AUSTIN, Texas—The University of Texas at Austin will raise tuition an average of 4.9 percent over the next two years, increasing the cost for the average Texas resident student in 2007 to $4,050 per semester.
The university’s tuition increase proposal was approved yesterday (March 28) by the University of Texas System Board of Regents.
The proposal resulted from the work of the Tuition Policy Advisory Committee, a panel that included students, faculty and administrators. William Powers Jr., president of The University of Texas at Austin, and Omar Ochoa, president of Student Government, spoke in support of the proposal at the Regents’ meeting.
Tuition will increase 9.6 percent in fall 2006 and 1.2 percent in fall 2007 for an annual average increase of 4.9 percent. The university for the first time made a tuition recommendation that covers the next two years to aid students and families in financial planning.
Powers said the increase will support the hiring of new faculty to reduce the university’s student-faculty ratio and will enable the university to offer “competitive merit salary increases” to faculty and staff. Funds also will be used for repair and renovation of facilities, Powers said.
About 24 percent of the tuition increase funds will provide financial aid for students. This supplemental financial aid program was put into place concurrent with tuition deregulation three years ago. Students from families earning $40,000 or less pay no more today than they did three years ago, even after all the increases in tuition. And students from families with income levels between $40,001 and $80,000 pay only a fraction of the increases in tuition that have been made over the last three years.
“We have done this to ensure that this university remains accessible to all, regardless of their economic circumstances,” Powers said. “The University of Texas at Austin remains a bargain, offering a high-quality education at a cost below that of most of its peer competitor institutions around the nation.”
The University of Texas at Austin is annually recognized as one of higher education’s best values by national publications such as U.S. News and World Report magazine, the Princeton Review and the Fiske Guide to Colleges.
The university will increase tuition for out-of-state students over the next two years, from about $8,000 to about $13,000 a semester. Powers said the increase will make the university’s non-Texas-resident tuition comparable to those at other state universities, where out-of-state students typically pay 3.2 times what state residents pay.
