The Ohio University Board of Trustees voted today to increase student fees on campus, including a 3.5 percent increase in tuition and instructional fees for the Athens campus.
OU students on the Athens campus will pay about $334 more in tuition fees next year; total tuition will be $9,871. The regional campuses will increase their instructional fees for Ohio residents by 1.5 percent, which is an increase of about $2 more per hour.
Housing fees will also increase 2.5 percent, which will cause the price of a standard double to rise from $5,325 to $5,458. The OU Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine will increase its instructional and non-resident fees by 5 percent. Ohio residents in OU-COM will pay $447 more per quarter and non-residents will pay $648 more per quarter next year.
Despite these increases, OU will continue to be competitive when compared with other institutions across the state, President Roderick McDavis said.
“We think we will continue to get our market share of high-quality students,” McDavis said. “(The fees) will help us to maintain the academic quality that we’re committed to provide to students from day one.”
The tuition and other academic fee increases are being invested in strategic investments that will improve OU’s academic offerings, said Pam Benoit, executive vice president and provost.
“Over and over again, each of these investments improve our academic quality in more ways than one,” Benoit said.
For the upcoming year, the proposed or anticipated in-state tuition and fees are $10,417 for the University of Cincinnati; $12,625 for Miami University; $9,735 for Ohio State University; and $10,704 for Akron University, according to a document the trustees reviewed during their meeting.
C. Robert Kidder, Board of Trustees chair, compared these to OU’s new $9,871 tuition and fee total.
“We are below the mean for the state of Ohio,” Kidder said.
As for the housing increases, they are being used to build a fee structure that will allow the university to be sustainable over the life cycle of the property, he said.
“We have completed the work with our outside architects and out of that came up with alternative ways in which we could go about moving towards a complete renovation of the housing stock up to a standard that is acceptable,” Kidder said.
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