The day after Texas A&M President Robert M. Gates announced he would not approve a differential tuition proposal for the 2006-07 school year, he said he received handfuls of e-mails from students who wanted to thank him.
In a Neo e-mail sent out to students and faculty on Monday, Gates said he chose not to approve differential tuition for next year because he wants to see how the newly-instated faculty reinvestment plan affects A&M, and because he feels students need more time to mull over the proposal.
“I think we’ll have a better picture of that in a year,” Gates said. “As of the first of March, we had hired about 300 additional faculty compared to the beginning of 2003; we’ll have funded 346 positions.”
The proposal focused on implementing differential tuition to Mays Business School, and would have charged an additional fee to students taking upper-level business classes to help create funds for improving and expanding faculty and equipment.
This was an idea that junior accounting major and off-campus senator Rich Pontious said he was originally in favor of.
“The overwhelming majority of business students that I talked to were in support of it,” Pontious said. “(But) it hasn’t been specified where those funds would go and how they would be allocated.”
Pontious and other students have put together an information sheet so that students can learn more about the proposal.
Gates said he needs to work more closely with A&M Provost David Prior, as well as college deans to address issues in the plan that trouble him, specifically how to reconcile charging a semester credit surcharge in a “flat-rate tuition environment.”
Nic Taunton, student body president for the 2006-2007 academic year, said he is happy that Gates has given students another year to think about the proposal.
“(The proposal) was kind of sprung on the student body,” Taunton said. “The point of differential tuition would be for us to never get behind on having enough professors for the students… The biggest question is what the money (from the policy) is going to (and we need an answer that is) more concrete than just faculty reinvestment.”