Students in business classes may be seeing their differential tuition fees increase.
The University of Oregon Tuition and Fee Advisory Board — the 18-member group of administrators, professors and students that reviews university finances to recommend changes to tuition and fees — recommended increasing the per-credit-hour fee that all students in business classes, and not those just declared as business majors, pay.
“With the proposed $5 increase, the college would continue investments in our advising team and develop pre-freshman programming,” Lundquist College of Business Dean Sarah Nutter said in an email statement to the Emerald, referring to the proposed per-credit increase.
After hearing the proposal from Nutter in a Feb. 4 meeting, the tuition board officially recommended increasing the fee in a memo to Schill on Feb. 20.
Read the Feb. 4 TFAB meeting materials here.
The current differential tuition rate is $20 per credit — coming in addition to standard university tuition — and affects undergraduate students taking business classes, and not just those declared as business majors or minors. The proposal would raise this to $25 per credit.
In other words, a student taking 8 credits of business classes (usually two courses) would be paying an extra $200 in the proposed differential tuition rate, as opposed to $160 under the old rate. For those taking more business classes in a year, those costs go up. The proposal estimated that a business major taking 36 credits of business classes in an average academic year would pay $720 in differential tuition, according to the LCB’s original proposal documents for differential tuition.
The business school established the differential tuition fee at the start of the 2018-19 school year and has been using the revenue to pay for new members on the business school’s undergraduate and career services team, Nutter said, as well as two new tenure-track faculty members.
“The staff-to-student ratios in all three of these areas were all well below national averages prior to these new hires,” Nutter said.
In the 2018-19 school year, the business school earned over $1.5 million in revenue from differential tuition, according to documents the Emerald obtained through a public records request, with 20% of that going toward scholarships, leaving $1.2 million for the other operations.
The proposal from the business school included estimations of how an increase would impact students, assuming an average load of 12 credits per term.
An average pre-business student taking 8 credits of business courses would need to pay an extra $40 per year, while business majors could need to pay an extra $180. Business minors could need to pay an extra $120 per year. (Numbers for out-of-state business students are the same as those for resident students, since their differential tuition is the same and only the base university tuition changes.)
“The dean of the business school shared with the TFAB all of the investments that had been made with the existing differential tuition revenue, as well as the planned investments related to this increase,” the TFAB proposal said. “TFAB members asked many clarifying questions, but did not identify significant concerns related to this proposal.”
Differential tuition in the business school has also helped fund four additional study spaces for business students and additional scholarships, according to the memo. With the $5 increase, the school hopes to continue to hire new advisors, launch pre-college programming to boost four-year graduation rates and develop a “Professional Edge” program designed to help students, alumni and community members learn new skills throughout their professional careers.
Other Oregon colleges, such as Oregon State University and Portland State University, also charge differential tuition for business students. OSU business students pay an extra $21 per student credit hour, while PSU’s in-state students pay $18.40 per SCH. Per year, that adds up to $756 and $662, respectively. The business school’s proposal would mean that UO business students pay the most in differential tuition out of these three schools.
The school currently dedicates 20% of revenue from differential tuition to scholarships, which amounted to about $302,000 in the 2019 fiscal year, according to the business school’s proposal. The memo also included proposals for tuition increases to a handful of business graduate programs, including the school’s in-person sports product management, master’s in accounting and master’s of science in finance programs.
The business school’s differential tuition would be included in TFAB’s proposal for the university to institute a guaranteed tuition model. According to the TFAB proposal, guaranteed tuition would lock a student’s tuition for five years, including some fees, starting their first year. This could also include the business school’s differential tuition, if the President Schill and the board of trustees approve the proposal in the spring.
