By Erin Stewart and Jennifer Toomer-Cook
Deseret Morning News

The number of high school students working toward a college degree before graduation has more than doubled in the past 10 years, putting a strain on funding for concurrent enrollment and jeopardizing the program, Rep. Margaret Dayton, R-Orem, said Monday.

The financially strapped system prompted Dayton to sponsor a bill requiring high school students to pay for the concurrent courses, which have previously been free. Students could pay up to $30 per credit hour under the legislation.

"It's almost a victim of its own success," Dayton said at a news conference Monday. "But I think it really pushes the goal that we have in this state that students do not look at high school as the end of their education."

The State Board of Education opposes the bill, which they say would leave concurrent enrollment out of reach for all but the rich and could sock school districts with a huge bill to cover fee waivers for the poor.

While $30 per credit hour seems reasonable, state board member Teresa Theurer noted most classes are worth three credit hours, cranking the fees up to $90 a class.

"That's way out of line," Theurer said at a State Board of Education meeting called Friday to discuss various bills.

"This would be devastating" to low-income students, board member Mark Cluff said. He suggested an income-based sliding fee scale. "Some of these kids are the first ones in their family to ever go to college. If they have to pay $90, they just couldn't afford that."

Public education opportunities are supposed to be open to all students. Schools waive low-income students' class, book, lab, even football and cheerleading fees, instead paying for them out of school funds.

Because the bill requires concurrent tuition be paid directly to the university, those public education fee waivers could be unusable, said Patti Harrington, state superintendent for public instruction.

"This negates the opportunity for kids that might otherwise never have thought they could go to college," she said.

Rich Kendell, commissioner of higher education for Utah, said the concerns are understandable and that his office is working to find a way to ensure low-income and minority students do not get left out. Such a plan could include scholarship programs or financial aid, he said.

"We don't want to see any interested students discouraged by the fees," Kendell said.

But Kendell and Dayton noted that without some increase in funding, the concurrent enrollment program might be phased out. About $5 million in state funds are pumped into the program each year, but that funding has not been enough to keep up with the growth, Kendell said.

Funding for concurrent enrollment has doubled in the past decade, but so has participation, from about 11,725 students in the 1995-96 school year to 26,680 students in 2004-05.

Last school year, high school students earned 177,659 semester hours of credit through concurrent enrollment, the state education office reports.

"There's a rubber band on concurrent enrollment, we just stretch it every year and it's going to snap," Kendell said.