A state lawmaker wants to temporarily freeze undergraduate tuition costs at the state’s public colleges and universities in a bid to convince New Jerseyans to remain in the Garden State after graduating from high school.
Under a bill introduced this month, schools would be barred from increasing a student’s tuition for the four consecutive years it takes them to complete their degree (or longer, for majors that require more than four years).
Bill sponsor Sen. Shirley Turner (D-Mercer) said New Jersey’s pricey post-secondary schools fuel a brain drain that sees 30,000 high school graduates leave New Jersey to attend colleges and universities elsewhere.
Annual in-state undergraduate tuition and fees have climbed almost 15% in the past four years at New Jersey’s public four-year colleges and universities, according to state data.
Housing and meal plans can double that cost or worse, Turner added.
“College has become unaffordable for so many people here in the state of New Jersey,” Turner said. “We lose so many of our best and brightest students to other states and other colleges, and once they leave, they don’t come back.”
The high tuition has increased students’ debt burdens, saddling them sometimes for decades, Turner added.
Turner has introduced the bill four times since 2021, but it has not made it through the Statehouse. She blames higher education lobbyists for the legislation’s paralysis.
“Colleges don’t like it, because they want to be able to raise their tuition every year,” she said. “Money is the mother’s milk of politics, and lobbyists are the ones that are there feeding the politicians.”
Jennifer Keyes-Maloney heads the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities. Affordability is top of mind for college administrators, but tuition hikes can be unavoidable due to factors beyond their control, Keyes-Maloney said.
The biggest slice of a school’s budget typically is faculty and staff salaries, and those are dictated by labor contracts that usually contain regular raises, she said. Schools’ utility, grocery, and other operational costs climb yearly just as they do for everyday residents, she said. Deferred maintenance and capital needs also have worsened schools’ financial struggles, she said.
At the same time, state funding for higher education has been unreliable and become an increasingly smaller proportion of the state’s entire budget, leaving schools scrambling to close the gap, Keyes-Maloney added. Federal funding cuts and disruptions President Donald Trump’s administration made to university research, diversity initiatives, and other programs have worsened the problem, she said.
“In a perfect world, if they had a constant resource of state or federal funding that was consistent, they would love to be able to provide as stable a tuition basis they possibly can, if not flat or non-moving,” she said. “Unfortunately, it becomes a shared sacrifice on the part of the family, in addition to the school, trying to maximize everything they can with the dollars that they get.”
State leaders must develop a “longitudinal vision” for higher education in New Jersey to cap runaway costs and reverse the brain drain, Keyes-Maloney said.
“It costs about $250,000 to educate a student from basically kindergarten through 12th grade right now. So you’ve made that investment per student, and then they leave and most don’t come back,” she said. “Why are we exporting so many students that we’ve invested in for so many years? And so the hope is that we can take a look in the mirror, decide that this is a priority, and then invest accordingly.”
University leaders in New Jersey have long called for more state investment in higher education, warning that some institutions could be driven to close because of high debt and a looming enrollment cliff fueled by declining birthrates.
Turner agreed the sagging state funding and federal cuts serve as a “double whammy” that drive up college costs for families.
But bloated administrative spending and schools that turn their campuses into “luxury resorts” have worsened schools’ financial struggles, Turner said. Freezing a student’s college tuition until they graduate would be a “marvelous recruiting tool” in a state that is increasingly squeezing out the working class, she said.
“The cost of living is so high that many students can’t get a job that’s commensurate with the cost of their education,” Turner said.
Tuition-freeze policies have become increasingly popular among state lawmakers looking to make public colleges more affordable. But researchers at the University of South Carolina and the University of Michigan found in an April 2025 report that they sometimes have unintended consequences that can disproportionately impact lower-income students, such as college officials cutting financial aid to offset tuition losses.
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