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YSU panel OKs tuition, room/board hikes
By HAROLD GWIN
YOUNGSTOWN
Both undergraduate and graduate students at Youngstown State University will be paying more for tuition this fall.
The university trustees’ Finance and Facilities Committee approved the terms of a tuition and fee schedule increase Thursday.
The measure now goes before the full board for a vote at 3 p.m. next Friday.
Approval seems to be a foregone conclusion as eight of the nine trustees and one student trustee attended and voted at the Finance and Facilities Committee meeting, where the measure passed 8-1.
Tuition will rise 3.5 percent for both graduate and undergraduate students. That means all graduate students will be paying an additional $324 a year, and undergraduates who are Ohio residents will be paying $243 more per year.
The committee also approved raising the room-and-board rate by 2.7 percent or $200 per year.
A couple of new college fees, presented to the trustees in December, also are part of the package.
For the first time, full-time undergraduate students with junior standing and above will be assessed a $204 fee in the College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Full-time undergraduates with junior standing and above in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences will be paying a $60 college fee.
The fees are designed to recover some of the additional costs incurred in presenting upper-level courses.
The committee also gave its approval to the university’s 2010-11 budget, setting the general fund at $158.8 million, up $4 million from the current spending plan.
The total operating budget, which along with the general fund includes nine auxiliary budgets (athletics, housing, bookstore, parking services, etc.), stands at $178.1 million, up $4.3 million over this year.
The budget also must be approved by the full board next week.
The tuition and fee increases are expected to generate an additional $4.2 million in revenue next year.
Only Trustee Harry Meshel voted against the tuition increase and the budget, saying he was doing so because he believes the university administration has been treating the trustee board as a rubber stamp, failing to involve its members in policy-making and programming decisions and coming to the board only for formal approval of decisions already made by the administration.
Board members have the right to be part of setting objectives, but they aren’t being given the opportunity to be part of the decision-making process, he said.
Meshel said he sees a new era ahead with Cynthia Anderson’s taking the role of university president in July.
Board members John Pogue, Larry DeJane, Scott Schulick, John Jakubek, Sudershan Garg, Carole Weimer, Leonard Schiavone and student trustee Lyndsie Hall voted in favor of the tuition increase and the budget. Trustee Millicent Counts left the meeting before the votes were taken.
YSU also raised tuition 3.5 percent in the current year after two years of tuition freezes.
Despite the newest increase, YSU says it still will have the third-lowest tuition of Ohio’s 13 state universities.