Students in the College of Arts and Science will soon see an additional fee for the classes they select.
After receiving the UM System Board of Curators’ formal approval in January, the College of Arts and Science became the last undergraduate college to implement a supplemental fee.
The fee will be $25 per credit hour and will go into effect starting this summer session. The fee, charged on top of tuition, will uniformly apply to classes at the 2000 level and above.
Arts and Science Dean Michael O’Brien said the money raised from the fees will go toward three primary areas.
The college will renovate student labs, with an initial priority on those in science, technology and math. It will also set aside $200,000 for study abroad scholarships.
The supplemental fee will also add a total of $500,000 in salaries for the college’s faculty, who are paid significantly less than their peers at other Association of American Universities member schools.
O’Brien, who has been dean since 2006, said he has seen a need for a supplemental fee from the beginning of his term.
“It occurred to me early on that we were going to need an increase in funds to do what we needed to offer students a much better education,” he said. “We have the same needs in the (College of Arts and Science) that all the other colleges have.”
O’Brien proposed the idea of a fee to Faculty Council during the Fall 2013 semester with the help of Sudarshan Loyalka, Fiscal Affairs Committee chairman. Shortly after, Faculty Council passed a resolution to approve the fee Oct. 17.
The university originally did not charge a fee for the college because Arts and Science teaches 60 percent of all undergraduate credit hours, O’Brien said.
The college had to consider the potential repercussions of having almost the entire MU student body pay an additional fee on top of the tuition. This especially applied to lower-division Arts and Science classes taken to fulfill general education requirements, said Rhonda Gibler, vice chancellor for finance and chief financial officer.
But O’Brien decided the fee was necessary to provide resources for the students in the college.
So with the help of Gibler, Loyalka and interim Provost Ken Dean, he made a successful case to the university for the benefits of the fee.
“No one takes lightly charging students additional fees because we know the cost of education is expensive,” Gibler said. “But our first priority is to make sure that students get the quality of education that they come to Mizzou to get. We make very difficult choices about how we’re going to spend our money every day, but when we see potential issues with continuing quality, that’s when we start to think about a fee.”
Loyalka said during the 2012-13 school year, the total for supplemental fees for the 10 colleges that had them was roughly $22 million.
Starting in summer 2014, the schools of Public Affairs and Health Management and Informatics will also charge a supplemental fee. The schools of Medicine, Veterinary Medicine and Law do not charge supplemental fees, Loyalka said. Professional schools can control tuition independently from the university as a whole.