Ohio University’s Board of Trustees’ Academics and Resources committees met as one at Thursday’s meeting to discuss tuition and the fiscal cliff.
“We understand that we have some issues inside the academy that we are challenged with, and we want to take two bites to the apple,” said OU President Roderick McDavis. “We want to make sense of our fiscal cliff and talk about opportunities about how we may approach that in terms of moving forward.”
One suggestion that Executive Vice President and Provost Pam Benoit made to “move forward” was to take a look at national trends and alternative tuition concepts.
“We know that college prices are increasing but that is in part because of the economy and lowered state funding,” Benoit said. “If you look nationally, the decline from state support has led to increased tuition.”
In April, the trustees unanimously voted to increase tuition 3.5 percent for the Athens campus.
Benoit spoke with Vice President for Finance and Administration Stephen Golding to the trustees about alternative tuition concepts including differential tuition and guaranteed tuition.
“Differential tuition is variable tuition based on major, program, college or class standing,” Benoit said. “Guaranteed tuition is a rate for undergraduate students for four years that remains the same.”
Benefits of the differential tuition model are the ability to provide new services, and support of new majors and programs, Benoit said.
Some benefits of the guaranteed tuition model are predictability, allowing families and students to plan ahead, Benoit said.
“We absolutely understand that tuition cannot support the underlining costs of operating this university so we need to think about tuition and understand that a tuition model has certain challenges,” Golding said. “We need to think differently about tuition and think about the future.”
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