While the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign may vote as early as tomorrow to increase tuition, Eastern will wait until at least January to decide on a figure.

The Illinois Board of Higher Education will meet early December, but Hencken said the board postponed discussing university budgets.

U of I’s Board of Trustees Thursday will vote whether to accept the university’s proposal to raise tuition 8 percent for current students and a locked rate of 16 percent for incoming students.

Last year, Eastern did not determine its tuition increases until its June BOT meeting. President Lou Hencken said that is the case because he wants to make sure the university understands the state’s budget situation, which is now estimated at a $5 billion deficit.

He’s worried if the university were to set tuition now, they might charge too much or too little.

“We’re running every possibly scenario,” Hencken said. “How close are we to coming to something? We’re not.”

It appears Eastern, like U of I and Western Illinois University, will exercise the format of the Truth and Tuition bill. The bill was recently passed by the state legislature. It freezes the tuition for new students throughout their four years, meaning they will pay the same tuition rate during their years at school.

Hencken compares the effects of the bill to an airplane flight, where the prices people pay vary from person to person.

Eastern’s tuition increased 9.5 percent for fall 2003, about an additional $125 per semester for students taking 15 credit hours. The funds from tuition are critical because state-appropriated money has been cut over the last year. In this Fiscal Year 2004, which began July 1 and will end June 30, 2004, Eastern received an 8.2 percent or $4.27 reduction in state funds.

Enrollment, boosted by the largest freshmen class at Eastern ever, put the university on pace to almost make up the state cuts from tuition.

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale also recently proposed a 15.9 percent increase for new students, which includes incoming freshmen and transfer students.

For U of I, the increased tuition would bring in $25 million and would allow the university to restore 480 courses, 80 faculty members, 160 teaching assistant and 40 instructors, a Nov. 11 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article reported.

Last year, Eastern did not fire any faculty while it attests almost every student had a full slate of courses.

“We’re always watching other state school’s tuition against our own,” said Blair Lord, provost and vice president for academic affairs. ” … but there is a certain similarity to how institutions will handle this.”

Hencken said there is a 99.9 percent chance Eastern will implement two tuition rates, one to new students and the other to continuing ones. The tuition funds, generated locally by the university and spent by the university, are important because if state funds take another leap for the worst, finding areas to slash the budget could be difficult.

“We’ve cut fat, muscle. We’ve cut to the bone,” Hencken said. “I don’t know where we could additionally cut.”