The Nevada Board of Regents has approved a policy aimed at helping students more easily calculate the cost of a college degree before pursuing it.

Regents voted on Thursday to approve a Predictable Pricing Program — one of two pricing structures they considered at a meeting in November.

The Predictable Pricing Program allows for a different tuition rate each year, but the rate must be published four years in advance so a student can see before they enter college what their total bill will be.

That formula calls for increases based on the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI), a national metric that measures inflation in the higher education realm. A student entering UNLV in the fall of 2019 would pay $233 per credit, while the cost of their fourth year would be the prior year’s per-credit price, multiplied by the HEPI rate from four years earlier.

The 2017 HEPI was 3.7 percent, which was the highest jump in the index since 2008. That’s why regents decided to raise tuition by 4 percent over the next two school years.