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CHRIS CODUTO/Arizona Daily Wildcat
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UA Provost George Davis reacts to a question during the faculty senate meeting yesterday afternoon in the James E. Rogers College of Law.
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By Keren G. Raz
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday February 4, 2003
Incoming business and nursing undergraduates may have to empty more from their pockets to pay for tuition next year.
Administrators announced yesterday that they are requesting business management undergraduates to pay an additional $250 per semester while nursing undergraduates pay an additional $1,000 per year.
These fees would be on top of the $1,000 tuition increase for resident undergraduates.
These fees are needed to improve the quality of education, administrators said.
Marjorie Isenberg, dean of the College of Nursing, said a $1,000 fee for undergraduates is necessary to pay faculty.
With a national shortage of nurses, the nursing school is feeling the pressure to train more students, but due to a shortage of faculty because of low salaries it cannot admit more students, Isenberg said.
"It's a Catch-22, and it's something we're going to have to deal with," she said.
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Faculty retention is one of the greatest things we need to work on
-Mark Zupan
Dean of the Eller
College of Business
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A nursing college program fee would place the program's cost in the middle of peer institutions, administrators said yesterday in their proposals.
Mark Zupan, dean of the Eller College of Business and Public Administration, has said his college faces losing its accreditation as one of the top 25 business colleges in the country if it cannot replace 21 lost faculty members.
"Faculty retention is one of the greatest things we need to work on," he said.
Although program fees coupled with a general tuition increase would raise the cost of tuition from $2,500 to $3,750 for business undergraduates and $4,500 for nursing undergraduates, Zupan and Isenberg said that current students will not have to pay up.
The College of Nursing is looking for a grant to cover the expense of a $1,000 program for all 250 undergraduates.
"If we get a grant, then we will go ahead with the fee · and currently enrolled students will have no obligation," Isenberg said.
If the College of Nursing cannot secure a grant, it will still go ahead with the fee, which will only be imposed on incoming students, Isenberg said.
Last semester, Zupan said he had promised students with advanced standing that they would not have to pay a program fee.
"We felt it was important to keep that commitment."
Freshmen and sophomores who have not fulfilled the requirements to achieve advanced standing will not pay the program fee.
Although Zupan was pushing last semester for a $500 program fee, he reduced that figure to $250 because of the magnitude of Likins' $1,000 tuition proposal, he said.
Both the College of Nursing and the College of Business will set aside 15 percent of their program fee to cover financial aid.
In addition, the business college is trying to get private funding for 80 scholarships based on individual need that could be awarded to juniors if a fee is approved, Zupan said.
"And we're halfway there," he said.
Administrators also requested the regents' approval of program fees for graduate students in the College of Nursing and the School of Information Resources and Library Science, along with an increase in fees for pharmacy students and law students.
The College of Nursing will ask for $1,500 for master's students and $4,000 for doctoral students. These fees are necessary to cover the costs of online courses, which the College of Nursing will offer to distance-learning students or students who would otherwise have to commute to campus.
SIRLS requested a $100 per-credit-hour fee for in-state students and $400 per÷credit-hour fee for out-of-state students as part of its efforts to survive, said Brook Sheldon, director of SIRLS.
Last month SIRLS was one of 16 programs targeted for possible elimination.
Administrators said that SIRLS must become self-sustaining if it doesn't want to be eliminated.
"Nobody is happy about quite a large increase, but they do understand it's important for SIRLS," Sheldon said. "It's a matter of survival," she said.
