12/02/2002 – STATE OF WASHINGTON ADVOCACY MODEL

 The following is a composite of historical rationale for the legislation passed in the State of Washington in support of international educational exchange.  The rationale and efforts indicated below were led by John Donnelly who I replaced as Associate Director following his retirement.   This information was collected as part of my responsibilities as WSU Associate Director, Education Abroad, International Programs and Services (Jim Ellis).  

 The combined efforts of the major universities in the State of Washington led to passage of legislation clarifying and facilitating the implementation of reciprocal exchange programs by allowing institutions to flexibly designating the participants coming to the US under this exchange as “residents” for tuition purposes and by authorizing a special tuition “waiver” program that encouraged these programs as well as sponsored partnership programs such as Fulbright, LASPAU, etc..  The wording of the legislation can be found HERE , for more background please read the following:

  

MEMORANDUM

 To:                  Lawrence Ganders

Director, Statewide Affairs

Washington State University

Olympia, WA

 

thru:   Jim Henson

Director, International Programs

 

From:             John Donnelly, Associate Director 

 

Date:              February 6, 1997

 

Subject:        WSU Support for New Home Tuition Plan for Student Exchanges

 

Two versions of the Home Tuition Plan are scheduled for a joint hearing of the House and Senate Higher Education Committee next Tuesday, February 11 at 1:30 PM.   HR 1647 is sponsored by Reps. Renee Radcliff, Steve Van Luven, Dawn Mason, Don Carlson, Velma Veloria, and Jeff Morris; SB 5623 is sponsored by Sens. Eugene Prince, Karen Fraser, Harriet Spanel, and Jeannette Wood. 

 

 

Rationale of Home Tuition Plan:

 

As with other Washington State universities, WSU is rapidly becoming more and more interdependent with the dynamics of accelerating globalization.   An enhanced capacity to expand and diversify WSU student access to international educational opportunities thus becomes a strategic imperative.  The proposed Home Tuition Plan legislation will enable WSU to greatly expand international exchange opportunities for WSU students while, at the same time, requiring  no new funding from either the State or WSU.   Students will  participate on a self-paying, reciprocal (one-for-one) basis; the Plan  guarantees that equal numbers of students are exchanged each year.   In brief, the Plan provides a revenue-neutral mechanism for funding direct exchanges (with both international and domestic exchange partner institutions) that already is used by more than 40 states. 

 

President Samuel Smith has stated he  believes that an education abroad experience is perhaps the best education we can give our students, and that he is a strong proponent of ensuring that every WSU student has the opportunity to spend at least one semester abroad.  The Plan will help to fulfill this goal as well as the  recommendation of the WSU’s  Provost’s Advisory Council for International Affairs that WSU find ways to increase the number of international student exchanges for WSU students. 

 

 

Anticipated Benefits If Home Tuition Plan:

 

Ø         The Plan will expand the number and  range of affordable educational exchange opportunities for WSU students in world regions that are of increasing economic, cultural, and political importance to Washington State.  For example, the new NAFTA higher education initiative, the  North American Regional Academic Mobility Program, requires each participating institution to accept incoming students without additional tuition payments in return for similar treatment of their outgoing students, i.e., a Home Tuition Plan.    It will thus enable WSU to expand the boundaries of its “global campus” at no additional cost to the State

 

Ø         By greatly expanding access to international student exchanges for WSU students, the Plan enables WSU to better link and integrate student participation in education abroad with their undergraduate degree programs.  It will facilitate the implementation of a  new Global Studies Minor Degree program at WSU, which will require student participation in an education abroad program.

 

Ø         It will increase the global competitiveness of  Washington State as more and more WSU and Washington students have the opportunity to participate in low-cost, high quality  international exchanges, thereby gaining critical global perspectives, skills and competencies.

 

Ø         The Home Tuition Plan will augment, not supplant, our current tuition fee waiver program for international exchange students.   These waivers provide the vital support needed to develop new exchanges (where it may take several years to generate equal incoming and outgoing numbers of students).  The Plan will thus enable WSU to utilize its  limited number of fee waivers more effectively to satisfy the rapidly growing demands from WSU academic programs for support of their efforts to negotiate and nurture international collaborative activities with new partner universities (e.g., new joint degree programs with Far Eastern State University in Russia and the University of Chile, new exchange programs with Korean and Chinese  universities, etc.).

