For students and their families, a university education is a massive investment of time and, often, money. To make a wise and informed decision about that investment, prospective students need full and timely financial transparency about that cost. The state of Florida has made that impossible for this year’s new out-of-state students.
As a married academic couple, we were excited for our oldest daughter to begin her college journey. Starting her sophomore year of high school, she carefully analyzed her options along many dimensions, from location and program offerings to student life and academic rigor. After she developed a short list of about 20 universities, we created a spreadsheet that categorized colleges on anything that could be quantified. As offers and acceptance letters began rolling in, yet another spreadsheet carefully tracked tuition, room and board, and scholarships.
After this careful analytic work, 13 on-campus visits and countless hours of conversation, our daughter chose the University of Florida. It was a tough decision; she had offers from other good colleges, including in- and out-of-state options that were more financially competitive. In the end, she valued UF’s high academic rigor and reputation combined with a relatively affordable cost. She made her choice about two weeks before the national May 1 decision deadline, and we began to prepare for her move to Gainesville. Of course, that planning included how we would pay for it. Based on numbers provided publicly on the university’s website, we thought we had that figured out.
Then the state of Florida changed the financial picture.
On June 18, the state of Florida’s Board of Governors permitted public universities to increase out-of-state student fees by 10 percent for the 2025–26 academic year (though called “fees,” this is in effect Florida’s term for the differential tuition costs paid by out-of-staters). And on July 23—more than two months after the national decision deadline, and less than a month before the start of the fall semester—the University of Florida’s Board of Trustees unanimously decided to do just that, hiking the per-credit cost for an out-of-state undergraduate by about $70 per credit, or about $2,000 for a full-time course load for the year. According to The Gainesville Sun, this decision was “in response to a budget shortfall of about $130 million due to a loss in state appropriations.”
Both of us lead university units with tight budgets. Therefore, we have empathy for the tough fiscal decisions that higher education professionals sometimes must make. Perhaps the hardest financial decision university leaders face is when and by how much to increase tuition—in other words, when to pass the financial burden on to the students that we serve. That decision also increases young adults’ student loan debt, a matter of national concern addressed in many higher education articles, books and podcasts.
But because of timing, what the state of Florida has done is different and much worse than a simple tuition/fee increase. If the university had announced the 2025–26 increase in fall 2024, we could have planned for that increase ahead of time. I do not think that would have changed our daughter’s decision, but it might have. Instead, by raising tuition so late in the game, Florida has created a classic example of a bait-and-switch: lure students in with the low cost, then dramatically increase it after their other options are gone.
We remain excited about our daughter’s future at the University of Florida—and, most importantly, our daughter remains excited, too, despite this financial bump in the road. However, this last-minute change in price generated additional stress and uncertainty around her transition to college. When we spoke with one of the university’s financial aid advisers in late July, he was empathetic. He pointed us to the university’s scholarship portal—but of course, those scholarship deadlines passed long ago, serving as further evidence that Florida’s tuition increase came much too late.
We have little doubt that this tuition approach has created stress for other students, too. With widespread concern for student mental health, increasing tuition costs just weeks before classes begin may add to students’ anxiety before they even set foot on campus. Student affairs professionals could see more requests for basic needs assistance, as students make tough choices between paying the higher tuition costs and other bills. University counseling centers are often already running at or above capacity and do not need such additional caseload.
Ultimately, this pricing practice fails the test of scalability. If every university increased tuition well after the decision deadline, it would be chaos. Students and their families would have no way to plan. Particularly given significant public concern about the high cost of higher education and burgeoning student loan debt, this is unacceptable.
Despite much debate within and beyond academia, the financial burden faced by young college students is a problem with no obvious solution in sight. But perhaps we can all agree on this: In order to make a wise financial decision, incoming students need complete and accurate information about the cost of college at least a few weeks ahead of the national decision deadline. Federal policy should preclude universities from making changes to their tuition and fees for the upcoming year after a certain point (say, two weeks prior to the decision deadline). Such a policy would provide transparency for students and fiscal accountability for higher education institutions.
Andrew M. Ledbetter is a professor and chair in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas Christian University.
Jessica L. Ledbetter is assistant dean of students at the University of Texas at Arlington.
