36th District Rep. Reuven Carlyle has penned a thoughtful opinion piece for the Seattle Times on his proposal to increase tuition at four-year colleges, paired with a substantial increase in financial aid. According to Rep. Carlyle:
As we write the most difficult state budget in generations, I’m pushing hard for comprehensive tuition-policy reform. I’m strongly advocating a proposal to grant our state’s public four-year universities the authority to raise resident undergraduate tuition by up to 12 percent annually, elevating the existing 7-percent cap. The schools would be required to designate a substantial portion of the new revenue toward new grants targeted at middle-class students.
As the situation exists today, these students and their families are caught in a horrible Catch 22: too wealthy to receive financial aid and too poor to comfortably afford college.
In Washington, a mere 20 percent of lower-income students successfully attend universities — making us a shocking 39th in the nation in this category — yet our state’s entire tuition model pretends to be designed around their interests. The “low tuition” model in Washington is an emperor with no clothes.
In Pennsylvania, by contrast, tuition is double that of ours, yet it is first in the nation in the percentage of lower-income students accessing higher education. The “high financial aid, high tuition” model is good policy but tough to digest politically.
Under the tuition model I’m proposing, middle-class families of four with annual incomes of between $52,500 and $73,250 would qualify for meaningful, need-based, state financial assistance for the first time. We can create the largest expansion of financial aid to the middle class in decades.
You can read the entire column by Rep. Carlyle here.