Chris Banks and Niko Kolis
bi@uwyo.edu
The amount of Hathaway Scholarship money that is awarded to students received an increase at the conclusion of this year’s legislative session.
A bill introduced earlier this year that originally proposed a 10 percent increase in Hathaway funds for students to keep pace with rising tuition has been cut to 5 percent throughout the past month’s budget debates.
“It’s definitely been a moving target,” said Joanna Carter, Director of Student Financial Aid at the University of Wyoming, in regard to the debate over the exact amount of funding increase the bill would allot for the program. This is the first time since the scholarship program’s inception in 2006 that a bill allowing an increase in funds for students has passed legislative measures.
“We’ve been pushing this for years,” Carter said. “Our office and the university administration have been strong proponents for legislation that would allow Hathaway award amounts to keep abreast of tuition raises.”
According to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, tuition at the University of Wyoming has increased by 4.3 percent from the 2006-07 school year and the 2011-12 school year. There has been an additional 2 percent increase since then.
Chad Baldwin, the Director of Institutional Education, said that due to the high amount of state funding, tuition hikes at UW have remained relatively small. State funding accounts for roughly 40 percent of the University of Wyoming’s budget, compared to the 4 percent that University of Colorado Boulder receives from state funding.
Because of the high amount of money that the state budget allows for the university to be allotted, special requests can often be put on back burner.
This year, circumstances appear to favor the universities funding requests.
Governor Mead’s budget was rife with money allotted for water projects on campus, salary raises for faculty, massive funding projects for energy research and development programs and now the Hathaway increase bill approval.
“I can’t speak towards the governor’s state of mind regarding the university,” said Carter, “but it seems as though everything just fell into place this year specifically for the bill to be passed and the funding secured.”
This is not to say that the passage of the bill can be attributed entirely to luck, however. The university has a lobbying element in Cheyenne which pushes for bills to be passed that directly progress the school’s interests.
“UW has representatives in the legislature that were certainly advocating for the increase,” said Baldwin.
The bill was sponsored by the Joint Education Interim Committee, and can be viewed at legisweb.state.wy.us.
