No system-wide fee hikes for Louisiana community colleges

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – Louisiana’s community and technical colleges won’t increase mandatory fees at its schools next year.
  
The college system’s Board of Supervisors announced that it unanimously agreed not to back system-wide fee hikes for students in the 2018-19 school year, amid worries that could price some students out of school.
  
Individual, program-specific fees could be raised, however.
  
Louisiana’s public colleges don’t currently have authority from lawmakers to raise tuition rates, so many of them turned to fee hikes in recent years to help offset some budget gaps.
  
Campuses are threatened with state budget cuts in the financial year that starts in July. Lawmakers are meeting in a special session that opens Monday to decide if they’ll pass a sales tax renewal to lessen or eliminate those and other cuts.