SGA, BOV set to clear the air on tuition hikes in public forum

Photo by Shayla Bailey.

The Student Government Association and Board of Visitors are looking to provide clarity on the university’s mulling over a tuition hike.

The organizations will host a public forum, in which students are encouraged to come with questions, this week, following last month’s announcement the university is considering raising tuition for the 17th year in a row.

The forum will be on Wednesday from 6 – 7:30 p.m. in room 250 of the Cabell Library. VCU Vice President for Finance and Budget, Karol Kain Gray, will have a presentation at the event.

The university’s budget proposal includes a potential range of 6.8 to 8.1 percent raise in tuition, contingent on the state’s budget, which will be finalized in May. Tuition increased by 3.8 percent last year and has increased every year since 2001. VCU officials are pointing the finger at a decline in state funding, which they say are the catalyst for increased tuition.
Tuition in 2016 was 74 percent higher at the average Virginia university than in 2006, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

On March 21, VCU President Michael Rao presented the Board of Visitors a budget which is 3.7 percent larger than last year’s. In the past four years, VCU has lost $34.3 million in state cuts. The plan may be altered when the state’s budget is finalized in May.

A number of students have aired their grievances at the university for raising tuition again. Some students with VCU’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America staged a protest against tuition hikes on campus Thursday.

A group of adjunct professors seeking better wages from the university also voiced complaints, saying the university’s refusal to raise adjunct pay doesn’t pair well with its recent real estate investments.

“They continue to link a hike in tuition to pay adjuncts a livable wage yet we continue to have building acquisitions, we continue to have one of the highest paid state employees work for VCU, which is President Rao,” Tom Burkett, an adjunct in VCUarts, told the Commonwealth Times last week, “yet we can’t come up with money to pay living wages to contingent faculty.”


Fadel Allassan, Managing Editor

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply