News > February 8, 2007

By Alex Osteen

Senior writer

On Feb. 2, the Board of Trustees voted in favor of increasing undergraduate and graduate school tuition, as well as room and board costs for the 2007-2008 fiscal year, to take effect next school year.

Despite rising endowment and student body size, the administration claims that higher tuition is necessary to adjust instructor salaries enhance student aid and to fund proposals that are being created from recent strategic planning.

Full-time undergraduate tuition will be raised 6.8% from $32,040 per academic year to $34,230 per year.

Part time students will have to pay 13.6% more next year, at a price of $1,420 per semester hour.

Every graduate level school in the university (including the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, the Masters of Liberal Arts School, the Babcock MBA program, the law school and the divinity school) must now increase tuition after the board’s vote, except for the Wake Forest Baptist Medical School, for which tuition is set by a different process.

In fact, according to the Institutional Research Office’s Factbooks, since 1996, undergraduate tuition has been inflated by more than 4.5% every year.

Ten years ago, it cost students $19,450 in tuition to attend the university.

Tuition isn’t the only aspect of the university’s charges that will go up.  Student housing is slated to increase by 6.2% to 7.6% this coming year depending on room type. Car registration, study abroad costs and summer school and housing fees will all also increase.

Normally the Board of Trustees makes this decision at their October meetings, after recommendations from a financial committee. However, according to university Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Nancy Suttenfield, voting was delayed until this month because she and Provost William Gordon wanted to complete a “comprehensive analysis of [the university’s] financial situation,” which they hoped would help the board make a better informed decision.

This decision to increase in costs to students for studying and living on campus comes after the university’s endowment has reached a record $1 billion and after it welcomed its largest freshmen class in its history. Princeton University, announced recently that it would not be increasing its tuition of $33,000 for a combination of the very same reasons.

Suttenfield explains that this seemed discrepancy is due to the fact that after examining all other potential funding sources, including “cost-savings measures,” budget reallocation and additional investment earnings, she and Gordon found that all sources will be necessary to “make adjustments to salaries to assure that we are able to attract and retain outstanding faculty and staff, enhance student aid, expand outreach to enlarge and diversify [the university’s] applicant pool… and cover escalating fuel costs.” She mentioned that the funding details of the plans to be proposed by the University Planning Council are yet to be decided.

Although tuition hikes have become tradition at Wake Forest, they also are common among national universities, both private and public. In the last week and a half, both the Daily Tar Heel and The Chronicle, UNC Chapel Hill’s and Duke University’s student newspapers, announced that their universities are also planning to raise tuition for next year. In fact, a survey by the College Board in 2005 found that on whole, nationally private universities increase tuition by an average 5% annually, higher than average inflation in the United States.

Suttenfield was careful to emphasize the fact that “the 6.8 % increase in undergraduate tuition for next year is not expected to change [the university’s] position relative to the 60 or so other highly competitive private universities, where [the university] finds itself in the lowest 20th percentile.”