Vice President of Administration Bill Mai addressed ASUW Tuesday night about the rise in tuition for the 2017-2018 school year.
“The trustees passed a general tuition policy where tuition would raise four percent per year until other action was taken,” Mai said. “They voted on it this year in November.”
Tuition will rise four percent like it has since 2014. Two percent ($1 million) goes toward staff and faculty salaries. One percent ($500,000) is divided between the libraries and IT. The final one percent ($500,000) goes towards academic support budgets.
“It is critical to keep this institution’s libraries current and growing,” Mai said. “That was the intent with this policy.”
Due to the budget crisis, the money allocated for the libraries, IT and academic support will be moved. Instead, the four percent increase will go towards staff salaries and increasing staff morale.
“The president came in and highlighted the need for [a] regular salary increase policy,” Mai said.
There will be an evaluation system put in place so that supervisors and vice presidents of boards can see who earns the raise in pay.
“From an evaluation standpoint, the president is pushing hard to be serious and be prompt in their evaluation processes,” Mai said. “I think that’s what increases will be based on.”
The salary system will not be implemented for more than a year.
“The HR system won’t be fully functional until probably July 1, 2018,” Mai said. “That process will really begin in earnest in summer and fall.”
The rise in salary will also be performance based. Mai said he sees student success and staff morale increasing because of the new program.
“We would hope that student success would benefit from a performance based situation,” Mai said. “We want to have a positive message across the campus for staff.”
ASUW also passed Senate Resolution No. 2534 “ASUW Support of Digital Correspondence Privacy,” which supports House Bill 9 titled, “Student ownership and privacy rights.” Both protect student privacy and ownership of any work the student has done digitally.
They also passed SR No. 2535 “ASUW Stance Against Abrupt Changes to the Administrative Calendar and Commencement Schedule,” stating that the “change was made quietly and without any announcement to the students” and ASUW “encourages the UW administration to make better efforts for transparency.”
