I saw that info in a national news paper. It’s causing quite a stir in the higher ed world. OSU has more than enough money to hire more faculty (faculty don’t make that much money in comparison to administrators) but they won’t do that; they choose instead to pass costs along to their already-strapped students.
And with so many additional students enrolling in these particular programs (OSU has done its best to limit admission to A&S and fine arts over the past few years) you’d think the additional tuition revenue would free up capital to do more faculty hires. Apparently not at OSU. Ridiculous.
Becomes a matter of supply and demand.
Though I do not want to make light of the struggle with tuition payments or loans many students/families have, there are several factors to consider:
- UIUC, Penn State, and Michigan have had differential higher fees for professional colleges for a while now. Their engineering programs are high quality and in high demand. Even the base undergrad tuition at these schools is around 40% more than OSU, so professional college enrollees are paying almost twice as much as Ohio State in in-state tuition at these institutions.
By the way, I did a search on google news on this topic, and I only found two articles on this topic: one in dispatch, and one in lantern. I do not what stir in the higher ed world marcusOsu is referring to. Believe, unlike selling its parking operations, this isn’t such an unusual move from OSU.
- I know engineering education is more expensive to deliver than humanities education. Support for labs, the fact that you compete with industry to recruit and retain PhDs in these fields and thus you have to pay faculty more, are some of the reasons. So, if the tuition is the same, engineering has to operate with a different faculty to student ratio.
- I think there is a different value to the degrees. Most finishing an undergrad degree in a field like Biology will have two options: either they get into a professional program like medicine, dentistry, or pharmacy, and have to pay high tuition for these programs, or they really do not know what to do with their degree. Those with an engineering degree have nice paying jobs lined up, almost always.
- These programs are in high demand: the average ACT for engineering enrollees was 30.4 for the Fall 2015 class, while it was 28.4 for the rest of the campus. So, engineering is quite sure of attracting enough students despite a higher fees.
I agree with some of the concerns – one has to hope that the additional money gets invested in ways that directly benefits undergrads: better interaction with faculty (especially tenure-line faculty), better advising, and career services. Hopefully the CFO (who makes 900K to start with) doesn’t get a fat bonus for getting it approved by the board.
if I read the proposal correctly, this will not be applied next year to currently enrolled students, even if only freshmen now?
@WIparent4 this is how I understand it as well