The 17 Oregon community colleges – including Blue Mountain Community College – will ask the state legislature to allocate to them an additional $32 million in the short Legislative Session to help keep tuition costs down and restore funding for student success programs in the second year of the 2017-2019 biennium.
At the end of the 2017 Legislative Session, the Joint Ways and Means Committee restored more than $70 million to public universities to help keep the cost of tuition down, but only put about an additional $6 million to do the same at the community colleges. This means the universities received double the percent increase as community colleges in the last two biennia.
In the last two biennia, the Legislature’s investment to the Public University Support Fund (PUSF) has grown at twice the rate of property tax and general fund going toward the Community College Support Fund (CCSF). For example, in the 2017 Session, general fund dollars into the PUSF increased nearly 27 percent compared to just 13 percent for the CCSF.
Due to this lack of funding for community colleges, Blue Mountain Community College increased tuition by $7 per credit for the 2017-18 academic year, which raised tuition to $104 per credit. This doesn’t include the fees and other expenses college students also must expend to fund their educations.
