Seven thousand seven hundred dollars can pay for a lot of things -- a few months of rent for a Center City apartment, several round-trip plane tickets to Europe and even a down payment on a car.
And for the average college student, it can certainly offset the cost of four years' worth of books, phone bills and late night runs to Wawa.
But this sum of money has significance beyond luxury items and staples of the college student's existence.
Seven thousand seven hundred is one-fifth of $36,212 -- the total undergraduate student charges for the 2002-2003 academic year, approved by the University Board of Trustees last week.
Moreover, $7,700 is also roughly the amount of money that Penn's total student charges have increased since the 1996-1997 academic year, when the total of tuition and other fees only added up to $28,442.
In other words, $7,700 can be a a student nightmare when it comes to paying for four years of undergraduate education at an Ivy League university.
Keeping up with the steady increase of student charges -- an average increase of 4.1 percent each of the past seven years -- can put a dent in anyone's wallet, even when inflation is taken into account.
Yet Penn administrators say there are several reasons -- ranging from the large-scale upgrades of technology on campus to the University's continued commitment to provide a high-quality education to its students -- that help explain the steady rise in undergraduate student charges since 1996.
According to Vice President for Budget and Management Analysis Michael Masch, the huge expansion in information technology over the past half-decade has placed an enormous demand on the University to provide students, faculty and staff with cutting-edge computing facilities.
"One of the things that's totally changed on university campuses is information technology," Masch said. "It's a funny thing because the same unit of service is much cheaper today than it was five years ago, but no one is willing to accept that level of service anymore."
Masch also said that the cost of having to continually upgrade routers, servers and Penn's network have placed a demand on the University's budget that was essentially nonexistent 10 years ago.
And since technology continues to rapidly evolve, Masch said he believes these costs will probably not dissipate anytime soon.
"Maintaining state-of-the-art technology is another cost that we'll have to bear," Masch said. "That's what it's going to take to keep up with the growing volume of data movement from the campus to the rest of the world through the Internet."
Still, $7,700 -- multiplied by 10,500 undergraduates -- does not go to paying for technology alone.
Other factors, many of which deal with the physical changes that the University has undergone over the last seven years, have further increased the price of a year at Penn.
Back in 1996, Perelman Quadrangle was full of grass, and the Quad dormitories lacked air conditioning.
Likewise, Masch said it was imperative that the University embark upon substantial renovations of its buildings.
"Prior generations really left facilities unattended to for too many decades, so by the time that we got to the 1990s, we had no alternative but to renovate them," Masch said. "We are now attending to those needs."
University Treasurer and Vice President for Finance Craig Carnaroli added that initiatives to improve Penn's environment and that of the surrounding community have also contributed to the charges incurred upon students.
"We made a big investment in University security and the creation of the University City District," Carnaroli said. "A lot of it is the quality of life around campus and what's affecting students individually."
According to University President Judith Rodin, the upward trend in student charges can also be attributed largely the cost of maintaining a strong faculty.
"The increase in faculty and staff salaries has been between three and seven percent in recent years, and the recruitment and addition of new academic faculty has also been an incremental expense," Rodin said.
Earlier this year, for example, a report released by the Faculty Senate Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty noted that Penn professors are among the highest paid in the country.
According to the report, the mean academic base salary for full professors during the 2000-2001 school year was reported to be $120,300, which only four peer institutions -- Harvard, Stanford and Yale universities and the University of Chicago -- exceeded.
Masch said that maintaining competitive salaries for professors not only contributes to the overall academic experience for students, but it also keeps Penn up to par with other competing universities.
"We have a faculty that is very competitive and highly desired, which is to say that we're not just taking a random sample of people across higher education," Masch said. "We're talking about a faculty that are among the most respected scholars in the country, so we have to be competitive with other institutions in terms of what their compensation is."
Nonetheless, even with the range of explanations for this increase in student charges, University administrators said that they are aware of the pressure that they are putting on students' wallets.
"What we try to do is to keep the cost down that we're passing on to the students and taking it on through philanthropy," Rodin said. "But there is some component that has to be added to student charges given that the services and facilities continue to be upgraded."
Carnaroli agreed, noting the importance of remaining conscious of the steady rise in tuition.
"There's always going to be pressures on operating the University that will put pressures on student charges, but we're also very mindful that we can't balance our books entirely on the students."