 

Ø         It enriches the learning of the home-campus population by increasing international diversity.  The presence of international students and scholars at WSU gives  human faces to unknown cultures. The long-term impacts of their experience at WSU are realized when they return home and become Washington State’s alumni, trading partners, and political allies.

 

Ø         The Plan will enable WSU to expand the educational options for  WSU students through participation  in  the National Student Exchange (NSE), a 130 member consortium which arranges for credit exchanges within the United States.   Greater  participation in the NSE not only provides an excellent opportunity for our students to see, experience, and understand other cultures within the United States,  it also  furthers WSU’s stated objective of recruiting more diverse American population to our campus.

 

Please do whatever you can to convey WSU’s strong interest in, and support for, the Home Tuition Plan as it moves through the Legislature.   I would be happy to provide any additional information or assistance as needed.  Thanks for your help with this State-wide legislative initiative.

 

 

cc:       Geoffrey Gamble, Provost (1046)

John Pierce, Dean, College of Liberal Arts (2630)

Carolyn Clark, WSU Faculty Legislative Representative

Cliff Moore, Assistant Director, Extended Degree Program, NSE Coordinator (5220)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1945, the Washington State Legislature created the first Foreign Student Scholarship Program, which authorized the University of Washington and Washington State College (University) to award (up to 50 scholarships or waivers) to students or graduates of universities of “friendly foreign nations”.

 

In the years since, the program has been revamped several times by Legislative actions: in l979, the international tuition waiver program was expanded to permit the three regional universities and The Evergreen State College each to waive the difference between resident and non-resident tuition for up to 20 foreign students.  During the severe State budget retrenchments in l982, the Legislature repealed the entire foreign student waiver program; then, in l986, persuaded by arguments for its reinstatement, the Legislature re-authorized the tuition waiver program for international students at the State’s four-year institutions: 100 each for the UW and WSU and 20 each for the regional universities and The Evergreen State College. 

 

Then, in l992, the Legislature allowed the State’s higher education institutions to retain their own  tuition revenues.  At this time, WSU changed the budgeting and allocation of its  tuition waiver programs from a quantitative number to dollar amounts per fee waiver category.  In making this change,  the original number of  100 international tuition waivers at WSU was reduced by some 40%.  Each institution must limit its total tuition fee waivers among all categories to no more than 20% of its total tuition revenue base. 

 

Prior to fiscal year l993, student operating fees were deposited into the State general fund.  The l992 legislature reduced state general fund  appropriations to higher education for fiscal year 1993 by the amount of the estimated operating fees, but established separate accounts for operating fee revenue for each institution.  At that time, the legislature also mandated a 6.6 percent reduction to operating fee waivers and limited all future operating fee waivers for WSU to a total of 20 percent of gross operating fee revenue.  In fiscal year l992, there were 70 students, of the possible 100 allowed by law, who were receiving international waivers.  As part of the overall reduction in waivers required for fiscal year l993, international operating fee waivers were reduced by 7 percent or $29,826.  This was a reduction of 5 students.  Since fiscal year l993, the number of students receiving the international waiver has ranged from 65 to 75 students.  International operating fees waivers as a percent of total have ranged from 4.2 percent FY 92 to 4.8% in FY 94, with 4.7 percent budgeted for FY 97.   

 

Since fiscal year l993, waivers have been managed by the Office of Student Affairs, but the budgeting  process for waivers involves several parties: the Budget Office produces a forecast of maximum operating fees that may be waived, the managers of the various waiver categories may request an allocation, the Office of Student Affairs coordinates a proposed budget, and the Executive Budget Committee must approve final allocations.  At WSU, the N-11 tuition waiver program for international students is administered by the Education Abroad section of International Programs. 

 

 

Table 1 in this Appendix provides information on WSU’s fee waiver allocations budgeted for FY 97 of which N-11 has been budgeted at $750,499; Table 2 gives an historical overview showing the growth of  N-11 fee waivers for international programs in comparison with WSU’s total fee waivers for the fiscal years l993-97.  Table 3 shows the current number and distribution of reciprocal exchange tuition waivers allocated by contractual agreements with WSU’s exchange partner institutions; Table 4 provides a picture of the tuition waiver allocations planned for the academic year l996-97; Table 5 shows the current number and distribution of non-reciprocal tuition waivers allocated to special sponsored student programs.

