BC Hikes Tuition By Almost $3,000

Continuing a recent trend among colleges and universities, Boston College (BC) announced Monday that it will be raising tuition prices, tipping the cost of a year at school to $42,268 from this year’s $39,642.

This represents a 6.6 percent hike in total costs for undergraduates at Harvard’s Beanpot rival.

At many colleges, tuition hikes are a matter of survival. If they do not increase their tuitions, they will face falling behind in the race for the most distinguished professors and, as a consequence, the brightest students.

Harvard, whose costs jumped 5.15 percent—to $39,880—for the ’04-’05 school year, has not yet announced its figures for the upcoming school year. However, as in recent years, a tuition hike is expected. Regardless, the College has vowed to meet the financial need of its admitted students.

“Obviously, costs will go up, but by how much we don’t know,” said Sally C. Donahue, director of financial aid for the College, when asked about the tuition for next year. “Our commitment to meet the financial needs of our students will be maintained,”

Jack Dunn, director of public affairs at BC, attributed their rising costs primarily to a “desire to attract and retain excellent faculty.”

He specifically noted that major allocations have been made for information technology, faculty research, and salary increases.

In addition to these allocations, Dunn said, staff benefits will increase by nearly 11 percent this year, due to increased health care premiums, post-retirement medical costs, and employee tuition costs.

The cost of financial aid itself also contributed to the increases.

BC will up its financial aid by $7 million dollars next year, awarding a total of a $95.3 million to undergraduates, Dunn said.

Also, “Unlike Harvard, Boston College offers [free] tuition to the children of its employees and that is one of the factors in this overall increase,” Dunn said.

Harvard and BC are both members of the 568 Group, a consortium of 30 of the nation’s top college’s and universities, whose unifying commitment is to meet the full demonstrated financial need of all students they accept, according to Dunn.

“Comparatively, BC is the poorest of those 30 schools but, consistent with our mission, we have worked hard to assure access to a BC education to those capable students with demonstrated need,” said Dunn.

Nevertheless, students at BC said they were not pleased with the news.

“It’s going to be a lot harder for me to stay in the school. I’m already on God knows how many grants,” said Marco Rufolo, a BC freshman.

However, he said he was not surprised by the raise and added that, “its just the first string of them.”

He said the latest raise in tuition has sparked concern over the socioeconomic diversity of the students that attend the school.

“If Boston College is struggling with a socioeconomic diversity problem now, imagine what will happen with the tuition raise,” Rufolo said.

Harvard instituted the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI) last year, which pledges no parental contribution for families with incomes below $40,000. The recent increase in fee waiver requests may indicate that the initiative has not deterred people from lower-income families from applying to the College.