ANN ARBOR—Another year of strong financial support from the state will allow the University of Michigan to continue to expand a number of cutting-edge academic programs while keeping tuition increases to a modest 2.8 percent for most students.

The budget and proposed tuition rates for the 2000-2001 academic year will be presented by U-M Provost Nancy Cantor to the Board of Regents for approval at their meeting Thursday and Friday (July 13-14).

Tables Related to U-M 2000-2001Tuition & Fees

Recommended General Fund Budget for Fiscal Year 2000-2001

Recommended Undergraduate Tuition & Fees, Fall 2000

Recommended Resident Graduate Tuition & Fees, Fall 2000

Recommended Non-resident Graduate Tuition & Fees, Fall 2000

Recommended Candidate Tuition & Fees, Fall 2000

Recommended First-year Student Tuition & Fees, Big Ten Universities

Approved Increases, Resident Student Tuition & Fees, Other Michigan Public Universities

The University’s anticipated state appropriation, if approved by the Michigan legislature in the fall, would represent an increase of 5.7 percent (or $19.3 million). The FY 2001 General Fund budget, Cantor said, is “built on an ongoing partnership between the University and the State, in which relatively generous state appropriations permit low tuition increases.” As a consequence, she said, “for the overwhelming majority of our students (including all our undergraduates), this budget proposes tuition growth that will be slightly lower than anticipated consumer price inflation in Michigan.”

The 2.8 percent tuition increase, if approved, would continue the modest growth in tuition the University has adopted over the past five years.

Cantor noted that the economic return for students pursuing a college education “is at its highest levels since economists started making such calculations. Less tangibly, but at least as important, education is the key instrument for understanding, engaging with, and negotiating in an increasingly complicated and interesting world. The best universities, including the U-M, return the greatest value, both economically and more generally.

“Part of our value comes from the sheer size and scale and quality of the intellectual and social and technological resources that we bring to bear in educating our students and in conserving and innovating,” she said.

In her budget proposal, the provost highlights connections between research and teaching that allow the University to provide a kind of education that is “virtually unique.”

“All of the examples discussed here have similar characteristics: Original research and creative activity of the kind that can only be led by a superb faculty leads to new fields of inquiry and of graduate and professional study, frequently involving the creation as well as the use of new technologies. Often, these new fields are interdisciplinary. Invariably, their development entails rethinking and reconfiguration of undergraduate curricula, and often precipitates the making of new connections to worlds beyond the campus” she said.

Examples of the kind of work made possible by the new budget include:

•New undergraduate programs in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, which combines the tools of engineering with the basic principles of biology to develop medical technology such as MRIs and synthetic heart valves. Starting next year, the department will offer undergraduate concentrations in bioelectrics, biomaterials, biomechanics, biomedical imaging, biotechnology and rehabilitation engineering.

•Development of new undergraduate courses as part of the University’s Life Sciences Initiative. The courses, according to guidelines developed by a faculty committee, will introduce first-year students in all fields of study to scientific problem-solving, data analysis and critical thinking; teach basic skills in the synthesis and communication of scientific information; and develop among students a comprehension of a basic scientific vocabulary to allow them to read and interpret articles in science publications.

•Continued expansion of the Arts of Citizenship Program, which has among other projects combined teams of faculty and students with Ann Arbor teachers to develop teaching plans that use the students’ neighborhoods as a vehicle for studying history, poetry and environmental education. Undergraduate students got involved in a dozen city classrooms this year, reaching more than 200 students.

Students from the U-M Residential College also are interviewing elders in Detroit about what it has been like to come of age as a teen-ager in Detroit over the past 75 years. The resulting life-stories will be transformed into theater pieces by Detroit’s renowned Mosaic Youth Theater for the celebration of the city’s 300th anniversary in 2001.

•A new bachelor of science degree in sound engineering, offered in the School of Music, which combines the resources of the School of Music and the College of Engineering with the physical facilities of the Media Union. Technical competency in sound engineering is achieved through the study of mathematics, engineering and physics, but added to that must be an ability to translate the aural, historical and theoretical aspects of live music to an electronic medium.

•The Digital Library Initiative is changing the shape of scholarship and the transmission of knowledge. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the University is currently adding 13,000 volumes to the Making of America file, a digital archive that has made millions of pages of deteriorating and inaccessible historical material widely available to scholars and students.

Technology is a theme that runs throughout the proposed budget for the coming year. Technology, the provost notes, encompasses both information technology as well as other kinds of technology which allow us to “see and appreciate parts of the world that we can’t easily see or appreciate directly.”

For example, she said, “some technologies allow us to see and record images of brain activity as it unfolds. Another technology may permit the examination of the inside of a musical instrument to better understand the sound qualities. Whatever the opportunity, we have to enable our students to seize it and to be as fluent as they can be.”

U-M President Lee C. Bollinger recently appointed a commission to advise him on the implications of the revolution in information technology for the University. It will examine a broad range of issues ranging from implications for research and teaching to distance learning and interactions with the broader world.

“The commission will be working over the coming year, but already it is clear that providing the infrastructure for both information technologies and for other technologies essential to our mission presents a continuing budgetary challenge,” Cantor said.

Overall, General Fund budget revenues for FY 2001 are $981 million, an increase of 5.7 percent over the previous year. Expenditures for administrative units over the past three years have grown at less than half the rate of the academic units. One area of significant cost savings for the coming year is a 5 percent reduction in the cost of utilities campuswide.

Pressures on costs for salary increases to recruit and retain top-notch faculty and staff, increased costs of instruction, technology and infrastructure improvements, and the like mean that this increase in the General Fund still requires the University to make major reallocations of resources in order to accomplish new endeavors.

“The principal sources that will support essential improvements in information technology, as well as new and expanded programs in FY 2001 (and beyond), are reductions and reallocations from activities undertaken in FY 2000,” the provost said. “By necessity, given the budgets they receive and their operating costs, the academic units continually reallocate from areas of lower priority in order to support areas of higher priority and programmatic innovations.”

Nancy CantorRecommended General Fund Budget for Fiscal Year 2000-2001Recommended Undergraduate Tuition & Fees, Fall 2000Recommended Resident Graduate Tuition & Fees, Fall 2000Recommended Non-resident Graduate Tuition & Fees, Fall 2000Recommended Candidate Tuition & Fees, Fall 2000Recommended First-year Student Tuition & Fees, Big Ten Universities