FAYETTEVILLE -- Starting in May 2017, employees of the University of Arkansas System can use tuition waivers only for undergraduate education -- unless certain campuses opt to provide the waivers for graduate-level education.
The tuition waivers currently allow employees to take undergraduate or graduate courses at a cost of 10 percent of tuition at the college or university where they work or 30 percent of tuition at a sister institution. Next year, employees who have worked within the UA System for at least one semester can waive 50 percent of the campus's tuition for up to 132 undergraduate credit hours.
"What has happened is that policy was created a number of years ago for the right reasons," said UA System President Donald Bobbitt. "The intent is to try to keep very good students in the state, but it's also a benefit that would help all of our institutions, particularly the ones that are located in rural areas, recruit faculty and staff. What has happened is it didn't have ... guidelines in it, and so people started applying it or not applying it to various programs. ... And then there were no limits set on it in terms of the number of hours."
All employees enrolled in a degree program before May 1, 2017, can continue that education at the original discount level as long as they remain continuously enrolled in the program, meaning they complete at least three credit hours in a given calendar year.
The rule will allow a chancellor to offer more benefits -- including waiving more of the cost of tuition on his own campus or reimbursing a percentage of tuition for employees taking undergraduate or graduate classes on another campus -- if a campus wants to pay for it and if the system's general counsel approves it.
For the past 10 months, Ben Beaumont, the system's senior director of policy and public affairs, researched different campuses and systems and began retooling the system rule to create guidelines.
The changes to the UA System board's policy -- which was approved by trustees Friday -- will still place the system on the generous side among its counterparts in the Southeastern Conference, Beaumont said.
For example, the University of Tennessee waives tuition for a maximum of nine semester hours for its regular, full-time employees. Louisiana State University will reimburse full tuition costs up to six credit hours per semester for its employees, but the waiver doesn't include "high-cost" programs like a master's in business administration.
On the other end, the University of Alabama System will reimburse employees of all tuition and fees for up to three credit hours per term and half of all tuition and fees charged at any system campus.
UA System administration did not make any changes to tuition waivers for employees' spouses and children.
Beaumont did not know how many people were using tuition waivers, but he said the UA System employs about 18,000 people. In 2015, the system as a whole waived about $6.5 million in tuition.
In that same year, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville granted the highest amounts of tuition waivers for on-campus employees among other system entities at $1.9 million, with about $1 million for employees and the remainder for spouses and children. The University of Arkansas at Little Rock gave nearly $475,000 in tuition waivers for its employees and nearly $159,000 for their spouses and children.
The new policy will make chancellors think "strategically" about what is job-relevant and what programs their employees need, Beaumont said. Capping the number of credit hours at 132 will also encourage completion of degree programs, he said.
Bobbitt said he didn't think graduate education needed to be discounted.
"Graduate instruction is the most expensive thing that we offer," he said. "The classes are quite a bit smaller, the faculty who are qualified to teach at the graduate level are most likely to be permanent, tenured faculty, tenure-track faculty, so they are paid higher. In other words, the expense of putting on a graduate program is much higher than undergraduate."
Professors teaching at a college or university must have a master's degree in the specialty they are teaching or 18 credit hours of graduate education.
The new policy, Beaumont said, is still a tool for recruiting faculty members because many have children, but it will also affect classified staff members.
Many chancellors said Friday that they were working out some of the details of what they wanted to offer employees.
Carla Martin, vice chancellor for finance and administration at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, said the university has typically followed board policy.
"If there's an opportunity to deviate, we typically don't do that," she said. "It just makes for convenience and clarity, so when people ask, 'How did you arrive at that number?' you can always refer them back to board policy."
UALR Chancellor Andrew Rogerson is reviewing the changes, that university said.
UA-Fayetteville currently waives 90 percent of tuition costs for its employees to take in undergraduate or graduate coursework. The university will continue to offer that tuition waiver, Chancellor Joe Steinmetz said.
"We're in a competitive situation with our staff that's not the same as some of the other areas of the state," he said. "And so this is a benefit that people like and it helps us in maintaining and keeping staff that are actually making less than if they went off to another university."
He later said in a news release that the university may consider changes to fees and the maximum amount of credit hours in a future review of the policy. He did not set a timetable for the review.
At Cossatot Community College of the University of Arkansas, employees currently get all tuition costs waived if they take courses at the two-year college. Employees wanting to take courses -- undergraduate or graduate level -- at another system campus pay 50 percent of the tuition costs, said Chancellor Steve Cole, adding that the college doesn't plan to change that.
"We just feel that it's hard enough to for us to attract really good employees and keep really good employees," Cole said. "The policies that we have in place, I think they're good for employee recruitment and retention. I think they're good for employee morale."
The system will let the dust settle with the new policy for about a year or two before looking at the financial distribution, or which schools are receiving and which are paying, Bobbitt said.
"Because if the discrepancy gets to be too large, it gets to be financially unstable as a plan," he said. "I thought it best that we first tighten the program to something that makes sense. I think we're there. And we'll let this settle out for a year or two and then we can take a look at what's the financial ramifications. I imagine taking graduate out of there would help a lot."
Metro on 11/12/2016