UT Politburo (predictably) begins laying foundation for next tuition increase....

"As a dog returns to his own vomit,
So a fool repeats his folly."
Proverbs 26:11

[Note: This story is actually a week old, but it remains worth noting because it's such a textbook example of how they operate.]

[Note II: You can see our testimony over why reigning in tuition hikes is step one to restoring financial accountability in higher education here.]

LOL, of course:

University of Texas System regents sketched out a strategy Friday to ensure that proposals to raise tuition and fees in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 academic years are warranted and to seek support from local officials, lawmakers and statewide elected leaders before adopting them. The effort to bolster the tuition-setting process with an eye toward enlisting political support comes after a legislative session that saw the Texas Senate vote 29-2 to freeze academic charges for two years at the state’s public universities and to sharply restrict future increases. But the measure, Senate Bill 19, didn’t emerge from a House committee.

“I think more than ever we need to do everything we can to educate them,” Regent Kevin Eltife, a former Republican state senator from Tyler, said of lawmakers. “They may not like it, but we need to be able to say when we go to session in ’19, ‘Look, we had to do this. Here’s the need, here’s why we did it, and we did our best to visit with all of you.’ And we need to target the reps and senators from the area of the institution and we need to target” the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.

Regent Rad Weaver said it will be crucial to find local champions for any tuition increase. “There’ll be one or two within each local delegation, and we need to identify those early on and make sure that they’re informed,” he said.

Regent Janiece Longoria agreed. “They can be very helpful with state leadership in helping frame the message about why it’s so important, assuming that they need a tuition increase and assuming that it’s the right amount,” she said.

Regent Sara Martinez Tucker, who chairs the UT board’s Academic Affairs Committee, said campus leaders would be expected to play a key role in making the case to elected officials for any tuition increase. Her committee signed off on the strategy Friday, and the full Board of Regents is expected to go along with it at a meeting later this month.

....

Chancellor Bill McRaven noted that a political calculation is inevitably part of the decision.

“If you look at the facts that will be presented in terms of the needs for the institutions to generate additional revenue, we are clearly going to have to balance that with the political will, and I think we all understand that moving forward,” McRaven said.

A few points:

• You'll notice that all the regents pushing this (Eltife, Weaver, Longoria, and Tucker) are Abbott appointees; the 3 remaining Perry holdovers all seem to be keeping their heads down.

• This is EXACTLY what we told the Senate nominations committee (and several individual senators privately) would happen if the Senate confirmed the last round of regent nominees.

• All this at a time when, according to the Board of Regents' own numbers, institutions across the system are receiving record revenues AND UTIMCO is more valuable than ever.

Bottom Line: This was soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo predictable (which is why we predicted it)....