UA proposes to limit tuition increase to 5 percent

Tuition will not go up next year as much as in previous years -- if a proposal put forward by the Undergraduate Assembly last night is adopted by the University administration. A tuition increase could feasibly be limited to five percent while maintaining need-blind admissions and most University services, according to the proposal. The UA arrived at the five percent figure as a goal because it is one percent greater than the inflation rate over the past 10 years,UA Chairperson and Wharton junior Dan Debicella said. A five percent increase would represent the smallest tuition hike in over three years. Last year, tuition increased by 6.1 percent, and in 1992-93, by 6.9 percent, according to figures provided by the UA. "We're saying you should keep tuition increases to five percent because it's possible," Debicella said. The proposal would require slight modifications of the University's budgetary system, said Wharton junior Vincent Scafaria, also a member of the UA budget committee. Scafaria said at last night's UA meeting that budgeting at the University is done using a system of "responsibility centers." He said each of the University's 12 schools -- along with divisions like the University Museum, the Book Store, Dining Services, and Residential Living -- makes up a responsibility center, creating its own revenue and spending its own money. At the end of a fiscal year, leftover funding from centers that profited is allocated to centers recording a loss -- so that no division of the University comes up short. Scafaria criticized the current system because there is no incentive to cut costs. "The profiting [centers] know their profit is going to leave, so why bother saving money," he said. In order to ensure that expenses drop enough to meet the lowered increase in revenue, the proposal calls for Provost Stanley Chodorow, acting Executive Vice President Jack Freeman and University President Judith Rodin to set limits on certain non-essential spending. "The whole idea is, you identify what matters to students," Scafaria said. "And anything else that's just dead weight, you cut." In what he described as "re-engineering," Scafaria said the University must "take out steps that lead to time delays and extra money." Using figures provided by Interim Budget Director Ben Hoyle, the UA argued that current services can be maintained if next year's tuition increase is limited to five percent. In even the worst possible scenario, expected revenues are greater than expenses by at least $24 million. However, the UA figures did not allocate specific funds to areas such as faculty salaries, employee benefits, or maintenance projects -- because the authors of the proposal did not want to tell the administration how to write next year's budget, Debicella said. But in the expected case scenario, $63 million remain to be spent on these areas. This year's budget only allocates $47 million to them, he said. "The purpose of [the proposal] is a show-me thing so the president can't say, 'oh, this is impossible,'" Debicella said.

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