Provost meets with grad students over tuition/fee increases

Pete Yee

MONEY-MINDED Provost Carl Amrhein fields fee increase question from the GSA.

The Graduate Students’ Association convened on Monday night to hear a specially called presentation from the University’s Provost and Vice President (Academic) Carl Amrhein, deputy provost Dru Marshall, and Vice President (Finance and Administration) Phyllis Clark concerning upcoming increases to graduate student tuition and instructional fees.

Unlike undergraduate students, who are facing a differential tuition increase across disparate professional faculties, graduate students will see an equal price increase across its student body.

The administration's proposition is a fully grandparented model for current students in the program, meaning that students currently enrolled won't have modifiers imposed on them. No students would see market modifiers placed on them in 2010/11. However, students will see the institution of a non-instructional fee ranging from $400–560 that has yet to be determined.

In 2011/12, market modifiers would be instated at 50 per cent of their full capacity, and students would see a fee reduction from the previous year. 2012/13 would see the full installment of market modifiers, with a further reduction in non-instructional fees.

Non-instructional fees, or "Common Student Space, Sustainability and Safety" fees, are being enforced to ensure program quality throughout the deficit, and to avoid cost saving by “shrinking the institution,” Clark explained.

In addition to covering the part of the deficit, non-instructional mandatory fees will help pay a wide range of costs — from maintenance and modification of common student space, deferred maintenance, and campus sustainability programs, to campus security emergency notification systems and emergency preparedness structures and systems.

Essentially, by the 2012/13 school year, all newly admitted graduate students will need to pay a $2,500 market modifier in addition to the base 2009/10 tuition rate of $3,590. These estimates don’t include compensation for the Consumer Price Index, which, until the current deficit problem arrived, would have capped tuition growth through a provincial regulation to 1.5 per cent for the 2010/11 school year.