Northwestern undergraduate tuition will increase 4.9 percent from $25,938 to $27,207 for the 2002-03 school year, administrators said Tuesday.
The increase is consistent with tuition hikes in the last three years, Vice President for University Relations Alan Cubbage said. Undergraduate tuition increased 4.8 percent last year.
Room and board will jump 5.1 percent to $8,147 for the 2002-03 school year. Adding cable television to dorm rooms would add $121 per year to students’ bills, and a proposed hike in the Student Activities Fee from $99 to $122 a year also could add to the costs.
Tuition increases every year to meet higher university operating costs, including building maintenance and updating campus technology, Cubbage said. For example, University Library has to pay an outside company more money each year to operate its online research databases, he said.
“Colleges and universities are very labor-intensive organizations, and so much of the cost stems from increased salaries for faculty and staff and increased health care costs, which is something everyone is facing,” Cubbage said.
Tuition at the Law School increased 5.9 percent to $32,008, and the Feinberg School of Medicine saw its tuition rise 4 percent to $34,116. Tuition at the Graduate School increased to $26,526, a jump of 6.8 percent.
“We’re moving graduate tuition so that it is roughly equivalent to undergraduate,” Cubbage said. “It was significantly lower over the past few years.”
Cubbage said NU increases its financial aid by the same percentage as tuition. About 60 percent of NU students receive some form of financial aid, which includes federal and university grants, loans and work-study jobs.
Most doctoral students receive tuition waivers, but graduate students in NU’s pre-professional schools are required to pay tuition, Cubbage said.
Cubbage said he could not compare NU’s tuition increases to other schools because federal law prohibits administrators from discussing the matter with officials at other schools.
But Janetta Hammock, assistant director of the American Council of Education in Washington, D.C., said both public and private schools are facing similar increases. During the 2000-01 year, public colleges increased their tuition by an average of 5.2 percent and private schools bumped up their tuition by an average of 4.4 percent, she said.
Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., increased tuition by 5 percent in January. Some schools, such as Williams College in Massachusetts, have taken money out of their endowment to cap tuition increases. Cubbage said that would never happen at NU.
“That would be like taking money out of your savings account,” he said.
Schools like Williams are in the minority, said Damon Manetta, a public relations officer at the National Association of College and University Business Officers in Washington, D.C. Most colleges and universities receive about 4.5 percent interest a year from their endowments.
Speech sophomore Phil Scepanski said administrators should consider using donations and some of the interest from the endowment to offset the “frustrating” tuition costs.
“It’s a little suspect they’re increasing tuition in the first year of a recession in the last 15 years,” he said.
