Rick Green, a trustee of the University of Connecticut, writes on The Hartford Courant this week:

…I’ve had an increasingly difficult time grasping the ever-rising cost of higher education. I find quite persuasive Senate candidate Peter Schiff’s views about how cheap government loans have fostered a spendthrift attitude at colleges and universities.

Not everyone is tone-deaf. The University of Maryland has frozen tuition since 2005 and this year will raise student costs by just 3 percent — while boosting SATs and GPAs for incoming students.

Recently, Middlebury College President Ronald D. Liebowitz rocked the academic world with a promise to limit tuition increases at his elite Vermont school to 1 percent more than inflation.

An “arms race” has consumed colleges and universities in the past few decades, from classrooms to gilded fitness centers to academic programs, Liebowitz confessed.

“What business operates like this, where you assume that resources are no issue?” Liebowitz said when I called. “Who knows what percentage of the middle class we have already alienated.”

Alienated is right. We certainly won’t see municipalities increasing taxes by 5 percent this spring. I don’t know anyone getting a 5.6 percent raise. Many of us are living with wage freezes.

So what is it with UConn — and the entire state university system, which is also jacking up tuition by 6 percent — that they think they don’t have to face the same financial limits as the rest of us?

When a prominent UConn professor at the trustees’ meeting likened the budget situation to the “global climate change” crisis, I nearly ran screaming from the room.

Pardon me, but isn’t this the same school to which the legislature has allocated more than $2.5 billion over the past decade and a half, transforming the campus and pushing UConn into the top-25 tier of public universities?

But much as I’m ready to hold a tea party in Storrs, I’m stepping back and taking a big breath…Continue reading UConn Needs To Show Some Financial Restraint >>