Increasing tuition at Kansas universities may slow enrollment, according to a researcher at Pennsylvania State University.

Donald E. Heller, senior research associate at the university’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, said studies showed that for every $1,000 increase in tuition, enrollment rates decrease by 2.5 percent.

The question that Kansans ought to be asking, he said, is what kind of funding the state’s need-based scholarship program will receive next year.

That won’t be determined, he said, until the state’s budget is finalized.

Kansas University officials have said they will set aside 20 percent of the tuition increase for grants to students who qualify for federal financial aid.

However, Heller said, during the recession of the early 1980s and 1990s, “at the same time states were increasing tuition, many of them were also cutting back on their scholarship programs, so it was kind of a double whammy.”

Heller noted that states across the country were considering and enacting similar tuition increases because of decreases or slow growth in appropriations.

“The concern is how that tuition increase impacts especially lower-income students and whether the state and institutions themselves will step forward and increase need-based financial aid to those students,” Heller said.

Research shows that lower-income students are the most likely to drop out of college, not to enroll in the first place or to opt for a junior college education in the face of tuition hikes, Heller said.

“When the price reaches a certain point, they just can’t afford it anymore,” he said. “They look for a less expensive alternative.”