The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees is set to vote on whether to approve a proposal that would delay changes to in-state and out-of-state tuition to allow for further study of its impact on the university during their regular meeting next week, March 21-23.

The trustees met with Huron Consulting Group in January, who recommended that the university should decrease out-of-state tuition from $15,500 to $9,500, to increase enrollment of out-of-state students. The trustees are considering other tuition changes, such as hiking in-state tuition by four percent and instituting block tuition.

The proposal before the trustees recommends no changes to tuition, providing a zero percent increase to in-state and out-of-state tuition for the 2018-2019 academic year. The recommendation also provides the UW administration’s proposed timeline to analyze and approve tuition rates for the 2019-2020 academic year.

In the proposal, the UW administration says that while the pricing recommendations put forth by Huron Consulting group are still relevant and beneficial, there are some concerns about the impact of the changes and time should be allowed to further analyze them, saying more work is needed before a firm tuition recommendation can be made.

“However, from a deeper analysis of the data, the Administration’s initial findings—when the Huron tuition rate recommendation of $9,500/year for full-time undergraduate non-resident students is applied to the entire population of undergraduate non-resident students and modeled using billing actuals—the complexity of discounts and inclusion of part-time students significantly changes the financial impact to UW,” the proposal states.

The administration’s proposed timeline will have the administration conduct and in-depth analysis of the tuition rate changes and present the findings to the trustees in May 2018. Another public comment period would be conducted in August and the trustees would vote on the proposed tuition rates for the 2019-2020 academic year in September.

The trustees began accepting public comments on tuition changes on January 25 and received 80 written comments on the issue.

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