The Board of Trustees will vote on the tuition increase in March.
Ohio University’s medical school is looking to raise tuition by about $1,000 for students at its three campuses for the 2016-17 academic year.
OU’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine originally planned to increase tuition by about 5 percent but was able to raise it at a 3.5 percent rate instead, OU’s Budget Director Chad Mitchell said.
The Board of Trustees will vote on the increases at the governing body's March meeting.
“(OU-HCOM has) been upfront with their tuition increases in the past, and what they brought forward is lower than what had been originally planned in recent years,” Mitchell said. “Because in recent years the tuition increased, the rate increase was 5 percent. They originally brought forward 4.75 as a multi-year assumption, and they brought this in at 3.5 percent."
Mitchell said the increases help offset costs for the increased state share of instruction for increased enrollment at the new buildings and to pay for faculty.
“Like other state higher education institutions, the Heritage College faces the challenge of remaining financially sound in a time when state instructional subsidy has been essentially flat for over a decade, and clinical and health workforce subsidies are flat or dropping,” Karoline Lane, a spokeswoman for OU-HCOM, said in an email. “We continually forecast our budget several years out, and we seek revenue streams other than tuition in order to keep increases modest yet consistent with our financial responsibilities and our responsibility to deliver high-quality medical education.”
Lane said OU-HCOM's cost will remain at about the median for all medical schools in Ohio, about $32,000, and said the college will still offer students an affordable education.
“We have our faculty, students and staff to thank for their due diligence and fiscal responsibility, because of which we’ve been able to keep our increases modest, especially during a time when the college is undergoing the largest expansion in its 40-year history and is pursuing an ambitious strategic plan,” Lane said in an email.
She said that plan includes running multiple campuses, hiring faculty, increasing research programs and evolving the college’s system for clinical training.
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Dr. Kenneth Johnson, the executive dean of OU-HCOM, said he did not want to comment on the proposed increases until they were approved by the Board of Trustees.
Last year, the college raised tuition by 5 percent, according to a previous Post report.
With the increase in tuition, OU-HCOM also expects to see a rise in enrollment across its three campuses in the next few years.
The college projects that its Dublin campus will expand from its current 98 students to 212 students in the 2020 fiscal year. It also projects that its Cleveland campus will increase from 49 students to 212 that year, according to OU's Budget Planning Council documents.
“By 2019, we can anticipate our total medical student enrollment of (about) 960,” Lane said in an email. “Medical school class sizes, unlike many undergraduate and many graduate programs, are set and monitored by their accrediting agencies. Medical school class size is not connected to changes in tuition.”
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