Students pay 4.9 percent more tuition

By Anna Douglas

In-state students will pay $285 more and out-of-state students will see an increase in tuition of $648, per semester.           

The Executive Committee of the Winthrop University Board of Trustees adopted the  tuition increase during an afternoon telephone conference that will allow the university to begin preparing to mail tuition notices for fall semester, which begins in late August.

Total cost of attendance for students who live on campus will increase 4.15 percent overall because room and board costs are not supported by state funds, and therefore not impacted by state appropriation reductions.  This increase was approved in April by the Board of Trustees.

Administrators will continue to keep a wary eye on Columbia in the months to come, President Anthony DiGiorgio said, noting that while state revenue receipts have shown some modest improvement in recent weeks, new job loss in the state’s public sector as a result of drastic state spending cuts could change that, as newly displaced workers in both the public and private sector no longer pay income taxes and reduce expenditures that generate sales taxes that support state services.

To date, Winthrop has lost $9.8 million in state funds since Fall 2008, and is slated to lose another $3.3 million in public funding when federal stimulus funds expire next year.

Winthrop is managing routine personnel vacancies, filling some deemed essential, but redistributing work for others, allowing funding for more than 35 vacant positions to be saved.

Travel will continue to be prioritized to that involving students in academic presentations or otherwise essential to faculty’s professional development and advancement.

Furlough days may be announced later

While furlough days for employees have not been included in the plan for the coming year, they cannot be ruled out until final enrollment numbers are available in early fall.

“We’re continuing to trim everywhere we reasonably can,” DiGiorgio said during the call. “We will begin this year without Winthrop personnel being under a furlough salary reduction; however, we will continue to adjust operational spending throughout the year as dictated by state revenue reports to stay within our means.”

DiGiorgio told Winthrop employees in April that he hopes to avoid furlough days altogether in the year ahead, but that will be dependent upon having no mid-year cuts in state support and having level enrollment for the year.  If furlough days are needed at all, he said, the university would hope to keep their number to “no more than four or five.”

With state appropriations expected to provide less than 10 percent of the university’s operating revenue by the 2011 academic year, DiGiorgio noted that “this means 90 percent of our operations will take place on a private school finance model that emphasizes enrollment growth, and our facilities are now ready for that incremental growth. We wouldn’t have been able to have planned on growth if we had waited on the state to build the buildings we need; we had to do it from our own capital resources. The fringe benefit for the region’s economy is that our projects have kept a large number of construction workers employed as the recession set in, while also getting the work done at very competitive costs.  In the long-term, this capacity will also mean Winthrop will have the tuition resources in place to increase investment in retaining and recruiting the national-caliber faculty for which we are known.”