During their April 23 meeting in the newly renovated Model Mill, the ETSU Board of Trustees unanimously approved an increase in tuition for the 2021-2022 academic year.
This will include an undergraduate tuition increase of 1.98%, which equates to $75 a semester, and a graduate tuition increase of 1.67%. Out-of-state tuition will be capped at $13,500. Out-of-state tuition for neighboring states, specifically, will be capped at $10,500. Tuition for international students will not be increased.
The Tennessee Higher Education Commission proposed a 0-2% tuition and mandatory fee limit at their November 2020 meeting, and they will take formal action at their quarterly meeting in May.
There will also be a $33 annual increase in the program services fee. This is expected to provide the ETSU Student Government Association with $310,000 in revenue for concerts and BucFund in their second year of a two-year increase, as well as $84,000 in technology access, of which ETSU is currently in their fourth year of a five year increase for.
“And those fees are used to increase the bandwidth on campus, to provide storage space for student projects and also to maintain the equipment to keep our networks up and running seamlessly, and we had depended on those networks even more this year than we ever had in the past,” said ETSU Chief Financial Officer B.J. King. “And so, it’s definitely a good investment in technology.”
The tuition and fee increases combined will result in an increase of $183 per student for the academic year. These increases are estimated to provide the university with roughly $1.98 million in revenue, which they will use to fund the salary pool, the faculty promotion fund, the pool for employee benefits and a wellness initiative proposed by SGA last year, which could not be implemented at the time due to flat tuition.
ETSU did not increase tuition and fees for the 2020-2021 academic year due to concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
In other business, the board officially appointed Kara Gilliam to serve as the student trustee for 2021-2022. Gilliam is a first year Doctor of Medicine/Master of Public Health candidate at ETSU’s Quillen College of Medicine, and she is the first medical student to be nominated for the position of student trustee.
For more information or to watch the full meeting, visit https://www.etsu.edu/trustees/livestream.php.
