The University of Missouri Board of Curators unanimously approved tuition and fee increases at a meeting Wednesday.
Students at the four UM system campuses will face a tuition increase for the next school year, except for in-state undergraduate students. Here is the breakdown (from the formal proposal):
The Board also unanimously approved a variety of increases to supplemental and course fees (details here). For example, students at the UMKC business school will pay $15 more per credit hour next year, and UMSL engineering students will pay $100 more per credit hour because the school is contracting courses from Washington University. Curator John Phillips says some of these fees actually take the place of tuition increases.
“And we’ve done this for a couple of years so my comment is that I think we ought to, for trasparency’s sake, take a hard look at differential pricing,” Phillips said.
Curator David Steelman agreed.
“We have unusual circumstances with what’s happened on the campuses. With some of the fiscal issues on more than one campus that are begin very hard to resolve and the turmoil and interim status of both President (Mike) Middleton and Chancellor (Hank) Foley that I am voting for these. I said last time I would not vote for them again without some more serious discussion of differential tuition as well as some programs,” Steelman said.
UM System Vice President for Finance Brian Burnett told the board he is already investigating differential pricing, which would allow different programs to charge different levels of tuition based on the actual costs of providing education. He said he would have details on that for the board at its meeting in December.
