Boston University students reacted to Wednesday’s announcement of a 3.7 percent tuition increase for the 2010-2011 school year with a combination of frustration and acceptance.
In an email from BU President Robert Brown, the university announced that it will raise its tuition to $39,314 next year. Brown said the increase, which amounts to $1,404, is the lowest percentage increase since 1969.
“The measures the University has taken to control costs and to provide increased financial aid for our students have enabled us to remain committed to our goals of offering all of our students the very best educational experiences that we can while advancing BU as one of the best research universities in America,” Brown said in the email.
However, BU Student Union President James Sappenfield said the university’s attempt to justify the numbers can be deceptive because even though the percentage is lower, the amount itself is proportionally high.
“While it has become regularly expected that BU raises tuition every year, and that this may be the lowest tuition raise in the past few decades, it still stands that BU has raised tuition when we as a school already have one of the highest tuition-and-housing rates in the nation,” Sappenfield said in an email. “Yes, we may be in a recession and health care and other costs may be increasing, but families of students are feeling that crunch as acutely if not more so than the university.”
Despite this, many students said the increase was inevitable and understandable.
“Given the economy it makes sense. I certainly wouldn’t have expected [tuition] to go down,” said College of Arts and Sciences freshman Angela Ortiz.
CAS freshman Shivani Mathur said she didn’t think the increase would affect most students too drastically.
“I don’t think it’ll really affect people’s return to BU. When you are paying that much money for tuition already, a small increase like that doesn’t make a huge difference,” Mathur said.
“Students will complain about it, but their actual behavior won’t be affected.”
School of Management junior Irene Chan said the increases are neither new nor surprising.
“As an upperclassmen I’ve already seen it go up every year, but it will be a wakeup call for the underclassmen,” she said. “Every school has price raises, and especially because we’re paying the price for an urban environment, BU requires that.”
Sappenfield said he was concerned about the effect on BU’s potential applicant pool after the tuition hike.
“By continuing to increase our cost without being able to match much loftier Financial Aid policies, we face two problems: We risk a less financially diverse pool of students and peers, which I would say is one of the fundamentals of both life lessons and experiencing a diversity of ideas and ideals. We also risk losing more academically minded students in favor of those that can foot a higher bill, which leads again to a decreased diversity of ideas,” he said.
However, some said the increase could negatively influence the decisions of potential incoming freshmen.
“I know I’m still coming to BU next year no matter what, but I think it could affect some incoming freshmen,” Ortiz said. “I still think people won’t really look at the price increase itself, but at the high price tag as a whole.”
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