Business students face $902 tuition increase

Students in the upper division of the College of Business Administration may be seeing a tuition increase of 12.6 percent for the 2010-11 academic year.

The $902 increase, which is $530 more than the increase other in-state students will likely receive, is the second part of the college’s three-year plan to instate a $750 per semester surcharge for all junior, senior and graduate business students.

The college began phasing in the plan this year with the institution of a $250 per semester surcharge and will continue with next year’s increase, culminating in a $750 per semester surcharge for the 2011-12 academic year. The plan was approved by the state Board of Regents as well as the College of Business Administration Student President’s Council, which is comprised of the presidents of the college’s various student groups and the college’s Faculty Senate.

UNI CBA is widely regarded as a top business school and has received the highest business school accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International, an honor achieved by less than six percent of business schools worldwide.

According to Leslie Wilson, associate dean of the CBA, the college proposed the idea of supplemental tuition to retain its status as a top business school, which is threatened by persistent budgetary pressures and shortages of business faculty.

“If you look at our peer schools, we essentially have almost the highest student/faculty ratio of our peers,” Wilson said. “And so there’s a lot of pressure on us to increase the number of faculty that we have so that we can kind of be more in line — average would be nice — with our peer institutions.”
 
According to Wilson, 55 percent of the supplemental tuition dollars is going to seven new faculty lines in order to decrease class sizes, increase regular faculty coverage and add flexibility to offer new courses.

“If you start doing how much it costs to have faculty in the classroom teaching only 50, our class expenses are actually higher than at (the University of) Iowa or Iowa State (University),” Wilson said. “So part of (the problem) is the student body wrestling with this: what’s important to you? Our students tell us having a variety of classes and making sure that our classes don’t get too large are important to them.”

Thirty percent of the supplemental tuition dollars will also go toward the Professional Skills Initiative, which is designed to expose students to contemporary professional skills, and 15 percent is going to provide financial aid to business students.

According to Wilson, the tuition increase is part of a balancing act between reasonable prices and ease of access to classes.

“Faculty are extremely concerned about accessibility, affordability,” she said. “There’s affordability — being able to afford to get here — and accessibility is being actually able to get into classes. So making it very affordable may decrease your accessibility; you have these balances you’re trying to deal with as best as you can.”

While many students were involved in the planning process, several were not aware of the three-year plan and were surprised to hear about the large tuition increase.

“I know that there was a tuition charge of $250 this semester and I don’t really know what it was for,” said senior management information systems major Heather Kessler.

Kessler doesn’t feel the tuition increase has had a positive effect on the college so far.

“The only thing that I’ve seen is less class offerings, less adjunct teachers, bigger class sizes and better toilets,” she said. “That’s it; that’s the only thing that’s changed in the College of Business. If they’re talking about having smaller class sizes and things like that, the only thing they’ve done is make classes bigger.”

Ryan Anderson, a senior accounting and finance major, thinks that lowering class sizes is a bad idea.

“It’s supposed to be harder to get into the College of Business, which I think is kind of bad,” he said. “If you’re going to be limiting the number of people that can get in and then increasing the rates for the people that do, it just seems you can increase the rates and let more people get in.

“It would be a bad idea (to lower class sizes),” he continued. “I never was really opposed to the class size, especially once you get past the business core, really they’re not that big of classes. You’ll probably only have 25 to 30 (other students taking the course), which I don’t think is really that bad.”