____________________
Education - UW Board of Governors
UW Fee increases, other board actions
Waterloo - UW’s board of governors gave its approval last week to tuition fee increases that will be effective in September 2008. Fees for current students, who will be in the upper years of undergraduate programs next fall, will rise by 4 per cent, while 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.
There are “literally hundreds of tuition rates”, said vice-president (administration and finance) Dennis Huber, under the recently introduced system by which students in every year of a program can be paying at different rates. The board was shown only some examples of next fall’s one-term fees, such as $2,394 for first-year students in applied health sciences, and $4,379 for first-year engineers. Those numbers don’t include the co-op fee or ancillary fees.
A full chart of 2008-09 fees will be available online, Huber said. One group of students who will find good news there is those in nanotechnology engineering, who have been paying some of UW’s highest fees. The Ontario government has now ruled that they must be charged the same as other engineering students, the vice-president reported.
He also told the board that the government is no longer requiring universities to set aside 30 per cent of the revenue from each tuition fee increase to add to the pool of “local aid” money for student assistance. Instead, the local aid budget — about $12.5 million at UW this year — is to be adjusted as enrolment changes.
Other notes from the February 5 meeting of the board of governors:
• Approval was given to changes in residence fees, effective September 1. In the Villages, Minota Hagey, UW Place and Columbia Lake Village South, fees will go up 5 per cent (making the two-term rate $4,349 for a double room and $5,785 for a “suite-style” room in the Villages). In CLV North, a two-bedroom townhouse will rent for $1,074 a month next fall, a 1.4 per cent increase from this year’s rate.
• Associate provost Catharine Scott reported briefly on last month’s vote by about 1,000 staff members on whether to be represented by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation. UW and the union are getting ready to appear before the Ontario Labour Relations Board to debate the status of some of the votes cast on that issue. In addition, Scott said, the university will argue that the whole vote was invalid because OSSTF didn’t have signatures from the required 40 per cent of the group it was seeking to represent. The union said in its application that it had 398 signatures, out of the 924 employees it said were in the relevant group. The university will argue that the group is larger, or that the number of valid signatures was smaller.
• The board approved a new $50 fee to be paid by applicants to the accounting and financial management program, to cover the cost of the “admissions assignment” that applicants are now asked to write.
• Provost Amit Chakma gave an update on the state of the budget for 2007-08, the fiscal year that will end in 11 weeks. He said the plant operations department has succeeded in cutting the cost of utilities by $1 million this year — taking the bill down to $12.0 million — and that’s helping to turn the bottom line from a deficit that might have reached $2 million into a surplus now estimated at $240,000.
• Chakma also briefed the board on preparations for the 2008-09 budget, noting that another annual across-the-board cut is inevitable. “We try to keep layoffs to a minimum,” he said, but noted that such cuts are, at least, “a crude way of delivering efficiency”. For the university’s financial health this year, it will be essential to bring in a larger number of international students, who more than pay their own way, he said.
• The board approved the proposed new “conflict resolution” policy for staff (to take effect March 1) and the proposed new policy on how academic department chairs are selected.
• Vice-president (external relations) Meg Beckel said with a grin that Campaign Waterloo has now brought the university $440 million, and counting. She said an “identity and branding exercise” for UW is under way (“we want to have some kind of cohesive marketing look”) and she’s also making plans for “a reputation survey” for the university.
• The building and properties committee of the board reported that the Centre for Advanced Photovoltaic Devices building, at the northeast corner of the campus, is just about finished. “At its January meeting,” said the report, “the Committee approved a $4.5 million increase to the previously approved $6.8 million project budget to permit the fit-out of the shelled two floors for the Faculty of Engineering and additional costs to complete Phases 1 and 2.”
• The pension and benefits committee got approval for some changes to the fine print in the benefits program, making clear that dental and other benefits for employees stop at the end of the year in which the individual reaches age 69, even though the government has changed the age when an individual has to start accepting a pension (from 69 to 71).
Source UW Daily Bulletin
|
