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NEWS
| November 5, 2003
Tuition and Fees
Proposal: $10-per credit hour spring
increase
The committee chairman argues
against a claim that the proposal relied heavily on student input.
By Brad
Rollins and Chris Baggott
The Shorthorn staff
The chairman of an advisory panel disputed administrators’
claims Tuesday that their final tuition increase recommendation
closely mirrors suggestions made by the student-dominated Tuition
Review Committee.
Speaking after a Student Congress meeting, Josh Warren said he was
“pissed” about administrators’ assertions that
their plan would be less expensive.
“I kind of took the approach that the administration would
take the spirit of what the committee recommended and work from
there,” Warren said.
Interim President Charles Sorber’s plan, released by the system
Tuesday, calls for a $10-per-credit-hour increase in the spring
and a $17-per-credit-hour increase in the fall. Upper- and graduate-level
nursing and engineering courses would see additional hikes.
The UT System Board of Regents will make a final decision at its
Nov. 18 meeting.
Dr. Sorber said early Tuesday that his recommendation would be less
expensive than the committee’s because of a $3-per-credit-hour
rebate for students who pay their tuition on time. He said he focused
on making sure students would have enough financial aid money. The
committee eliminated the rebate during its deliberations, he said.
Sorber said he tried to keep both the committee’s intent and
student and faculty needs in mind when formulating his proposal
for system officials. He declined to discuss Warren’s claims
late Tuesday evening, though.
In a departure from his typically measured public remarks, Warren
was specifically dismissive of Sorber’s claims that a $3-per-credit-hour
rebate had been jettisoned by the committee but restored under the
Sorber recommendation.
“I wanted to operate from a position of trust with Dr. Sorber,
but we should have taken a more legalistic approach,” he said.
“Dr. Sorber says it was a misunderstanding, and I have to
assume that is the case. But in the future, we won’t leave
room for any misunderstandings.”
He said the committee was clear about wanting to maintain the rebate
but did not include it in the written version of its proposal upon
the recommendation of Rusty Ward, interim vice president for business
affairs and controller, who was one of two administrators on the
committee.
“When we made our recommendation, we expressed we liked the
idea of the discount,” Warren said. “When we were crunching
the numbers, we couldn’t figure how much to set the discount
at. The Tuition Review Committee recommendation didn’t address
the discount either way.”
Warren, a computer science engineering graduate student, said the
proposal forwarded to the UT System reflects only a portion of the
committee’s intent. While acknowledging the plan reflects
the committee’s recommendation to delay the bulk of the increases
until next fall, Warren said other key provisions were done away
with.
He said the recommendation to have much of the increase reflected
through fees instead of tuition was scrapped in the Sorber recommendation.
“If you do the math, the final proposal by Dr. Sorber has
only a very small portion done by fees,” Warren said.
The provision is relevant, he said, because fee increases are not
subject to a 20 percent set-aside for financial aid programs required
of all tuition increases.
Nevertheless, he stopped short of saying the weeks-long committee
process was a waste.
“It was important to us that we delay most of the increases
until the fall, and this plan did that,” Warren said. “I
don’t think our input was totally scrapped.”
Bryan Shaner, another committee member who aggressively pushed the
fee element, said he thought Sorber “took the path of least
resistance” in making a recommendation the system would find
agreeable.
“He did what the system wanted,” Shaner said. “I
don’t blame him for what happened, but he did what the system
wanted.”
Shaner said the biggest problem with the proposal is that it makes
all students pay for the few on financial aid. There are “such
a small number” of students on financial aid that Shaner said
he thinks it would be unfair to make other students pay for them.
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