Northwestern announced Tuesday that tuition, room and board costs for undergraduate students would rise by 4.8 percent for the coming 2008-09 academic year.
The increase in tuition is slightly less than last year’s increase of 4.96 percent, but still slightly exceeds the 2007 calendar year consumer price index increase of 4.1 percent.
The tuition was set after a Saturday meeting of the board of trustees ratified the recommendations made by the NU administration. NU’s graduate, law and medical schools also announced next year’s tuition rates, with The Graduate School’s increasing by 4.8 percent, Feinberg School of Medicine’s increasing by 4 percent and the School of Law’s increasing by 5.6 percent.
This announcement comes a day after Brown University reported that it would cancel tuition entirely for students whose family income is under $60,000 a year. Tuition for other students at Brown will rise by 3.9 percent.
NU spokesman Al Cubbage said that NU’s increase was in keeping with rises in tuition at other schools. He cited Cornell (4.7 percent), Princeton (3.9 percent), and Notre Dame (4.9 percent) Universities as comparable schools with similar tuition increases.
“It looks like (our increase) is pretty close to those that we have been able to find,” Cubbage said.
The announcement projected an 11 percent increase in total financial-aid spending by the university. Cubbage said the prediction stemmed largely from the administration’s decision to expand scholarships to high-need students and cap federal loans, as well as from its commitment to match the 4.8 percent increase in tuition.
“That’s happened every year,” Cubbage said. “We’ve always had this pledge that financial aid goes up at the same rate of tuition.”
NU’s Vice President for Business and Finance Eugene Sunshine – who helped form the proposal presented before the board – said the current tuition increase was not due to any new activities in particular, but was justified by a variety of concerns.
He added that the smaller increases in both consumer and producer price indexes did not reflect the unique spending requirements faced by a university.
“They’re all significant because they’re so large,” Sunshine said. “Our salaries here, because we have so many talented faculty, go up at a pace much higher than the rate of inflation or other kinds of labor.”
Sunshine also cited capital improvements, such as those in NU’s information technology, as also making the increase unavoidable.
“The expectation of our students and faculty is that because we’re a first-rate university, they expect us to be first rate in these areas,” Sunshine said.
