Alongside rising tuition, NC State students will see an increase in general fees with an additional $500 increase in an engineering program fee for the 2017-18 academic year.
General NC State fees are set to increase at a minimum of $48.50, a 1.92 percent increase for all students, according to Mike Mullen, dean of the Division of Academic and Student Affairs and co-chair of the Fee Review Committee. The fees fall within their 3 percent annual increase cap set by the Board of Governors in 2016.
Mullen collaborates with the Fee Review Committee each year to formulate a proposal for the following year’s fees.
“Students are heavily involved in this process,” Mullen said. “I present an overview of the process to Student Senate each fall. This includes an overview of university budgets, comparisons of our tuition and fees with our peer institutions — our in-state tuition and fees are very low compared to most of our peers, typically the third least expensive among 17 universities in the group — a breakdown of current fees and a preview of requested increases.”
From the Board of Governors’ unanimous 15 percent cap set in 2014 on need-based financial aid, the total amount of university-funded, need-based aid will not be increased despite the increase in fees. Mullen holds that the fee increases will be taken into account for those that receive need-based financial aid from the university.
“Whenever fees are increased, they are calculated into the cost of attendance for the university and would indeed be part of the calculations for need-based aid,” Mullen said.
In addition to increasing fees, in the past three years, the College of Engineering has implemented an annual increase of $500 to an engineering program enhancement fee, capped at $1,500 as of the 2017-18 academic year for engineering students.
In the shadow of the General Assembly’s $80 million budget cut to the UNC System in the 2012-13 academic year, the College of Engineering has implemented its fee in an effort to continue advancing the prestige of its program in relation to other universities in the U.S.
“The bottom line is, it is very easy to drop if you aren’t doing things that allow you to have the resources to provide the quality that you have to provide,” said Louis Martin-Vega, dean of engineering. “The motivation for this fee is not to put in a fee and make it rougher for students at all. It’s to assure that that quality is going to stay here because we know what can happen if you don’t do that.”
Many comparable engineering programs, such as that of Virginia Tech, utilize a similar enhancement fee, some accounting for up to $5,000 in additional costs. Many other American engineering programs, such as the College of Engineering at Texas A&M, have substituted differential tuition in place of enhancement fees. Differential tuition, which is additional, degree-specific tuition charged alongside university tuition, is most commonly used for increasing available seats and professors’ salaries.
Because the College of Engineering is restricted to implementing fees, additional fee revenue can only be used for supplemental programs and research, according to Jennifer Cox, director of communication for the College of Engineering.
Revenue generated from the fee will contribute to purchasing and upgrading research equipment, improving student-computing services and expanding Women in Engineering and Minority Engineering Programs. In totality, the fee aims to improve engineering education resources as well as student development, recruitment and retention within minority student bodies in the College of Engineering. The fee also funds graduate research assistantships, the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, the Engineering Entrepreneurs and professional development.
As of Monday evening, Martin-Vega is in the process of further evaluating the current implementation plan for revenues from the engineering enhancement fee with the Student Senate representatives from the College of Engineering. Prior to the meeting Monday, Student Government had little to no influence on the implementation of the enhancement fee’s revenue, according to former Student Body President Paul Nolan.
“We have no reason to want to not share what we have related to the increase,” Martin-Vega said. “It must be understood that this is still the beginning of a process; we haven’t even completed the second year of this. There needs to be a lot of understanding of what a fee is versus what tuition is.”
For more information on the engineering enhancement fee, visit https://www.engr.ncsu.edu/academics/fee. To read more about student fee increases in general, visit https://sg.students.ncsu.edu/increases.
