One of the bills from the 2026 legislative session will come due next week.
And college students and parents will pay.
The State Board of Education will meet Tuesday morning to set tuition and fees for 2026-27. It’s not a question of whether the price will go up. It’s a question of how much.
This year, Gov. Brad Little and the Legislature burdened the college and university system with the brunt of their self-made budget crisis. A year after splurging on $453 million in tax cuts and credits, 2026 was a session for purging — a 4% budget cut this year, a 5% cut next year.
Yes, Little and the Legislature shielded K-12 from most of the budget cuts. And yes, the Legislature went further, by also exempting Medicaid, prisons and the Idaho State Police from the budget cuts they layered onto Little’s 3% reductions.
But when Little and the Legislature did all of that, they unavoidably put the squeeze on the rest of state government. It starts with higher ed, the biggest budget they left on the chopping block.
That’s why House Bill 876 — which the Legislature calls, with no sarcasm detected, a 2027 “maintenance” budget — provides fewer general fund dollars for higher ed. General fund is a wonky budgeting term, but the distinction is important. The general fund represents higher ed’s share from sales, income and corporate taxes. In other words, it’s what everyday taxpayers put up for higher education.
Colleges and universities have one other large revenue stream at their disposal: tuition and fees.
The only people coming to the rescue of higher ed are students and parents — since Little and the Legislature aren’t going to do it. Which, in turn, leads us straight to the decision before the State Board Tuesday.
Little’s education policymaking body gets the unenviable job of considering the schools’ tuition proposals and approving the increases. The State Board will make the hard decisions, because of politically expedient decisions at the Statehouse.
It appears the State Board will look at proposals that would add several hundred dollars to the college sticker price.
At the University of Idaho, for example, a proposed 5% tuition and fee increase would add $472 to the annual bill for full-time, in-state undergraduates. This would bring the overall cost to $9,872 — not quite five digits, but closer than we’ve ever seen at an in-state institution.
Not all milestones are the stuff of celebration.
The tuition increase would bring in about $4.1 million, President C. Scott Green wrote in a March 4 memo, published at the Argonaut, the U of I’s campus newspaper. The tuition increase “is necessary to address rising costs driven by inflation, including expenses related to information technology, utilities, and health benefits, while also supporting sustainable institutional growth,” Green wrote.
AJ Pearman, a U of I student and opinion writer at the Argonaut, acknowledged that universities face budget pressures. But she also noted that her classmates face inflationary pressures — rising housing, grocery and transportation bills — and a tuition increase only adds to the strain.
“These are not minor changes,” Pearman wrote in an April 2 column. “Over the course of a degree, even modest (tuition) increases can translate into thousands of additional dollars in debt.”
There’s never a good time for a financial crunch, but for Idaho’s colleges and universities, this one is especially inopportune. That’s because enrollment is increasing across the state’s higher education system.
Enrollment increases are a good news-bad news situation. More students mean more revenues from tuition and fees — price increases or not. But more students put increased pressure on staff, space and support systems. This illustrates the fundamental lie behind a higher education “maintenance” budget that provides fewer tax dollars to serve more students.
The students keep showing up. The U of I this spring reported its 10th consecutive enrollment increase. Spring enrollment has increased by 25.5% over the past five years. “We continue to buck the national trend,” Green said in a March 17 news release.
But Green and other higher ed administrators are all too aware of what’s coming: a post-Great Recession “demographic cliff” that will leave colleges and universities competing for a shrinking population of college-aged students.
Colleges are heading straight into a “Hunger Games” recruiting war. Some schools simply aren’t going to survive (although, as the Hechinger Report wrote earlier this week, smaller and rural private schools appear to be in the greatest jeopardy).
So maybe, for Idaho colleges, the threat isn’t existential. But that doesn’t mean the threat is non-existent. Idaho is growing, which makes it fertile recruiting turf for out-of-state institutions looking to pad their student numbers. If these out-of-state schools can offer a competitive price point, a generous financial aid package, or a robust course catalog that ensures a student can graduate within four years, they can quickly become the best option for discerning Idaho high schoolers.
“Ultimately, (U of I’s tuition) proposal reflects a larger issue within higher education — one where the promise of opportunity is increasingly tied to a growing price tag,” Pearman wrote. “If universities continue to rely on tuition increases as their primary strategy, they risk pricing out the very students they aim to serve.”
It’s not that long ago — from 2020 to 2023, to be exact — that Idaho colleges and universities froze undergraduate tuition in an attempt to lure in-state students. Now, tuition increases feel predictable and predestined.
It’s because bills are coming due, bills state leaders are leaving unpaid.
Kevin Richert writes a weekly analysis on education policy and education politics. Look for his stories each Thursday.
