Tuition, Room and Board to Rise 3.79 Percent

Financial aid increase projected at 5 percent

Boston University academic year tuition increase

Photo by Vernon Doucette

March 19, 2012
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Tuition for the 2012–2013 academic year will rise to $42,400 and the cost of basic room and board to $13,190, a combined increase of $2,032, or 3.79 percent, over last year’s costs. The New York Times reported last week that on average, tuition and fees rose by 4.6 percent this year at the nation’s private colleges.

In a letter sent to Boston University students and parents last Friday, President Robert A. Brown said the increase, which will enable the University to enhance the quality of education and student support services, is among the lowest in the last 40 years.

Brown said the University is working to maintain access for students from all economic backgrounds, and that the average undergraduate financial aid award is projected to rise 5 percent. Currently, 57 percent of undergraduates receive financial aid from the University.

He said next year’s budget would fund modest growth of academic programs, improvement in student services, and critical information technology systems.

“We also continue to invest in vital new facilities that enhance our student experience, such as the new Center for Student Services, at 100 Bay State Road,” he wrote. “The New Balance Athletic Field on West Campus will open in summer 2013 and will greatly extend the University’s capacity for intramural and recreational athletics.”

Brown said the University is budgeting to be able to continue to improve the quality of a Boston University education, while being mindful of the need to control the cost of attendance for students and their families.

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Tuition, Room and Board to Rise 3.79 Percent

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  • Art Jahnke

    Senior Contributing Editor

    Art Janke

    Art Jahnke began his career at the Real Paper, a Boston area alternative weekly. He has worked as a writer and editor at Boston Magazine, web editorial director at CXO Media, and executive editor in Marketing & Communications at Boston University, where his work was honored with many awards. Profile

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Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.

There are 42 comments on Tuition, Room and Board to Rise 3.79 Percent

    1. You should consider lifetime earnings, not starting salary after graduation. After graduating in 1993, my starting salary was 32,000 and my base salary is exactly 100,000 more than that today (19 yrs later). I’ve been earning 6 figures since age 30. Yes, the name of the school on your resume opens doors. (Granted, back in ’93 tuition/room/board at private universities was a much more reasonable $25,000/yr, and I’m not sure what has happened to make college costs skyrocket so much.)

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    2. How can the school increase federal aid if the student is already receiving the maximum amount allowed for the school year? I don’t see how my low income as a struggling single individual is taken into consideration with admission costs. If you live off of the system you get all the aid in the world. If you put forth an honest days work you are penalized.

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  2. President Brown says EVERY YEAR that this rise “is among the lowest in the last 40 years.” When will this stop? Families are struggling more and more to send their kids to college here, my own included. While many students are offered financial aid, it usually isn’t nearly enough to offset the rising costs of tuition. Instead of spending $65 million dollars on a new student center that BU had no pressing need for, they should be looking for ways to cut wasteful spending and make this school affordable again.

    I want to see an exact breakdown of where this increase is being spent.

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      1. As a BU student, it is unequivocally disgraceful for me to receive these insolent emails of 3% raise in tuition every year.

        As stated above, enough is enough.

        BU admins, this is going to turn against you. Beware :-)

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  3. I think it’s amazing how athletic field development is something all students are charged for. Honestly, I could care less about university athletics. I’m not here to watch games. The only people who benefit from these things are the student athletes, some of whom receive a free education. For myself, I know I’m entering a field where my degree is only a degree. I will be receiving my master’s in May, but my professional field does not offer huge pay checks. Boston University should focus more on providing better skilled professors, because I know my education here has been mediocre. I guess I’m just paying for the stamp on my diploma that says Boston. Such a waste of money.

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    1. I agree completely with you Morgan, the professors here mostly suck (except for SED, duhhh), and I really do feel like all that I am paying for is the name on my diploma and resume. Such a waste of money.

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  5. i wonder how a school can justify there overlapping administrators? or there exorbitant union contract? this is just typical. don’t worry though, because that 3+ percentage increase can be considered my gift to the school. I will never give a cent to this school and all it’s BS bureaucracy.

    ps. education much like housing is on a bubble.

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  6. I fail to see how education can be a similar bubble to housing. Housing is an asset, not an investment in human capital.
    I disagree with people criticizing the quality of education provided at BU. Maybe you need to reconsider the degrees that you are pursing and the salaries promised after graduation. That data is available long before you enroll. While BU is insanely expensive ,it is in line with national competitors, if you do not feel that it is a worthwhile investment there are plenty of lower cost state universities available across the country.

