Hold on to your wallets, Gators.
UF President Bernie Machen introduced the idea of a 30 percent increase in tuition to the Faculty Senate on Thursday.
Although state law allows the university to raise its tuition rate by 15 percent annually, Machen would look for an exception at a time when stimulus money is running out and when Gov. Scott is having a field day with his budget-cutting shears.
Before you run to Tigert to protest, we thought we’d do some number crunching for you.
Right now, the average UF freshman pays about $167 per credit hour, which equals $5,010 a year if the student takes 30 credits. The proposal would up this cost to about $217 per credit hour, putting the annual tuition cost at $6,510.
However, many UF students don’t pay their tuition out of pocket because they receive Bright Futures scholarships. The largest of the scholarships pays $125 per credit hour, meaning that, as of now, a student would pay about $1,260 to make up the difference per year.
We have to assume the scholarships aren’t increasing anytime soon — in fact, students may receive even less money in the future. So, sticking with the $125 an hour, the new proposal would saddle students with about $2,760 that Bright Futures wouldn’t pay for.
You may notice we’ve been using 15 credit hours as a basis for calculation; this is because we’re anticipating block tuition becoming a reality. With both the 30 percent increase and block tuition, students taking 12 credits per semester would have an even bigger gap, having to pick up about $3,500 in tuition per year.
Machen is asking to at least double what students pay out of pocket for their education. We can see his reasoning: UF is still about $2,600 behind the national average for annual tuition and is coping with severe budget cuts. The president even said he’d scale back tuition increases after this one-time hike.
However, this plan pulls the rug out from under the feet of students who carefully budget their expenses. We’ve watched Bright Futures wither and our wallets shrink during our years here, and we’re tired of our bank accounts being caught off guard.
We hope the powers that be consider grandfathering in current students.
That is, we’d appreciate if they could lock in tuition rates from freshman year through graduation, allowing us to plan and be smarter with our money. The increase would apply only to incoming freshmen, who haven’t yet budgeted their money.
Playing a guessing game with our finances only forces more students to take out more loans.
Of course, we could always work longer hours and take fewer classes — which we would be penalized for under block tuition.
The upcoming years will see a perfect storm of budget cuts, tuition increases, scholarship decreases and block tuition implementation.
Although they might fear the state of the job market, graduating seniors have something to be glad for.
