Dear Friends,
I made major announcements this week at my annual State of the Campus speech that I am pleased to share with you.
The Boulder campus is eliminating all course-related and program fees beginning next fall to save our students $8.4 million a year. We want our students to get a degree in a timely manner at the lowest cost possible for themselves and their families. Our collective purpose is to remove a financial burden for our students.
There are more than 60 course and program fees ranging from $1 per credit hour for German and Slavic languages to $1,255 per semester for the graduate clinical speech, language and hearing sciences program.
Students will still be responsible for mandatory fees such as health services, the Recreation Center and the bus and bike program, but this is a big step forward in making college more affordable.
The elimination of course and program fees will come two years after we debuted a tuition guarantee for resident freshmen and transfer students, locking their tuition rate for four years. Non-resident students have benefitted from a tuition guarantee since 2005.
I give our Board of Regents credit for inspiring us to do this by endorsing a multi-year budgeting plan and the tuition guarantee program. These initiatives have allowed us to forecast our finances and determine how we could eliminate these fees for our students.
For the departments that depend on those fees, my administration will continue to provide them. This money will come from increased revenue, thanks to increased enrollment, improved student retention and campus operating efficiencies.
I also announced the campus will be funding a new scholarship conceived in a staff innovation competition. The CU Boulder Impact Scholarship looks beyond traditional measures of accomplishments. In addition to academic success, applicants must demonstrate persistence based upon a student's socio-economic circumstances. Ninety percent of the pilot round of these scholarships awarded this fall went to first-generation students.
Finally, I announced that I am committing to partner with our student government, which is working with the Colorado Department of Higher Education to bring open educational resources to our students. The goal is to provide these openly licensed teaching materials, shared in an electronic format, to students at an extremely discounted rate, potentially saving them hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per semester. We are committing to being a leader in moving to online textbooks. The Boulder campus is offering to invest up to $1 million to pilot this program on our campus.
These announcements made national headlines—you may have seen them in your community—and together we are calling them the Be Boulder Pact. It’s our commitment to our students and their families to further lower cost and increase accessibility to a top-tier education at CU Boulder.
Our campus imperatives call for supporting our students in their success and developing tomorrow’s leaders. That includes doing what we can to help students graduate in a timely fashion with as little debt as possible. We want our students to succeed both as students and as graduates.
Sincerely,
Philip P. DiStefano,
Chancellor
www.colorado.edu/chancellor
