As part of its approval of a $1.9 billion budget for fiscal year 2011, the UT Board of Trustees approved a 9-percent tuition increase at the board’s Thursday afternoon meeting.
The increase will come to $534 a year for in-state undergraduates and $616 a year for in-state graduate students. In-state undergrads will pay $6,452 a year beginning in the fall, and in-state grad students will pay $7,442 annually.
The increase was a half-percent higher than the proposed tuition raise of 8.5 percent.
Trustee Charles Wharton made the amendment to the original proposal, saying that, though he does not like raising tuition, it’s better to increase the figure now than later.
Interim President Jan Simek said 9 percent would be better because it would allow more flexibility. He said the original 8.5 percent proposal was made with the intention of keeping the cost as low as possible for students while still maintaining the same quality of education.
Simek and trustee Don Stansberry said the university remains a good buy despite the increase because of the Hope Scholarship providing $4,000 annually, which 99 percent of incoming freshmen receive.
Simek emphasized the fact that as incoming students come in with higher GPAs and better test scores, the university needs to continue to place a premium on quality education.
“We can’t draw down the quality of what we’re doing as we get better students,” Simek said. “They will cease to come to our institution (if we do that).”
Simek said the tuition increase does not make up for the budget reductions.
“These increases will comprise essentially additional cuts to our base budget if we don’t do something to try to mitigate them this year,” Simek said. “The increase will also give us a little bit of flexibility as we draw down the stimulus money to deal with the needs that arrive at the end for that funding, as we formulate how we do business. And make no mistake, we are reformulating how we do business.”
But with the half-percent extra that was approved, $800,000 will come to the university, for use to reduce bottleneck courses and improve academic advising by hiring, easing students’ ability to graduate.
Some trustees said that moving from an 8.5- to a 9-percent tuition increase might hurt the most those colleges with the new differential tuition in place — the College of Business Administration, College of Nursing and College of Engineering — as the tuition would increase at the same rate as regular undergraduate tuition does.
But the amount per year that regular undergraduate tuition is being increased by — $28 — was held up by other trustees as insignificant.

Athletic reporting revisions

In addition, the board approved the bylaw amendment which revises the reporting line to where intercollegiate athletics now will report directly to the UT-Knoxville chancellor and not the UT system president.
Simek appointed a Taskforce on Athletic Reporting in fall 2009 to see who the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics should report to — the system president or the campus chancellor.
In the Taskforce on Athletic Reporting’s report and recommendation, it was noted that “no other BCS athletics department currently reports to a state-wide system administration,” and that the last two schools to do so — the University of Colorado and the University of Missouri — have transferred reporting lines in the last decade.
The report also said that UTK officials already do much of the athletic administration, such as the admissions, enrollment, financial aid, course registration, academic advising, academic eligibility and judicial affairs cases of student-athletes.
And, according to the report, "in finance and administration, much of the daily operations of athletics are supervised and performed by UTK administrators."
Chancellor Jimmy Cheek supported the amendment, saying that the way reports are done currently, he cannot attend regularly scheduled meetings of SEC chief executive officers.
Cheek also said that revising the line would benefit because it would add the athletic directors to campus life, allowing them to meet regularly with campus officials, listen to concerns and advise the campus.
Despite the switch in the reporting line, according to the byline amendment, "the president will be responsible for general oversight of intercollegiate activities at all three undergraduate campuses and will be responsible for ensuring that chancellors provide information necessary to carry out that oversight."