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    2. Have you forgotten that BU is a private school? There are many other private schools that charge a much higher tuition. I agree with “Class of 2013” in that maybe you should look into a state school (nothing against state school, there are plenty of prestigous state schools i.e. UCLA, Michigan, Berkelee, etc.). Raising tuition and expanding the campus will only increase national and world recognition of an already excellent institution. This will, in theory, push BU up in the college rankings and help you in your future career(s).

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      1. Not if BU students continue to get publicity for sexual harassment. We got rid of our football team (RIP Harry Agganis), maybe it’s time we disbanded the hockey team or maybe even our athletic program entirely and put all BU’s resources towards academics

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          1. Ya we are well on our way to another record: most sexual assaults in a season.

            Hockey and other programs should be cut back. School is about academics, not athletics.

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  7. Makes perfect sense, they can get all the money they want from the gov’t and foot the students with the bill, at higher interest rates on a ballooning principle. Sounds like a great Ponzi scheme.

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  8. Great, now you think were all stupid. You raise tuition by the “lowest percentage in years,” Failing to mention that its still more money than previous years. Of course you can raise it by a lower percentage if you are raising tuition every year. The more tuition is, the smaller a percent is needed to raise by the same amount. Were college students, I’d prefer you try not to insult our intelligence, we understand math.

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  9. This is outrageous. For an institution’s profitability(or viability), there are two things to consider — Revenue and Costs. The problem at BU lies on the cost side — its lethargic bureaucracy that simply cannot perform. Instead of reforming and streamlining operations, the University leadership continues to pass the pain to the students.

    President Brown must publish a white paper to explain the University’s revenues and costs. This must be audited by a credible third party, and then bench-marked against comparable educational institutions. A massive reform at BU’s top leadership structure is long overdue. Some people just need to retire, and leave the decision making to younger, and more dynamic leaders.

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    1. BU has an annual financial audit and it’s publicly available through…wait for it…the BU website! Imagine that. The ignorance in this comment section is the only thing that’s rising uncontrollably

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  10. Although I very much so agree that the increase is upsetting and intolerable I would also like some of you to look at how you are presenting yourselves. I have to agree a little that BU may not be serving its purpose of educating when I count the amount of typos. For example: “now you think were all stupid” should really be “now you think we’re all stupid”; and “your making my point” should be “you’re making my point”. I suppose these typos support the fact that BU doesn’t have a right to increase tuition when its students are making such elementary errors.

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    2. This is a pointless argument. Yes, students take writing at BU, but they learn grammar long before they get here. Regardless, it’s an anonymous comments section, I’m sure they don’t care.

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  11. Why isn’t any money being put into the class selection website (studentlink). It looks like it was formated to be compatible with DOS. I think any computer science major here with knowledge of Flash could create a much more user friendly platform on which we could schedule our classes. And that change would actually help the entire student body, not just a percentage of it.

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    1. I mean there is something to be said for keeping it simple and compatible with older/outdated equipment.

      that said, its not the most well organized of websites.

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      1. I agree that the StudentLink is in desperate need of some modernization, and your comment about MS-DOS is particularly amusing since behind the scenes there is a Mainframe running quite a bit of code that predates MS-DOS. Hopefully, we will be able to get the ball rolling in the next 12 months.

        I can promise you one thing…we won’t be using Flash, which is not a good technology for building accessible web applications, especially in the era of devices that don’t even include the browser plugin.

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  12. Writing that the tuition increase “is the lowest in 40 years” doesn’t make the situation any better. Don’t even bother writing that next year.

    I find that it’s ridiculous that I have to pay an absurd amount of money each year, AND not even know where it’s going. I feel like the administration could really cut down on some wasteful spending and find ways to SAVE money, instead of just asking for more dollars!What does our administration do with all of our money every year? I wish that they would be more open about it. I wish the whole administration was just more open in general.

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  13. Like the boy in the photo in the white cap who looks like he’s sleeping, most of you sound as if you had no idea how expensive BU was before enrolling. Please. Go to another prestigious, private university and see if it’s any less expensive.
    Also, current students enjoy many new facilities at BU that older alums did not have.

