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Board
of Trustees approve tuition, minimum wage increase The Board of Trustees approved an 8.7 percent tuition increase, a $213 million budget and increased minimum wages for university staff for 2002-03 at its second meeting of the year Friday, said Clarence Scharbauer III, chairman of the TCU Board of Trustees Student Relations Committee. Scharbauer said the tuition hike, which will take effect May 13, will increase the flat rate fee from $15,000 to $16,300 a year. Students paying by credit hour will pay $455 an hour instead of $420 an hour, he said. Scharbauer said even with the increase, “TCU is still a great value.” He said TCU’s tuition is less expensive than about half of the private institutions in the United States. Chancellor Michael Ferrari said a separate $100 fee for the new $30 million University Recreation Center was considered for all students but was later rejected. He said the total flat rate and hourly rate tuition covers basic instructional costs and related student life fees for the Recreation Center, Student Center and Brown-Lupton Health Center. The Recreation Center’s left wing is scheduled to open for classes in August, and the rest of it will open in October, said Don Mills, vice chancellor for student affairs. “The (recreational) fee was increased, but it is not a separate fee,” Mills said. “As we were putting the tuition structure together, it became quite clear that a big part of the budget was going to be this recreational facility. We needed to put something in the fee recognizing that this was an additional $30 million facility that we are borrowing money for.” To compensate for the tuition increase, Mills said financial aid will increase from $29.1 million to $31.4 million. Scharbauer said that next year freshmen and sophomores will pay the flat rate, and juniors and seniors will continue to pay by credit hour. This will continue for two years until the hourly fee is phased out and every student is paying the flat rate, Scharbauer said. Ferrari said the tuition increase last year for new students under the flat fee model was 15 percent. The tuition increase last year for students on the credit hour model was 7.7 percent, an increase from $390 to $420 an hour, he said. Mills said it is important for TCU to stop depending on the endowment to provide revenue for what the university wants to do. Carol Campbell, vice chancellor for finance and business, said the endowment was its highest during March 2000 at $1 billion. As of Sept. 30, the most recent quarterly figures available, the endowment was about $850 million, down 15 percent, she said. Scharbauer said TCU’s expenses for 2002-03 will be $213 million, and its revenue will be $214 million. The budget for 2001-02 is $199 million, Ferrari said. “While we are spending quite a bit more money next year, a lot of it was the (economic) environment in a sense that demanded that we do that,” Mills said. Mills
said included in the expenses is a .75-cent increase in TCU’s
minimum wage for staff to $8 an hour and $1.5 million for hiring
new faculty and instructional support staff. Scharbauer said the 7,400 students currently at TCU represent a 2.4 percent increase in the number of students from the spring of last year. He said 1,511 of those students are the current freshman class, which is the university’s largest freshman class ever. “We’re going to shoot for 1,475 (freshmen) in the fall because we felt we were a little bit stressed with the 1,511 (freshmen),” Scharbauer said. Mills said the university administrators plan on having an enrollment of about 6,800 students in the next three years. Scharbauer said the addition of a women’s softball team was also discussed at the meeting. It is only a recommendation at this point, and the athletics committee will present a report to the trustees in the spring, he said. “TCU has had a hard time with Title IX,” Scharbauer said. “Our numbers are out of whack compared to other schools. We’re constantly looking at what we can do to sure up Title IX.” Title IX is a federal law that requires equal opportunities for men and women to participate in sports. The ratio of male to female athletes should be proportional to the ratio of male to female undergraduate students, according to the NCAA’s Web site. Kelly
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TCU Daily Skiff © 2002 |
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