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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Nearly twice as many out-of-state students would be able to attend Utah's public universities and colleges at a reduced tuition rate under a bill that won approval from the House 73-1 on Monday.
The bill sponsored by Rep. Craig Buttars, R-Lewiston, would increase the number of tuition waivers from 500 to 900. Of the 900 waivers, 675 would be used to grant in-state tuition to eligible out-of-state students and 225 would be used to cover half the out-of-state tuition for eligible students.
Buttars' intention is to attract more students from southern Idaho and Wyoming to Logan's Utah State University, which lost more than 500 out-of-state students in the past three years as its tuition rose. But the bill makes students nationwide eligible for the tuition waivers and those waivers would be divided up among all the state's public universities.
"This will be most beneficial to Utah State University. Utah State has really taken a hit," Buttars said. Adding out-of-state students to some of the school's agriculture classes will help save those programs for in-state students, too, by boosting the overall numbers, he said.
Utah State University President Stan Albrecht recently told a House Education Committee that his school is losing students to Boise State University because families who live on the border and have ties to Utah State can't afford to send their children there, although they'd like to.
Buttars said there would be a minimum impact on state universities' budgets because the out-of-state students would be filling seats that are already open and wouldn't be displacing in-state students. Utah's high school graduation rate is at one of its lowest points in a decade and isn't expected to begin producing more graduates until about 2012, he said.
Out-of-state students tend to spend more money once they arrive at school than in-state students because they usually live on campus and are also likely to live here after graduation, Buttars said.
That's what Rep. LaWanna Shurtliff, D-Ogden, did.
"I'm one of those students who came across the border to Utah State from Wyoming," she said. "I stayed and I've never gone back to Wyoming to live. ... Utah State is almost the college for the people on the western part of Wyoming and southern part of Idaho. They're close to that institution and it really is their college."
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
