URBANA, Ill.—The University of Illinois Board of Trustees at its regular meeting today (March 26, 2008) approved new tuition and fee rates at its three campuses in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield.

Guaranteed tuition for the 2008-09 school year at the Urbana and Chicago campuses will rise the equivalent of 3.66 percent per year for new freshmen who enroll in the fall semester and graduate in four years. The increase is $401 per semester at Urbana and $353 per semester at Chicago.

At the University of Illinois at Springfield, which has expanded into a four-year, public residential liberal arts institution, tuition will rise $428 per semester.

President B. Joseph White described the new tuition rates as necessary to maintain quality.

“Higher education provides the State of Illinois with the human and intellectual capital to compete successfully in the global economy,” White said. “In a challenging economy, we must retain and attract top faculty in a competitive academic marketplace.

“We must also maintain our physical infrastructure that the citizens of Illinois have invested in for well over a century,” White said.

Fees at Urbana will be $1,494 per semester, an increase of $92 over Fiscal Year 2008. At Chicago, fees are $1,593 per semester, an increase of $32 over 2008; and at Springfield they are $932 per semester, an increase of $58 over last year.

Fees cover student health and counseling, facility repair and renovation, student programming, recreation, career services, transportation and library/information technology operations and upgrades. Fees generally are set in consultation with students.

The trustees approved new room-and-board rates at its three campuses at the January meeting in Chicago.

Room and board at the Urbana campus will rise $266 per semester to $4,099, based on standard double occupancy and a 14-meal per week plan. On the UIC campus, room and board will rise $313 per semester to $4,222. At Springfield, room and board will rise $197 to $4,420 per semester. The new rates reflect rising costs for energy, services and food.

The trustees approved a resolution to seek $150 million in new, dedicated operations funds for health-care education at UIC’s six health-care related colleges over the next five years. The colleges are medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, applied health sciences and a school of public health.

Also authorized was a request for $22 million in new funds beginning in 2013 to increase medical school enrollment by 20 percent over four years. The Association of American Medical Colleges has recommended the U.S. medical schools increase enrollment to replace retiring physicians and to treat the nation’s aging population.

Trustee Kenneth D. Schmidt, a physician from Riverwoods, has made presentations at the last two board meetings outlining the need to increase funding for educating physicians, dentists, nurses, pharmacists and other health-care professionals. The effort is being called Healthy Returns—the Illinois Bill of Health. 

“UIC is the state’s principal educator of health professionals,” Dr. Schmidt said. “But we fall further behind each year in both operating funds and facilities for educating health-care professionals because it costs more to educate them than the tuition the market will bear.”

Eric A. Gislason, UIC interim chancellor, said the state’s system for higher education funding currently does not address the true costs of educating health professionals, which is higher than other fields because of rapid technological advances and the need for low faculty-to- student ratios.

The UIC College of Medicine graduates more physicians annually than any other medical college in the nation. It currently enrolls 1,390 students, 796 in Chicago. The college also administers regional medical schools in Peoria, Rockford and Urbana-Champaign.

In addition to educating physicians and other health-care professionals, the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago and affiliated clinics provide more than 600,000 patient-care visits per year on the West Side of Chicago.

In other action, the trustees approved the employment of the Chicago construction-management firm Clayco Inc. for the preconstruction and construction phases of a facility to house the Blue Waters supercomputer awarded in August by the National Science Foundation to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Blue Waters, a $208 million IBM supercomputer, is scheduled to go online in 2011.

Clayco’s contract is for fees of not more than $3.09 million for the $72.5 million, 95,000 square foot building equipped with water-cooled data-processing machine rooms, loading docks, offices and storage. In December, EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc. of Chicago was retained to provide architectural and engineering services through the construction phases of the project.

The trustees also authorized the University’s major online-education entity, Global Campus, to negotiate tuition discounts with companies, organizations and groups that enroll significant numbers of students in specific academic programs. The maximum discount rate is 15 percent below the regular approved rates.

In other business, the trustees approved a new designation for the College of Communications at the Urbana-Champaign campus. The new name will be the College of Media, which more accurately describes the college’s contemporary educational and research missions.

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