MaryFrances McCourt, IU senior vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer, addressed college affordability at a BFC meeting Tuesday, referencing the proposals mentioned in the Bicentennial ?Strategic Plan.
The plan builds on Affordable IU, an initiative aimed at stabilizing tuition increases, providing financial aid, increasing financial literacy, reducing direct costs and encouraging on-time graduation.
To encourage on-time graduation, the plan expands current programs, such as the Summer Tuition Discount Program, the new Office of Completion and Student Success, the new Graduation Progress System and Finish in Four, a tuition freeze for juniors and seniors set to graduate in four years.
According to the plan, the most recent tuition increases were the lowest tuition increases on record.
Across all IU campuses, the undergraduate tuition increased by 1.75 percent while the graduate tuition rate increased between 0 and 6 percent.
McCourt said that although the plan largely builds on current initiatives, students should expect to see new initiatives as well.
“We constantly monitor our initiatives to ensure they are delivering impact,” she said. “In some cases we continue existing initiatives if results are aligned with the desired outcome. Other initiatives are expanded if they can be leveraged for more impact and some may be discontinued. I would expect to see a continued evolution of initiatives to impact affordability.”
McCourt said, however, that the need for an affordable education must be balanced with the need for a quality education.
“Although we want to deliver an affordable education, we cannot do that at the risk of quality deteriorating,” she said. “We must ensure that we have resources to invest in faculty, facilities and technology to maintain or increase the rankings of our academic programming, our ability to perform meaningful research and to deliver the services and tools for our students to ?succeed.”
Though Matthew Gough, INPIRG campus organizer, was also scheduled to present about college affordability at the BFC meeting Tuesday, due to time constraints, Gough is now set to present during a January meeting.
In line with college affordability initiatives, INPIRG is looking to replace traditional textbooks with open textbooks, Gough said. Released under a creative commons license, open textbooks are available online, free to download and inexpensive to print.
“(Traditional) textbook publishing companies want to make the most money they can off of textbooks,” Gough said. “So they’ll use practices to undermine the used textbook market and to raise the costs ?of textbooks.”
Such practices included releasing a new edition of the same book every year or so, Gough said.
“There’s only so many times that you can change problem sets and justify charging $200 for a book,” he said.
Though open textbooks are similar to eTextbooks, they are less expensive and do not expire, Gough said. Furthermore, instructors can modify open textbooks, adding and removing material as they see fit.
Because creators of open textbooks are paid in the same way that creators of traditional textbooks are paid, Gough said open textbooks are made with the same quality that traditional textbooks are made.
Gough said the challenge is educating instructors about the advantages of open textbooks compared to traditional ?textbooks.
“I would say, if this works for your class and if this is what you’re looking for, you should consider adopting it, because it’s going to save your students a lot of money and make higher education more affordable,” he said.
