The Board of Trustees voted to raise the cost of attending Northwestern by 3.6 percent to $49,791 for the 2009-10 school year, university officials plan to announce today.
“Nobody in this climate can do without a tuition increase,” University President Henry Bienen said in an interview last week. “You couldn’t run the university. You’d close your doors.”
Al Cubbage, NU’s vice president for university relations, said the administration planned to distribute a letter from Bienen to the NU community early this morning. The letter details the university’s financial conditions and its plan for the immediate future.
“Our endowment, which reached a high point of $7.4 billion in April 2008, now stands at approximately $5.6 billion, a 24 percent decline,” Bienen wrote. “There are no signs of a quick recovery; indeed, it is likely that our endowment will decline even more.”
The financial plan approved by the board Saturday was identical to the proposal submitted by Bienen’s office earlier this year.
“We looked at what the other universities do, and it’s a relatively modest increase,” said the board’s Budget Committee Chairman William Osborn in a phone interview Monday. “All endowments are down. It’s a very hard time.”
In the letter, Bienen also announced a 3 percent decrease in the school’s operating budget and a 10 percent increase in scholarship funding, which will total $86 million next year.
“What’s up is an attempt to really reduce expenses as much as possible and to direct the funds to financial aid as much as possible,” Cubbage said. “That’s kind of really where the emphasis is.”
Osborn said that the scholarship increase made the board more receptive to the tuition hike.
“We’re making more money available for scholarships – that’s one of the reasons we’re also increasing the tuition,” said Osborn, who was elected to replace Patrick Ryan as its next chairman during the same session.
The 3.6 percent increase places NU in the middle of the road compared to other top private schools that have already announced their plans for next year.
Princeton University and Brown University raised costs by only 2.9 percent, whereas Washington University in St. Louis adopted a 4.4 percent jump. Although Harvard College and Stanford University will see a similar increase in tuition, 3.5 percent, both announced financial aid funding increases of about 13 percent, compared to NU’s 10 percent.
Most schools in the Big Ten have not released plans for next year because state schools often decide tuition adjustments later in the year.
