Oklahoma tuition

Comments on various Oklahoma news sites are already responding to a proposed tuition increase at one of Oklahoma's state public universities, the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

You can view these stories and these comments here:
Tulsa World (via Associated Press): OU tuition likely to rise by 9.9 percent

Oklahoma Daily (OU student newspaper): Tuition hike

Norman Transcript: Boren predicts nearly 10 percent raise in tuition

Oklahoman: Students warned of tuition increase

All of these sites offer the option to post your own opinion with other comments after the story. As you can no doubt see, people are reacting very negatively to the story that tuition will now cost more than $5,000 per year to attend a public school and the comments are just going to continue as more people become aware of this story.

From personal experience, I can say that tuition was once less than $2,000 a mere seven years ago when I was a freshman at OU. The very next semester was the large double-digit tuition increases that hit across the country. The colleagues from Texas that had said that out-of-state tuition to OU was lower than in-state tuition in Texas were now transferring back to their home states. Less and less students lived in the dorms, it seemed.

A few years later, OU President and former U.S. Senator and Oklahoma Governor David Boren had a new idea - scholarships to offset tuition increases. They're called "Sooner Heritage" and nearly everyone that applied for them received at something (and everyone that fulfilled all requirements, including applying for federal Financial Aid received something). The awards were about $500-$1,000 each, about the amount of the annual tuition increases.

Tuition will likely go up once again, pending regent approval... but it doesn't look that Heritage scholarship amounts are, which is what many online commenters are calling out OU on.

~AP

Making a statement

The Society of Professional Journalists - Oklahoma Professional Chapter board issued the following statement:

The Oklahoma Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists joins with Freedom of Information Oklahoma Inc. and the Oklahoma Press Association in denouncing the recent decision by the Oklahoma Supreme Court to restrict information on court documents and access to the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network website. Oklahoma SPJ will be working with FOI Oklahoma and OPA to convince the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision before the new rule goes into effect on June 10, 2008. Signed,Oklahoma SPJ Board

Now that tax season is over, I will be posting more on this subject at OKSPJ.com in the near future. In the meantime, here is the exact court decision, straight off the OSCN court Web site here:
http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/deliverdocument.asp?cite=2008+OK+23

This is not for public release on anyplace except the state's site, so if you want it verbatim, you'll need to read it there, sorry.

If you want it in a nutshell, however, the Tulsa World paraphrases it as "The rules, which take ef fect June 10, require litigants to redact personal identifying information, such as birth dates, Social Security numbers and home addresses, from paper documents that are filed with the courts. The rules also take offline many court records that currently are available via the Internet."

You can read the entire article which I took this from here:

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=20080321_1_a1_hrpfo10336

As stated above, FOI Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Press Association have also denounced the decision. Here are other stories on it for more information:
---
The Oklahoman: "Putting Oklahoma Co. records online prompts disagreement:"

Quote from article: "A former county commissioner said he's "pretty hacked off” because he thinks Caudill made the county's Web site a possible resource for identity thieves."

Link to article: http://newsok.com/article/3218979/1206071863
---

In an effort to get out as much information as possible before the June 10 date of effect, I will be posting more on OKSPJ.com later this week. Stay tuned here for updates.

~AP