Graphic by Charles Nailen/The Hoya

Georgetown University tuition, room and board, expenses and fees will total $38,262 for the 2003-04 academic year, a 4.5 percent increase over this year’s total. Tuition will increase from $26,544 this year to $27,684, an increase of just less than five percent.

Next year’s average housing cost amounts to $6,653, a four percent increase from the previous year, and the carte blanche meal plan will increase by three percent, to $3,400. In addition, the university will assess a $100 activities fee, up from $50 last year, and the Yates fee will increase by four percent, to $245.

“Georgetown operates in a very competitive field within higher education and also must cover inflationary increases,” Darryl Christmon, CFO for the Office of the Provost, said. “We use our new revenue first to increase faculty compensation in order to attract and retain an extremely high quality faculty. We also invest a significant portion of the tuition back into scholarships in order to enroll the best and brightest student body we can attract. We then have to pay to build and maintain quality facilities, invest in new technologies and [pay] for staff increases.”

Despite the increased costs of attendance, the university maintains that financial aid will be able to accommodate students of all socio-economic backgrounds.

“Georgetown practices need-blind undergraduate admissions and meets the full financial need of all eligible students,” University spokesperson Laura Cavender said. “This means that Georgetown admits and enrolls students without regard to their financial circumstances and is committed to insuring they can attend by meeting their full demonstrated financial need. Each year, more than 55 percent of the undergraduate students at Georgetown receive some form of financial assistance.”

This year’s 4.5 percent increase is lower than the rate of increase for the past two years, 5.5 percent from 2001-02 to 2002-03, and 8.9 percent from 2000-01 to 2001-02, but higher than the increase of 3.8 percent from 1999-2000 to 2000-01.

Although Georgetown’s total expenses remain high for comparable universities, this year’s rate of increases remains comparably low. Georgetown’s overall expenses exceed those at institutions including Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Stanford and Johns Hopkins, but remain lower than those of Cornell, IT, Columbia, Chicago and NYU.

As colleges announce their respective tuition figures for the new academic year, Congressman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (D-Calif.) has proposed a bill to use federal price controls to force colleges to reduce the rising cost of higher education, the College Affordability in Higher Education Act.

“As a matter of principle, every student deserves the right to pursue his or her education goals. However, lack of financial resources continues to prevent millions of highly qualified students each year from attending college,” McKeon said in a March press release. “We must address this unforgivable problem with renewed energy. We need to take a balanced, common sense approach to the tuition financial crisis that is striking too many would-be students at too many colleges and universities in America.”

Opponents of the bill claim that by sanctioning universities that fail to comply with this bill, students who depend on financial aid would be punished.

“Needless to say, such losses [in federal financial aid] would be catastrophic for institutions – not to mention the thousands of students who would be shut out of achieving their college dreams. In only 48 months, this bill would dismantle a system of higher education that took this nation more than 200 years to build,” David Ward, president of the American Council of Education, said.