The University of Tennessee is grappling with extraordinary budget challenges, and the future looks grim. A few changes may strengthen the university long-term, but most will negatively impact students, employees, and the state as a whole.<\/p>\n
As outlined in this morning’s News-Sentinel<\/a>, they’re looking at laying off 700 people. They’re raising tuition by 9%. For our family though, Peterson’s proposal to remove the tuition cap is the most damaging. For clarification, a "full time" student is defined as one taking 12 semester hours; that’s three or four courses, in most cases. However, one must take at least 15 hours per semester to graduate in four years — more than that in some majors.<\/p>\n A student taking 18 hours (like my two) would see a 50% increase in tuition even before the 9% increase.<\/p>\n Peterson’s rationale is that removing the tuition cap would be an "efficiency measure, aimed at discouraging students from registering for classes they may drop too late for other students to get enrolled." However, a more logical way to accomplish that would be to charge students an additional fee — say $50 or $100 — for dropping any class after the add deadline (typically about a week and a half after classes begin).<\/p>\n It’s not just a few high-performing students who would bear the brunt of this change: 51% of all full-time undergraduate students took 15 or more hours in Fall 2007 (the most recent data<\/a> publicly available). Those 51% would see a minimum<\/em> 25% increase, in addition to the 9% across-the-board increase.<\/p>\n I acknowledge that the highest-paid administrators have voluntarily taken a 5% pay cut, and applaud them for starting there. However, the draconian changes proposed to tuition rates and the elimination of the most cost-effective instructors will cut too deeply into the university’s core mission.<\/p>\n That will, in turn, cut deeply into the State’s efforts to improve overall.<\/p>\n At the very least, the State needs to increase the lottery scholarship amount, commensurate with any tuition increase. But the tuition cap should be left alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The University of Tennessee is grappling with extraordinary budget challenges, and the future looks grim. A few changes may strengthen the university long-term, but most will negatively impact students, employees, and the state as a whole. As outlined in this … Continue reading