Undergraduates at UW-Madison's Business School dreaming of a future filled with plush, high-paying jobs will likely have to pay more in the short term, as the Business School announced to students last Tuesday it would raise tuition in order to remain competitive with other top-notch programs.
Following a series of discussions with students, Michael Knetter, dean of the School of Business, will present the proposal before the UW System Board of Regents for a vote in March.
""Nine out of the other 10 business schools in the Big Ten already have an undergraduate differential tuition. They did that for the same reasons we need to do it,"" Knetter said. ""Their costs are going up more rapidly than the state support will allow them to.""
Knetter said the options facing students are to implement a tuition differential or to scale back the Business School programs. The differential for undergraduate business students would be $500 per semester for students majoring in the program and $150 per semester for business certificate program students.
""We think it's important to have a business program that can do a better job of handling the demand that's out there for business education,"" Knetter said.
""In this application cycle in January for admission to the business school, 50 percent of the students that wanted to study business we weren't able to admit because we don't have the capacity to handle it,"" he added.
Steve Schroeder, director of the Business Career Center, said the bulk of the differential tuition will go toward hiring additional faculty. In the last couple years, he said, UW-Madison has been losing Business School faculty and has been unable to replace them.
The dean actively reached out to students for their input and is working hard to make the proposal as transparent as possible, Schroeder said.
Students are generally supportive of the proposed tuition differential, according to Kim Hughes, UW-Madison senior and president of Mu Kappa Tau, a professional student-marketing organization in the Business School.
Hughes has met with Knetter multiple times to discuss the tuition differential.
""I think that [students] were really responsive once they understood the need [for a tuition differential] and once all their questions as far as logistics could go were answered,"" she said.
""I think we've been getting an awesome education and to maintain the level of education that we get, I think it's really important that we have the tuition,"" she added.
If the UW-System Board of Regents passes the proposal, the tuition differential will take effect in the fall of 2007. Graduate students in the Business School already pay a differential tuition of $1,440 per year.
