Poll: $20,000 to Attend WSU Or UW? It's Not an Unlikely Prospect In This Decade

When I received my college acceptance letter way back in the dark ages of  2000, I was shocked that it was going to cost more than $2,500 a year to be a Cougar. After all, attending good ol' Clover Park High was free.

Oh, how naive my 17-year-old self was.

And I don't even want to think about how much it will cost by the time my kids start college.

That's because paying more than $20,000 to attend Washington State University or the University of Washington before the end of this decade isn't an unrealistic possibility.

And that's just tuition.

According to The Associated Press, because tuition rates at colleges in Washington are rising at a rapid rate, higher-education costs may quadruple between 2004-19.

The projections are key for prospective investors in GET, the state's prepaid tuition program, which allows parents to lock in tuition at a rate above current costs but below what they would expect when their kids start college. A year's worth of prepaid tuition is now $16,300.

Supporters of the university system hope that the state can begin restoring at least some of the cuts to blunt those rising costs.

"We've reached a tipping point," Democratic Rep. Reuven Carlyle was quoted as saying. "We cannot allow tuition to substantially increase in the disproportionate fashion that it has."

But Margaret Shepherd, UW's director of state relations, said that the greatest factor in rising tuition is the level of state support. Tuition comprised about 41 percent of the UW's education budget in 2008; it will be 71 percent for the coming year.

An actuarial analysis of the state's prepaid tuition program cited by The AP assumes that state support for education will drop a little further and that long-term inflationary growth, which has averaged about 4 percent per year over the past two decades, would be about 5.5 percent per year.

Students at UW will be paying $11,782 in tuition for the 2012-13 school year, along with additional fees not included in the prepaid tuition calculations, up about 15 percent from 2011. By the 2019-20 school year, tuition would be $20,249, plus additional fees.

That being said, attending WSU or UW right now as an in-state undergraduate can top $25,000 when factoring in the cost of such things as books, transportation and living expenses.