CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The council that oversees the state’s Community and Technical College System refused to increase tuition for three colleges seeking it during the council’s Friday meeting.
“Somehow, someway we’ve to keep these CTCs affordable with the highest quality that we can give them,” council chairman Butch Pennington told MetroNews.
Pennington said the council took a close look at which colleges needed the increases and those who didn’t.
“Some of the smaller colleges couldn’t cut (their budgets) as much as some of these bigger colleges. Some of these bigger colleges, in my opinion, could find areas to reduce,” Pennington said.
The council approved a 7 percent tuition increase for New River CTC and a nine percent increase for Eastern CTC, which was seeking a 12 percent hike. The panel rejected a 7 percent increase request from BridgeValley CTC, 6.8 percent from Southern WV CTC and a pair of double-digit increase proposals from WVU at Parkersburg.
WVU-P was seeking a 14.9 percent hike for its associate degree students and 17.3 percent more from students in the bachelor degree programs. Pennington bristled at the proposals.
“To me that was out of the question, that’s too much,” he said. “We can do better than that. We have to do better than that.”
State law requires CTCs wishing to increase tuition and fees by more than five percent to get the approval of the council. BlueRidge, Mountwest, Pierpont and WV Northern will all have tuition increases under five percent.
Pennington said he’s noticed a lot of the CTCs have built several nice buildings being used by the community but the community doesn’t pay for them, the schools do. He said their needs to be an adjustment.
“It’s not fair to ask these students to pay for them or take money that the state’s allocating for education and convert it to these community buildings—and I think today we kind of drew a line in the sand that we’re not going to do that anymore nor should we,” Pennington said.