Kudos To Chairman Eltife For Protecting Students From Tuition Hikes

 

(Chairman Kevin Eltife, Source:University of Texas at Tyler YouTube page.)

As Chairman of UT-System Board of Regents, Kevin Eltife is leading expanded access to Texas higher education, especially overcoming financial cost barriers that impede prospective students’ access to education. 

Under Eltife’s leadership, The UT-System Board of Regents established a $300 million endowment in March 2022, The Promise Plus program, that grants tuition assistance to families who make less than $80,000 dollars per year.

Under Eltife’s leadership, UT-System Chancellor James Miliken, along with five other state institutions, penned a letter to Republican state leadership with a request for more general revenue support for their institutions to avoid a tuition hike on students. 

As a result, UT-Tyler secured approximately $10 million dollars in additional state funds for operational expenses per year for the next two years. Due to this agreement with the legislature, UT-System will now freeze in-state undergraduate tuition for the next two years.

Eltife also oversaw UT-Tyler’s new medical school’s welcome of its inaugural class tuition free, thanks to a generous donation from The Fair Foundation.  

Eltife has championed institutional growth while avoiding burdening students with much of this growth’s financial costs through tuition increases. Instead, he has relied upon endowments and legislative appropriations.

While one wonders about the long-term effectiveness additional funding will have on alleviating higher education’s ever-rising costs and its current structural challenges, there is no doubt that Eltife’s efforts have helped stay the financial burden for Texas students and families. 

Kudos to Chairman Kevin Eltife for his successful leadership in reducing higher education’s burden on students and for keeping Texas higher education’s affordability at the front of his mind. There is no doubt that UT-Tyler students have benefited.

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Twitter: @Jhescock12

Feature image source: University of Texas at Tyler's YouTube page.  

*EDITOR’S NOTE: A previous version of this article erroneously referred to The Promise Plus scholarship as a $300 endowment instead of as a $300 million endowment. This was a typo and was corrected on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2023 along with other minor copy edits. 

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