Editorial: Tough tuition decisions

The increase - part of an overall 5 percent hike in tuition, fees, room and board - is the largest one-step jump undergraduates have seen since a 5.2 percent increase six years ago. Since then, students have enjoyed relatively modest tuition increases hovering around 4 percent. Now, however, all the growth in Arts and Sciences has caught up with rising costs and a slumping economy, and students will be forced to make up the difference. The higher tuition will undoubtedly and significantly add to the burdens that less-fortunate undergraduates face, which is made all the more problematic by the weak economy.

Thankfully, the amount the University spends on undergraduate financial aid will increase 8.3 percent, easing much of the burden on the students whom the tuition increase will affect the most. That the University has continued to make priorities of financial aid and economic diversity is commendable. Administrators should continue to push expansions of financial aid - as they did with international students and as they could do by more often replacing loans with grants - and work to close the divide between students who have and students who have not.

Whether a higher-than-normal tuition increase should have been avoided with greater fiscal prudence is an important question. Not every investment made by Arts and Sciences and Pratt during the booming '90s was justifiable, and it is unfortunate that students' families' money - rather than cuts to less successful programs - must now pay to maintain those investments. But at this stage in the Arts and Sciences budget mini-crisis, a tuition hike that is still historically low is preferable to cutting faculty searches that may already be under way, sending Arts and Sciences into a tizzy and risking the University's academic reputation.

Students can and should take solace in the fact that the higher tuition will not, when combined with the financial aid increase, place too great a burden on needy families. And they should feel comfortable that paying 5.4 percent more next year to the core of the University will help ensure the vigor and reputation of Duke's academics. The tuition increase, while unfortunate and probably avoidable, will prove necessary.