HARTFORD, Conn. — Connecticut State Colleges and Universities is building its next two-year state budget request around a 3% annual increase in tuition and fees, even as a faculty representative urged leaders to drop it.

The Board of Regents' Finance and Infrastructure Committee voted Nov. 11 to recommend the request to the full board. It asks for $168 million in additional state support in fiscal 2028 and $150.3 million in fiscal 2029. Each year's figure includes $25 million for what officials called strategic investments: health care programs, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing.

Interim Chancellor Natalie Braswell said the system's financial model includes the 3% increase as a planning assumption, and that any actual increase would need board approval. "We cannot balance our budget on the backs of our students," she said.

Braswell said students are paying a growing share of the cost of public higher education. Between fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2027, she said, students' share of the funding sources the system tracks rose from 56% to 67%, while the state's share fell from 44% to 33%. The request includes $5 million in fiscal 2028 to help keep any tuition increase moderate.

Pushback on tuition

Asked by a student regent whether tuition could stay flat, Chief Financial Officer Lloyd Blanchard said the request depends on the increase. Having the state cover it instead would cost about $22 million more, he said. He said the system has gone about two years without a tuition increase.

A faculty representative told the committee that, with cost cuts on top of a tuition increase, students "will be paying more for what must be less." She asked that the request not assume the 3% increase. "It's just really not, I think, the time for it," she said.

Braswell said she agreed about the burden on students, citing students she has met who struggle to afford food and housing. But she said lawmakers will ask what the system has done to raise its own revenue and cut costs, and that tuition and state money are its only two main sources of revenue. She encouraged students, faculty and unions to make the case against a tuition increase to the legislature themselves.

Regent Ari Santiago, who ran the meeting, said proposing no tuition increase "would actually decrease the likelihood that our overall plan was taken as seriously as we want it to be."

Where the deficit comes from

Braswell said the system's structural deficit comes from several sources. She said a gap of about $162 million in state support for negotiated raises is the largest. The raises cost about $345 million over fiscal 2026 and 2027, and state support covered about $183.4 million of that, she said. She also cited a $104 million shortfall from a change in how fringe benefits are funded and the end of more than $164 million in one-time money, most of it federal pandemic aid.

She also said the system itself was responsible for $75 million in overspending. "That's a real number," she said.

The colleges and universities have identified about $43 million in cost cuts and new revenue for fiscal 2028 and $55 million for fiscal 2029, Braswell said. Campus finance officers described leaving open positions unfilled, restructuring management, sharing services between campuses and growing enrollment. Blanchard said the system spends about $78 million a year on financial aid, its largest expense outside of personnel, and that the figure has been rising about 10% a year.

$2.1 billion building plan

The committee also endorsed a 10-year, roughly $2.1 billion capital plan that officials call "CSCU Next." Officials said about 90% of the money, about $1.9 billion, would go to repairing, renovating and modernizing existing buildings. About $204 million would go to new buildings and property. They said the plan would absorb about $488 million that lawmakers authorized earlier but never released.

Officials said the plan is modeled on CSU 2020, a 10-year, $950 million building program that passed the state Senate 35-0 and the House 127-1. They said that program was later expanded to cover the whole system.

Major projects include about $200 million at Central Connecticut State University, about $188 million at Eastern Connecticut State University, about $221 million at Southern Connecticut State University, about $176 million at Western Connecticut State University and about $459 million across CT State Community College campuses.

At Eastern, the money would include a new sports center to replace a field house from the 1970s. An Eastern official said the current pool is too small for diving and was out of service for five months. During that time the swim team practiced at the University of Connecticut, and Eastern paid rent to use the pool, the official said.

Both proposals go to the full Board of Regents next. Officials said the amount the system actually receives will depend on the governor's budget proposal and on the legislature.