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    1. Other alums didn’t have them because they didn’t pay for them like we are..(OBVIOUSLY?) Furthermore, I do not use virtually ANY of the resources besides my classrooms and the library (which I am sure all the other alums since the university was first founded had) because I don’t have time to. So how about I pay as much as when it was founded? Thanks. I agree everyone knew how much it was going to cost them going into it, but that is not the point.. that does NOT make it right, or even OK. No one is saying BU is way more expensive than any other private school- they are all equally outrageously priced and none of them should be that costly. Additionally, many majors particularly graduate programs are not offered at state schools (which also are still costly). Yeah I am sure they offer a medical degree at CCRI or something.. NOT and even if they did who the heck would want a physician that graduated from CCRI? So yeah it sounds superficial or whatever to pay for the label of a good school, but really what other options do people have with this job market?-Someone from BU who’s CV looks identical to someones from CCRI will likely get hired over them in a heartbeat. Rich kids love to get all huffy puffy about people complaining about school costs, but that is because they don’t know what its like working 40 hours a week while taking 20 credits and still not having enough to pay for all your textbooks, rent, groceries, utilities, etc. NEVERMIND tuition. It is absolutely frustrating.

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      1. My point about the better facilities is that better facilities makes the increased costs somewhat more tolerable/understandable. They broke ground on the new SMG building in 1994, the year after I graduated. Our hockey arena was Walter Brown. Our ‘fitness center,’ if you could even call it that, was in the basement of Case Center. The armory stood in the place of the new high rise, luxury dorms and FitRec/Agganis. The floor of Marsh Plaza was crumbling, in shambles. But I agree with you that a $60,000 price tag is outrageous and a huge burden on the middle class. The middle class (me included) are being pushed out.

        What is this CCRI you keep referring to?

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  14. The government subsidization of a college education and its subsidization of healthcare have caused costs in both economic sectors to increase disproportionately to the overall rate of inflation. Debasement of the currency and government meddling in the system have combined to create this perpetual problem. Any sector that can profit from this corrupted system will do so.

    The only solution is to end the department of education, and end the Federal reserve fiat money system with its inflationary policy that together fuel the growth of this obese industry.

    Need I remind you that the original mandate of the FED was not to create inflation year over year but to keep the dollar stable. This inherently implies that there should be equal periods of deflation to counter the inflation but this is not what has happened…….the FED has never contracted the money supply.

    Since education and health are now deemed to be entitlements of US citizenship and the great society the government “must” fund these important programs to the hilt. In doing so the government lures the pigs to the food trough. The net result is what we have here today thanks to the endless supply of fiat money. But who really cares, when the majority of students get easily qualify for “financial aid” to cover the burgeoning costs of college!

    The problem is blatantly evident and solution equally simple albeit painful.

    The free market should dictate the cost and value of college education not the government. Get the government out of the equation and let the market forces work.

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    1. Education is a market failure because of its positive effects not realized by the private sector. We may be over-subsidizing education but the free market forces would not produce the ideal solution either.

      The health care market would also be a failure because of moral hazard, adverse selection, uncertain outcomes of health care consumption, and supplier induced demand. Regardless of what the government is currently doing the free market would also not find an efficient solution to these problems.

      the problem may be blatantly evident but the “solution” is not equally simple.

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  15. In regards to those who think everyone should stop complaining and go to state schools, some majors are only offered at a very select number of institutions.

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  16. Increases happen at every university. If you weren’t complaining about it here, you’d be doing it on some other school’s website. Theres also a little something called inflation.

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  17. “Ron Paul” above is correct. The chief cause of inflating costs has to do with the inflated credit bubble created by the federal government by creating financial aid programs. Federal assistance to combat increasing tuition only exacerbates the problem. To read more, visit http://www.libertybu.com/?p=290

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  18. I have to wonder if these commenters who are complaining about the tuition increase and poor quality of education they feel they are receiving are the same ones I see texting, facebooking, and watching youtube videos in class. Those students certainly detract from my education, but I get out of it what I put in. So many of these resources that people say they never use are there for you and incredibly valuable, but you have to make the effort to use them. Go to the career development events, the writing center, the lectures, study in the collaborative rooms, and enjoy your time here. I wish the cost of groceries and rent would stop going up, too, but I know that’s not going to happen. In the meantime I keep working as hard as I can at my job and using my time wisely for studying.
    If you’re arguing that you can’t go to another school because they don’t have the major you wish to study, then understand that you have the option of choosing another major at a public school, or paying the for the privilege of studying at a university that can afford to support such a diverse array of programs.

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