Regents pass $10 student fee hike

The Board of Regents voted to increase tuition and fees by $405, and $64 of that increase is not covered by the NM Lottery Scholarship.
The regents have until April 30 to tweak the increase, but if it stands, tuition and fees will be about $5,505 per undergraduate student per semester. Graduate students will face an increase to $6,040.

The tuition increase is made up of a 5 percent “tuition credit,” which was recommended by the legislature at its last session, and a 3.5 percent hike added by the regents at their budget summit Friday.

The 3.5 percent addition is meant to help compensate for legislative cuts and other budgetary shortfalls resulting from the economic downturn.
Also, the Board of Regents passed the $10 student fee increase recommended by the Student Fee Review Board, an increase that goes to three organizations and the Queer Resource Center.
The regents also unanimously approved $54 in additional fee increases for Athletics, University libraries, Information Technologies and some building projects on campus.

The four organizations initially asked the regents for $20 a piece, but Regent Gene Gallegos proposed cutting the requests in half, a proposal the regents adopted.

Student fees are not covered by the NM Lottery Scholarship, so all increases in student fees come out of student pockets. With the increase, student fees now total around $514 per student.

The passage of the SFRB recommendations came as a relief to many students on campus who have demonstrated in favor of the $10 increase since early last week.

And at the budget summit, almost a dozen students signed up for the public comment session of the meeting.
However, Regent President Raymond Sanchez reassured the audience that the board had already decided to pass the increase in an effort to shorten the five-and-a-half-hour meeting.

“We’re going to go ahead and pass that,” he said.
As a result, six students declined to speak.

This year, the NM Legislature was able to reduce much of its cuts to higher education through stimulus funding. But UNM President David Schmidly said that since the stimulus bill will only provide funding this year, the administration’s task of containing costs and balancing the budget will be much more difficult during the next fiscal year.

“This is what keeps me awake at night,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to balance the budget when you know that you’re dealing strictly with recurring funds. When you have a lot of one-time money in a budget, balancing it becomes much problematic, because you not only have to continue to manage a decline but you have to see money come out of that budget. And it somehow has to be replaced.”

Regent Don Chalmers offered an equally bleak summary of UNM’s near future, saying that UNM’s fiscal situation had “more threats than reasons to be optimistic.”