Students can pay higher tuition now or pay it later, but a proposal to guarantee four-year tuition for entering Kansas University freshmen doesn’t hold much promise to save students any money.

The Kansas Board of Regents gave KU officials the OK last week to refine their plans for a guaranteed tuition proposal that would lock in a base tuition rate for incoming freshmen for four years, time enough supposedly to complete their degrees. On the surface, the plan seems like a great way to avoid rising tuition rates during a college career, but the details of the plan indicate guaranteed tuition may be a better deal for the university than for students.

First, only base tuition will be guaranteed. That is only about 25 percent of the cost of attending KU, according to Provost Richard Lariviere. The other 75 percent of the costs include housing costs, student fees and differential tuition charged by individual schools within the university. All of those costs are almost guaranteed to rise over a period of four years.

In addition, students who commit to the guaranteed tuition plan will be paying tuition that is higher than the university-wide base for the first two years and less than the base rate their last two years. Those figures haven’t been set, but it seems likely that the total tuition paid under the guaranteed plan will be at least close to what is paid by students who follow a pay-as-you-go plan. People on the guaranteed plan simply will pay more at the beginning, less at the end, instead of the other way around.

KU officials tout the plan as a way to encourage students to finish their degrees in four years, because after the four-year guarantee, their tuition would jump. That seems to imply that students bear all the responsibility for taking longer than four years to complete a degree. Will the university also guarantee that students will get the faculty advising and class availability necessary to meet the four-year goal?

In a subtle way, a plan that charges students higher tuition in the freshman and sophomore years also seems to fit with another idea that has been floated by KU officials, which is to raise admission requirements for Kansas high school graduates. The current state standard guarantees admission to all Kansas students who are in the top third of their graduating class, have a score of at least 21 on the ACT test or have a 2.0 high school grade-point average. Although those qualified admissions standards were approved only after considerable statewide debate, KU officials think they still allow the admission of too many students who won’t be “successful.”

Perhaps higher freshman and sophomore tuition rates will discourage more students from applying to KU, or if they fail to be “successful” and leave before completing a degree, the guaranteed tuition plan would allow KU to reap higher tuition from them before they drop out.

The details of the guaranteed tuition plan still must be worked out, but the ideas that have been floated so far seem more focused on making the university look like its helping students than on actually providing any meaningful financial relief.