STUDENT LAURA HARRIS DRAFTS LEGISLATION

SPP Student. Laura Harris

Click here to listen to Audio Clip (Real Media Format : 46 seconds)

SPP Master’s student Laura Harris recently helped to draft a bill which impressed state delegate Terry Kilgore (R-Gate City) so much that he introduced it to the General Assembly. If passed, the bill would give participating Virginia college students and their families more security when budgeting for tuition payments.

Harris developed her bill last summer while participating in the College Leaders Program—a civic education and political leadership program for college students that focuses on Virginia government and is run by the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. Participants were asked to create a policy proposal and present it before a panel of legislators. Harris and the four other students in her working group came up with the idea of a tuition lock certificate program—which would allow students who chose to do so to pay a single annual amount for all four years of college. That rate would be slightly higher than the cost of their first year of college, but would likely end up being less than what they would have paid for any of the subsequent years under normal conditions. (For example, an incoming student might agree to pay $6000 for all four years of college; and while the yearly cost of her education might have only been $5000 her freshmen year, it might have gone up by $1500 each additional year.)

"We got interested in this issue because as college students we were frustrated with how hard it is to budget for college when you never know how much tuition is going to rise every year," Harris explains. "It’s a great bill for working families because it allows them to know exactly how much they will have to pay every year and not worry that tuition will go up to an amount they can’t afford."

Harris is from a small town called Duffield in southwest Virginia where the delegate is Kilgore—former Governor’s Jerry’s twin brother. "I wrote him about the bill in June, not really expecting much from him because I’m a Democrat and he’s a Republican!" she reports. "To my surprise, however, he ended up carrying the bill in the General Assembly this session." Harris was hopeful it would move through the legislative process: "The bill has bipartisan appeal, because it helps working families but also encourages budgeting and fiscal responsibility," she says. "Plus, no one in either party likes tuition rates increasing."

But just before this story went to press, the legislation died in the state Committee on Education. "Regardless, I'm thrilled that Delegate Kilgore carried the bill—and I plan to write him to find out why it died," says Harris. After getting feedback from Kilgore, Harris’s hope is to re-draft the bill and ask him to introduce it again this year.

For more information on the bill itself, click here.