Nic Fees Will Go Up Next Spring $25 Tuition Increase Approved After Some Heated Discussion
Students will pay more to attend North Idaho College starting next spring, trustees decided after some heated discussion Wednesday night.
The tension wasn’t between board members over whether to raise tuition $25 per semester.
Rather, it was between trustees and NIC President Bob Bennett, who thought the board had accepted his earlier recommendation not to ask students for more money.
The confusion apparently stems from the fact that no one called for a vote on the issue at the last board meeting.
“I was really surprised to read in the paper the next day that we’d taken action,” said trustee Sue Thilo.
Bennett apologized for any confusion. Then he read aloud from a memo he’d written to the board to show he’d made everything perfectly clear.
It was an unusually tense discussion between the top NIC administrator and his bosses on the board.
After Wednesday’s meeting, the board went into a closed-door session that included discussion of Bennett’s annual evaluation. He has been president for 10 years.
The college has widely published the expected semester fee of $512 for the 1997-98 school year.
About 250 students have already paid that amount for next semester, which is one reason trustees didn’t raise tuition effective this fall.
The fee increase will raise at least $75,000 next year. That’s not much in the overall budget of $19 million, but trustees made it clear that students had to help pay for increased costs.
The college is funded by tuition, state tax dollars and local property taxes.
“A lot of people I’ve talked to think that maybe the students aren’t paying their fair share,” said trustee Steve Widmyer. “We have a great campus, great faculty … We’re not offering a bargain-basement product.
“Even with a tuition increase, we would still have the lowest tuition and fees in the state,” he said, before proposing unsuccessfully that the increase start this fall.
Trustees haven’t decided yet what to do with the additional money. One option is to put it into salary increases.
The college had proposed only a 2 percent increase in base salaries for faculty and staff - less than in most years. While faculty has tentatively agreed to that, other employees have not.
Gary Coffman, director of counseling services, asked for a 5.7 percent increase on behalf of nonfaculty employees. He said they make less than 50 percent of what comparable area workers are paid.
“We’ve slipped below average,” he said. “That is a real threat to the vitality of the institution.”
Steve Schenk, dean of college relations, is participating in salary discussions. He said low salaries are already causing morale problems on campus, and predicted that they could make future hiring difficult.
, DataTimes