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Portland State students are leading the charge to create affordable and accessible tuition structures in Oregon’s public universities. Christy Harper, PSU’s student body president, along with two members of her executive staff, Kelly Thoen and Mary Fletcher, testified at the Oregon University System’s fee book hearing which was held at the University of Oregon, Tuesday, May 11, 2004.

The fee book is published annually by the State Board of Higher Education and dictates the tuition policies of public universities for the next academic year. Last year the State Board of Higher Education decided to allow universities to begin removing their tuition plateaus. A tuition plateau is flat tuition rate for students who take a course load within a certain range of credits, traditionally 12 – 18. Since then, most of Oregon’s public universities have implemented a per-credit tuition structure. Critics of per-credit tuition structures say that students take longer to graduate, and pay more money in fees, than students who were allowed to use a plateau structure.

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski’s temporary chairmanship of the State Board of Higher Education means that students have a rare and powerful opportunity to bring constituent-based pressure to bear directly on the Oregon University System, the governing body of Oregon’s universities, in order to reestablish tuition plateaus.

“The fact that we have an elected official as the chair of Board of Higher Education is wonderful. He has said that he has a commitment to access to higher education,” said Harper. “We are going to hold him to that.”

After the testifying alongside students from the University of Oregon at the fee book hearing, ASPSU’s State Affairs Director Kelly Thoen worked with the Oregon Student Association, a statewide alliance of student governments, to organize a campaign that flooded Governor Kulongoski’s office with phone calls from concerned students and citizens.

The phone campaign was effective. After a meeting held the following Friday, the Board of Higher Education announced that the presidents of Oregon’s public universities have been asked to present strategic alternatives to the removal of the tuition plateaus. “People participating … it makes a better product in the end,” said Governor Kulongoski when asked about the phone campaign. “Any time you can get people involved in letting people in public positions know what you're thinking – even if they don’t do what you want them to do --you have an effect on the process.”

Student leaders see the Higher Ed. Board’s request as an important shift in the leadership of Oregon’s universities. “This is the first time in a while that the board has really told the presidents to do something,” said Christy Harper. “That is great. Now we need to get the plateau back!”