NC State’s Board of Trustees approved a special student-fee increase for the university’s 8,800 engineering students, in addition to voting to raise the cost of tuition by at least 3 percent for the entire student body.
Engineering students at NC State currently pay a $90 fee in addition to other required student fees. The new increase, approved by the Board in late November, would raise that fee to $1,500 over the course of three years.
In addition to the fee increase for engineers, the trustees approved a tuition increase of 3 percent for all in-state students and 6 percent for all out-of-state students in each of the next two years.
If the proposal is accepted by the UNC-System Board of Governors, tuition for in-state undergraduate students will rise to $6,407 by 2016-17, increasing $182 next year and then another $187 a year later. Tuition for out-of-state undergraduate students will increase to $23,926 by the fall of 2016.
Standard student fees for all students would also rise $138 by the fall of 2016, raising the total to $2,396 for undergraduates and $2,407 for undergraduates.
The fee increase request the Board of Trustees approved is made biennially, so it only officially approved the special engineering fee increase of up to $1,000 for the fall of 2016.
However, the university is planning to request an additional $500 increase to bring the total annual fee for engineering students up to $1,500 by the fall of 2017, according to Dean of the College of Engineering Louis Martin-Vega.
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Warwick Arden said the fee is necessary in order for the university to keep pace with other schools across the country that are pouring money into engineering programs.
NC State is currently producing well-prepared and highly sought-after graduates, but it will not be able to continue if the university does not make significant investments as technology and the field of engineering is constantly evolving, Arden said.
“The bottom line is engineering is not a static field,” Arden said.
The engineering fee would be used to expand existing educational enhancement programs, develop new programs and address critical infrastructure needs, according to Martin-Vega.
“It’s not necessarily something we are thrilled about doing, but we don’t have any other choice right now,” Martin-Vega said.
Programs that would be expanded would include Research Experiences for Undergraduates, the Engineering Entrepreneurship Program, the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, International Internships, Study Abroad, the Women in Engineering Program and the Minority Engineering Program.
In addition, the fee would enhance undergraduate and graduate professional development programs and increase support for student research assistantships.
Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences Jeff Braden said it is common to see universities across the country charge more for professional and technical degrees because the cost of educating the students is much higher.
“It costs more to be a nuclear engineer than to be a poet,” Braden said.
In addition to the cost of the students’ educations, Braden said the fee is justified because the graduates often receive higher starting salaries and tend to see a larger return on their educational investment.
“It’s not unreasonable to ask for them to pay more for their education,” Braden said.
Martin-Vega said the practice of charging engineering students more for their educations has become the norm among public land-grant universities with engineering programs.
In fact, NC State and Georgia Tech are the only two schools within their group of peer schools that do not a have a substantial separate fee for engineering students, and even Georgia Tech’s undergraduate tuition is a few thousand dollars more a year than NC State’s, Martin-Vega said.
Martin-Vega said, even with the added fee, the total amount engineering students pay for their educations at NC State is still going to be lower than any of the university’s peer institutions at the current moment.
“I know it’s something for the students who go here to see this bump, but were they to go elsewhere, even if they lived in those states, they are not going to find a program of this quality that costs any less,” Martin-Vega said.
In recent years, public universities from across the country have turned to tuition and fee increases to help offset repeated cuts in their allocation from their respective state budgets.
Increases continue to raise concerns in the UNC-System and beyond about the rising cost and decreased affordability of public higher education in the U.S.
Travis Tippens, the president of the Engineers Council and a senior studying electrical engineering, was a member of a committee of students that met a few times to discuss certain areas where the College of Engineering could use the money to best benefit students.
Although charging an additional fee for engineers would have beneficial outcomes for students within the college, Tippens said he is not thrilled to be having to pay the fee himself. Tippens said the responses he heard from engineering students were “nothing positive.”
“Nobody wants to pay more for their education,” Tippens said.
The College of Engineering hopes to offset some of the costs for students by using the money to fund more opportunities that provide educational experiences for the undergraduate students while also providing them with financial compensation, such as teaching assistant positions that offer students a stipend for their work, according to Martin-Vega.
“It isn’t like we are simply going to take all of this and leave people out in the wind or something like that,” Martin-Vega said.
Arden said no money from the fee increase will be used towards directly hiring faculty, and the money will be put back into engineering programs that are meant to benefit the students who are paying for them.
The Board of Governors will vote on the increases early next year.
