Syracuse University plans to raise tuition above $50,000 in 2018

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Syracuse University tuition could rise to more than $50,000 next year to help the school fund a $100 million, five-year plan to improve academic programs and the student “experience.”

The university’s board of trustees still needs to approve a plan to raise tuition 3.9 percent for first-year and transfer students entering in the fall of 2018, Syracuse said in a news release posted Wednesday on its website.

In addition, those students will also face a $3,300 premium added to their tuition base to help pay for the school’s plan to spend $100 million.

Syracuse University noted that the premium won’t affect any current students or first-year and transfer students entering in the fall of 2017.

Syracuse’s undergraduate tuition for the upcoming academic year is a little more than $45,000. The proposed 3.9 percent tuition increase and the initiative surcharge of $3,330 would combine to increase the figure to just over $50,000.

Syracuse University is calling its improvement initiative “Invest Syracuse: Advancing Academic Excellence and the Student Experience.”

The university describes the effort as a “$100 million initiative to provide all students with a distinctive, world-class learning experience to prepare them for professional and personal success.”

“Invest Syracuse is the engine for advancing the University’s academic programs and the student experience,” Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud said in the school’s news release. “It will elevate our academic excellence, provide an unrivaled student experience and solidify Syracuse University’s standing as a distinctive, preeminent, global research institution,” he boasted.

Paying for it

Besides the tuition increase, the school will generate the resources for Invest Syracuse from two additional funding sources.

They include reducing administrative spending by $30 million and identifying additional “efficiencies.”

Syracuse University also plans to raise an additional $40 million to support “high-achieving prospective students” interested in pursuing a degree at the school.

The fundraising campaign is called the Opportunity Syracuse Initiative, the school said.

 Priorities

The Invest Syracuse initiative will help the school implement several priorities.

Besides student recruitment with the fundraising campaign, Syracuse also wants to create a new “named” scholarship program “focused specifically” on valedictorians and salutatorians at high schools from across the country.

The school also said it wants to focus on “rebalancing” student grants and loans so Syracuse students graduate with “significantly less debt.”

The priorities also include recruiting and hiring 100 additional faculty members over the next five years and “allocating resources to retain outstanding faculty,” the school said.

Syracuse also wants to build a “more robust” office of research to offer “tangible” support to all faculty pursuing “scholarship, research and creative work.”

In addition, the school plans to launch a “faculty innovation and discovery fund to incentivize faculty to pursue interdisciplinary scholarship, research and creative work outside the core mission of their academic department.”

 Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com