Graduate School Tuition Rates Are Soaring System Grew Much More Complex With Fixed for Four Plan

ATLANTA – Shawn Rogers, a 37-year-old law student at Georgia State University, whose wife is expecting their first child this weekend, was also expecting a 15 percent increase in his tuition.

So when the bill showed up in the mail with a 33 percent increase, Mr. Rogers said he was shocked that no one at Georgia State or the University System of Georgia, the state’s network of 35 colleges and universities, had bothered to tell him what was coming.

“The fact that they can raise it at will like that, after I’m sort of locked into a program, is disturbing,” he said.

Graduate students are starting to complain about the increases, particularly in the wake of the decision last year by the State Board of Regents, which oversees the university system, to institute a fixed tuition rate for the first four years of undergraduate education.

The Fixed for Four plan, though, doesn’t include graduate students, who are just now receiving bills that point to soaring tuition plans, according to a group of Georgia State students who have demanded the regents explain the increase.

For example, the students say, students at the University of Georgia’s master’s program in law will pay almost 65 percent more in tuition in fall 2007 than they did for the same period last year. UGA’s rates for students working toward a master’s in accounting will grow 39 percent; rates for the Medical College of Georgia’s medical school will grow 9.7 percent.

Students such as Mr. Rogers are complaining not just about the size of the increases, but also about the fact that the system or their school didn’t do more to make students aware of the change.

But John Millsaps, a spokesman for the university system, said the new tuition rates were publicly available. He also said regents aren’t the starting point for graduate tuition rates; the board does set undergraduate levels, with some exceptions.

“Any requests for tuition increases at the graduate level come from the institution,” Mr. Millsaps said.

The method for coming up with graduate tuition rates has become more complicated since the approval of Fixed for Four, Mr. Millsaps said. In the past, schools charged graduate students 20 percent more than undergraduates, meaning tuition for both grew at the same rate.

With Fixed for Four, undergraduate rates increase dramatically from one year to the next because students will not be asked to offset the growing cost of education with increased tuition in their sophomore, junior and senior years.

Although colleges and universities can still charge graduate students 20 percent more than undergraduate tuition from year to year, the system has also opened up other options, Mr. Millsaps said.

Schools can propose no increase, can peg their graduate rates to the undergraduate tuition charged to students who don’t qualify for Fixed for Four, or can provide regents with information on the charges at similar institutions and propose a rate unrelated to their undergraduate tuition.

“Once we had Fixed for Four, now we have a very complex situation,” Mr. Mill-saps said.

Some of the increase also stems from the fact that, in the past, undergraduates helped offset the higher costs of graduate education, Mr. Millsaps said. With the new rates, some institutions are looking to graduate students to shoulder more of those costs.

Mr. Rogers, though, thinks he deserves the same kind of consideration given to undergraduate students.

“I think, ultimately, it would behoove them to consider a fixed tuition for graduate students as well,” he said.

Meanwhile, he plans to continue going to school despite the unexpected growth in price.

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