 

Several additional points are noteworthy: (1) a N-11 waiver for a nonresident undergraduate student next year is valued at $9,758 per year, but at $12,368 for a nonresident graduate student.  If all of the $750,499 N-11 budget for FY ‘97 were allocated only to undergraduate international exchange students, then the N-11 budget would support approximately 77 student exchanges. (2) At the end of each fiscal year, the budget slate is wiped clean; unused N-11 fee waivers cannot be carried forward from one fiscal year to the next.

 

 

OVERALL BENEFITS AND JUSTIFICATION OF INTERNATIONAL TUITION WAIVERS

FOR WSU

 

The tuition waiver program provides Washington residents with the most direct and least expensive route to a period of overseas study.  WSU students who qualify for these direct exchanges, where they become fully-enrolled students at the foreign institution, are allowed the best possible foreign study experience with maximum integration into the educational system abroad.  Students from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds are afforded the opportunity to study abroad through the tuition waiver program.

 

International tuition waivers used for reciprocal student  exchanges provide WSU students with an alternative to the higher cost study abroad programs, and also create a tier of options overseas for students with advanced language skills.  Until these waivers were available, it was extremely difficult to develop institutional exchanges, as students from countries with fully-funded higher education, or from low-income, Third-World countries, were unable or unwilling to meet the relatively high cost of out-of-state tuition at WSU.  The waiver program provides the incentive to foreign universities to make a tuition-free period of study available to WSU students.  Moreover, the international tuition waiver program has allowed WSU to enter into new reciprocal exchange agreements with dozens of foreign universities and to expand existing exchanges.  New exchanges with Pacific Rim universities--particularly Asian and Latin American institutions--have diversified and strengthened our WSU’s collaborative activities abroad..  In order to fulfill the program commitments to our exchange partners, as well as to expand and develop new contracts supportive of the dynamic and growing nature of WSU’s internationalization as a “global land-grant university,” efforts are being made to restore WSU’s tuition waiver allotments to the full 100 student level authorized by the Legislature, and within the 20% limitation on WSU’s total fee waivers

 

 

 

POLICIES ESTABLISHING PRIORITIES AND LIMITATIONS ON THE USE OF N-11 INTERNATIONAL TUITION WAIVERS AT WSU:

 

Under the l986 Washington State Legislation re-authorizing the tuition waiver program, WSU and the other four-year institutions are authorized to waive tuition and fees for undergraduate or graduate students from foreign nations subject to these priorities and limitations:

 

Two elements of the re-authorization are central to the legislation:

 

1.   Priority is given to students on academic exchange or on special programs sponsored by recognized international educational organizations.

 

2.   The waiver program is designed to “promote, to the greatest extent possible, the reciprocal placement of Washington residents” in foreign universities.

 

In October 1992, an Ad-Hoc WSU Committee on Exchanges and Agreements was appointed by Jim Henson, Director of International Programs.  The Committee reviewed the current utilization of WSU’s international agreements involving tuition waivers and then, consistent with the above Legislative limitations, developed the following set of recommended guidelines and priorities for allocating N-11 tuition waivers in support of WSU’s on-going and new international agreements:

 

Ø      Priority should be given to tuition waiver exchanges and agreements that are actively used on an equal, reciprocal basis  (that is, where the ratio of WSU students sent and foreign students received is maintained on a 1:1 basis).

 

Ø      Priority should be given to tuition waiver exchanges that support foreign language study and training by WSU undergraduate students.

 

 

Ø      Priority should be given to agreements and exchanges that have clearly defined goals and are related to WSU academic programs and faculty interests.

 

Ø      Priority should be given to agreements which give promise of becoming financially self-sustaining over time.

 

Ø      Although WSU may wish to develop geographic strategies for tuition waiver use and distribution, individual faculty and academic units should be free to develop collaborative agreements in their respective areas of strength and interest; if faculty initiated agreements expand to include tuition waivers for reciprocal student exchanges, they can apply for inclusion of tuition waivers consistent with the above priorities and guidelines.