By MASUDUR RAHMAN

Senior Reporter

At a special formal session on June 25, Oakland University’s board of trustees unanimously voted to raise the tuition rate for 2008-09 by 6.29 percent for undergraduate students and by five percent for graduate students.

One percent of this tuition increase is due to the non-mandatory student fees, such as transcript fees and fees for nursing, music and education courses, being included into the price of tuition for all students, a decision that was passed at the previous board meeting in May.

The rate of increase was 1.29 percent lower for graduate students than it was for undergraduate students because the administration wanted to “relieve some of the pricing pressure for our graduate students,” said John Beaghan, OU’s vice president of finance and administration.

This latest increase follows a 13.9 percent rise in student tuitions for the 2007-08 year.

This increase was based on the administration estimating a “flat” state appropriation, meaning that the amount of money OU receives from the state of Michigan, for 2008-09, will not change from the amount given to in 2007-08.

Many of the trustees, including Board Chair Dennis Pawley, blamed the “degradation of state aid” for the tuition increase. Trustee Henry Baskin also said that Michigan legislators not telling OU how much aid they’ll give early enough has forced the administration and the board to play a “guessing game,” and led them to budget conservatively and assume flat appropriations.

However, even if OU receives more appropriations than budgeted, it was decided at the board session that the tuition will not be decreased. Instead, the excess money will be placed in a special reserve until the board is certain that there will not be a mid-year cut in state appropriations.

This proposal was approved three days before Michigan legislators met on June 28 and passed a bill that gave a one percent increase in state aid for all public universities in Michigan, including OU.

This one percent increase in state aid means an increase of $519,329 from last year’s $51,932,900, totaling state aid to OU for the 2008-09 to $52,452,229.

The report did not include $519,329, announced three days after the board of trustees special formal session by the Michigan legislature, in the estimation of OU’s budget. The money will not be used to lower the tuition increase rate but rather send it the special reserve mentioned above.

Should OU not get a mid-year cut, the board of trustees approved the proposal that this money will only be used to improve classrooms and labs.

Samir Hanna, a student liaison to the board of trustees, said at the session that he was glad the board will consider student input on which classrooms and labs will be upgraded.

Later, however, Hanna also said that he wished the administration and the board had considered more student input before deciding what was to be done with this hypothetical extra money.

“[Upgrading classrooms and labs] are important things to do, but I wish there were more student input into what the money will be used for,” Hanna said.

Beaghan said that some of the reasons for the tuition increase were things like increases in health care, utility increases and contractual compensations.

“We buy gasoline just like you buy gasoline,” he said. “We have to pay for all these things somehow or cut the budget.”

“Somewhere along the way, we have to decide what quality of education services you want to provide,” he said. “We built a budget that we believe will provide quality education services to our students.”

For resident freshmen and sophomores the tuition per credit hour rose from $252.50 to $268.50, for juniors and seniors it rose from $276 to $293.25, and for graduate students it rose from $472.50 to $496.

For non-resident freshmen and sophomores the tuition rose from $587.50 to $626.75, for juniors and seniors it rose from $630.00 to $672.00, for graduates it rose from $814.50 to $855.75.

This means that a freshman or sophomore taking 12 credits will pay $3,222, a $192 rise from last year; a junior or senior will pay $3,519, a $207 rise from last year; and a graduate student will pay $5,952, a $282 rise from last year.

Student body Vice President Dan Evola said in a phone interview that the tuition increase, although less than last year, is unacceptable. “But I don’t think that OU is completely responsible for all of it — a lot of it comes from Michigan not giving us enough money,” Evola added.

Evola is also not happy with the decision to use the excess appropriations money to upgrade classrooms and labs.

“I don’t think it’s fair that if we get more money, they can just go and take it. This money should be refunded back to the students,” he said.

The board of trustees said at the session that the excess money, which was only hypothetical at the time, should not be refunded back to the students, but should go toward improving educational services instead.

Evola also blamed Lansing politics for the tuition increase. He said that it’s “outrageous” that the “big three” universities (University of Michigan — Ann Arbor, Michigan State University and Wayne State University) and Michigan Tech University get more than double the amount of state aid per student than OU does. He accused some members of the Michigan legislation of having close ties with WSU and favoring them.

Hanna agreed that this situation is “unfair.”

“They say that the ‘Big Three’ get more funding per student than we do because they bring in more research and money into Michigan,” Hanna said. “But OU is a research university, too.”

Evola plans to organize a protest rally in Lansing to fight this “unfairness” and try to get more state aid for OU. He said that students from other universities will not be invited to protest alongside them.

“We’re all competing for the same money, so it doesn’t make any sense for different universities to protest together,” Evola said.

FYES stands for fiscal year equivalent student, or in simpler terms, the number of full-time students a university has.

“We’d be temporarily set if they gave us what we asked for — $4,000 per student,” Beaghan said. “The average [funding per FYES among public universities in Michigan] is about $5,200 – we’d take that too.”