A long-anticipated increase in undergraduate fees for USC’s College of Engineering and Computing is gaining traction. Pending the Board of Trustees approval, the phased-in fee increase per semester will take place in the fiscal year of 2019.
Full-time, non-freshman CEC students currently pay $504 in undergraduate fees per semester, while freshmen pay $228 per semester. For major courses, students pay an additional lab fee. The proposal made by the CEC aims to simplify the fee assessment by eliminating lab fees and increasing the program fee to $1,500 per semester for all full-time students.
According to the proposal, the additional resources from the fee increase will enable the CEC to provide benefits to students in the form of improving instructional laboratories, reducing class size, increasing teaching assistance support, improving retention and professional development programs and enriching targeted student experience programs.
“We compete with universities worldwide for the same thought-leader faculty members, so we must be competitive and offer market rates for salaries — again, which is higher in engineering and computing disciplines,” said College of Engineering and Computing Dean Hossein Haj-Hariri.
When Duncan A. Buell, a professor in the CEC, spoke with the provost on in November of 2016, he received a response that the fee was never pitched to the board for the purposes of undergraduate education.
Buell said that according to the provost, “The fee was pitched to the board in support of research, but the only place from which to get more money was undergraduates ... and the undergraduates would be happy to pay the fee because the increased research prestige of their college would increase the prestige of their bachelors degrees.”
Buell immediately sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the Board of Trustees asking for the written justification. He received a written justification stating that all fees would go towards undergraduate education.
On May 21, 2017, Buell sent another FOIA request to the dean asking for a brief description of the fees, giving 10 percent of total revenues raised.
“I got nothing. Three weeks later, I sent a second request. Three weeks after that, I sent another request,” Buell said. "I did finally get back from the university general council the same written justification from the board."
First-year mechanical engineering student Blake Butler worries that the tuition increase may cause students who are already short on money to struggle more.
“I personally don’t think this [is] necessary if they used the resources that they already have a little better,” said Butler. “It seems like a money grab.”
A previous fee increase already went into effect in the fall of 2016.
One justification for that fee increase was hiring more advisors for the CEC. According to Buell, the cost of hiring advisors does not come near the total amount in fees that the CEC will gain from students.
Another justification involved upgrading existing labs. But, Buell says the CEC hasn’t seen the computer labs upgraded.
“We have a cyber security lab with nothing in it,” he said. “There is an excellent place to put $300,000 worth of equipment.”