UMass Offers Five Percent Tuition Cut

University of Massachusetts students will have a little extra spending money next fall.

In an effort to keep higher education accessible to more Massachusetts students, the Board of Trustees of the University of Massachusetts announced yesterday a five percent tuition cut for undergraduates on all of its campuses.

According to Kay Scanlan, Director of the News Office at UMass-Amherst, the five percent tuition decrease is part of a five year effort to reduce costs for undergraduates. This is the third consecutive year in which the University of Massachusetts has cut tuition and fees.

Students at the Amherst and Boston campuses will save $100, bringing the tuition cost for students at the Amherst campus to $5,229 for the fall of 1998.

At the same time, students at the Dartmouth and Lowell campuses will save $83 and $85 respectively on their tuition fees.

The University of Massachusetts system's tuition woes began in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the university had to increase its tuition prices due to state budget troubles.

These tuition hikes made UMass-Amherst the second most expensive of the six New England public university systems. After the recent tuition drops, the Amherst campus is now in fifth place, and mandatory tuition and fee costs on the Amherst and Boston campuses will be at their lowest since the 1992-93 academic year.

Scanlan said that the current program of tuition cuts is backed by the state legislature, which has increased University of Massachusetts funding by seven to eight percent for each of the past several years.

"We would be unable to basically freeze or lower our mandatory costs without legislative support," Scanlan said.

President of the University of Massachusetts William M. Bulger expressed his enthusiasm for the plan in a press release. "As we near the end of this decade, undergraduates at three of our campuses are going to be paying the same tuition and fee bills their older brothers and sisters would have paid at the beginning of the decade," he said.

University of Massachusetts students are also supporters of the tuition cuts. Student trustee of the UMass-Boston campus Michael Murray said, "Students on this campus appreciate the university's efforts to control costs. This is a nontraditional campus where many students work and have families to support, so these savings help."