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Rising Cost of Education
Costs outstrip fee hikes, says provost
Waterloo - UW’s provost says he will ask the board of governors to raise student fees by between 3.9 per cent and 8 per cent for the coming year, but warns that the resulting boost in UW’s income won’t keep pace with the rising cost of living.
The reason, provost Amit Chakma explained to UW’s senate on Monday night, is that student fees provide about 41 per cent of the university’s operating budget. So an overall increase of 5 per cent in fee levels — the most that the provincial government will allow — means an increase of about 2.1 per cent in total funding.
The other 59 per cent of operating money comes from government grants, which aren’t expected to go up at all this year, and miscellaneous sources.
Chakma said fees for current students, who will be in the upper years of undergraduate programs next fall, will rise by 4 per cent if the board gives its approval at its February 5 meeting. Fees for first-year students will be increased by 4.5 per cent in “regulated” programs, including arts and science, and 8 per cent in “deregulated” programs, including engineering.
All graduate students will face a 3.9 per cent fee increase and all international students will pay 4 per cent more, Chakma said in an oral presentation to the senate’s monthly meeting.
Set against those increases, he said, is an estimated 5.5 per cent annual increase in UW’s costs, largely for salaries — both scale increases and the cost of individuals’ progress through the salary ranks. Subtract the 2.1 per cent revenue increase from the 5.5 per cent cost increase, he said, and UW is falling behind at a rate of more than $12 million a year on a budget that’s now closing in on $400 million annually.
“No near-term solution can be found to our structural deficit,” said Chakma. He’s putting together a package for 2008-09 that would involve bringing in more international students (who pay higher fees than Canadians), building up the revenue from UW’s endowment fund, and the “painful” process of cutting spending.
“These are pessimistic scenarios,” said the provost, noting that sunny weather sometimes moves in — such as last year, when the government gave universities an unexpected end-of-year bonus from funds that hadn’t been needed earlier to pay for expansion of graduate enrolment.
Chakma briefly addressed the issue of campus workload and how it’s related to the university’s growing enrolment. “Yes, workload has gone up,” he said, but enrolment growth has been channeled into “strategic initiatives” and special growth funding has allowed UW to hire new people, including about 120 new faculty positions since 2000.
With no enrolment growth, and the annual squeeze between fast-rising costs and slowly-rising income, UW would have been cutting by something like 3 per cent a year, he said. As a result it would be down 150 faculty positions and 300 staff positions from the position in 2000. That would have had a much heavier impact on workload, he said, than what’s actually been happening: a ratio of students to staff and faculty members that goes up by 1.0 to 1.5 per cent each year.
Source University of Waterloo
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