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NEWS
| NOVEMBER 29, 2005
Tuition and Fees
New proposal ails senators
Student Congress members concerned
over implications of planned fee increase.
By C
J Patton
The Shorthorn staff
Provost Dana Dunn presented her plans for moving to a flat-rate
tuition system Nov. 18 to the Tuition Review Committee, and several
Student Congress senators are less than enthusiastic about the proposed
change.
SC Vice President Zac Sanders, who voiced his opposition to the
measure during the Nov. 21 SC general body meeting, said he thinks
the controversial nature of the system, which incorporates a large
increase to tuition prices, played a role in the timing of the release.
The original presentation did not make clear the scale of the increase,
he said.
“It’s really interesting that it’s two weeks before
finals and everyone’s gone for Thanksgiving, and they wait
until right now to put this up,” he said.
Dr. Dunn said a delay earlier in the development of the proposal
made the late presentation unavoidable. She said her office took
additional measures to ensure that students could give adequate
feedback to the senators, including placing the proposal online
and extending the final deadline to Friday for the Tuition Review
Committee’s recommendation.
“The instructions came in quite late from the system,”
she said. “[The Tuition Review Committee was] given all the
time the process would allow.”
One of the senators’ major issues with the flat-rate system
is the incorporation of all fees and tuition into one lump sum.
Currently, all fees are broken down individually, both in amount
and area of funding.
Collins Watson, Graduate Student Senate president, also a member
of the Tuition Review Committee, said this would place tuition and
fees behind a screen, hiding distribution of funds from students.
“We are worried, that budgeting and allocation decisions will
be put behind the veil at the expense of openness, accountability
and student involvement,” he said.
Dunn said she has assured the committee that this proposal is not
designed to hinder student involvement with the process.
“We have, each year, been completely transparent in how we’ve
spent the revenue. We committed at the last meeting that students
would be as involved as before,” she said. “In my opinion,
this is a nonissue.”
Sanders said the ability to boil all costs down to one sum, a main
argument for the change, is unnecessary.
“You know where your money is going right now. In the future,
you will not. It’ll all be up to the Provost’s Office,
or whoever’s on this ‘super committee,’ ”
he said.
In addition to the substantial increase planned for the 2006-07
year, the proposal also calls for an additional 5 percent increase
for the following academic year. Sawyer thinks this large of a jump
in tuition over only two years is bad for the university, and will
have a negative impact both on current students and future enrollment.
“By raising it that much, that dramatically, that fast, we’re
only going to be $250 under UT-Austin,” he said. “What
the university is going to end up doing is losing students.”
Dunn said the university’s budget is in dire need for the
increased revenue and believes the increase is justified.
“We very much wish that we were not in a position where we
felt we had to ask for a tuition increase, but unfortunately that
was not the case,” she said. “We do not have a choice.
We need the resources for faculty hires, for faculty and staff increases.”
CORRECTION
In this article, the attribution to Sawyer refers
to Student Congress President Josh Sawyer.
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