TBR Finance & Business Operations Committee to meet April 13 to begin discussion of 2017-18 tuition & fees

The Tennessee Board of Regents’ Finance and Business Operations Committee will meet April 13 by telephone conference call to begin discussions on maintenance fees and tuition for the 2017-18 academic year.

The meeting is the first of three or four sessions the committee will hold to review state funding and the revenue needs of the 13 community colleges and 27 colleges of applied technology in the TBR system – and then to make recommendations to the full Board of Regents on student tuition and fees at the board’s next regular quarterly meeting on June 22-23. One of the goals of the committee is to address student affordability concerns. 

The committee meeting is scheduled for 1 p.m. CDT, Thursday, April 13. The conference call is open to the public and media to listen to the committee’s discussion. Anyone wishing to listen should contact TBR Communications Director Richard Locker at (615) 366-4417 or rick.locker@tbr.edu by 4:30 p.m. CDT, Wednesday, April 12, for call-in information so an adequate number of lines may be reserved. Committee materials will be posted on the TBR website at tbr.edu

At the first meeting, committee members and TBR business and finance staff will review the process and background financial information and set goals and a schedule for the next committee meetings.

Under the FOCUS (Focus on College and University Success) Act of 2016, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission will issue binding guidance to the state’s college and university governing boards on a range of percentage increases in combined tuition and fees allowed. THEC issued its preliminary guidance in November, for student tuition and fee increases of between 0 and 4 percent, depending on state appropriations for public higher education.

THEC will issue its final, binding guidance after reviewing higher education funding in the overall state budget for fiscal year 2017-18 expected to be approved by the Tennessee General Assembly by mid-May.

This will be the first budget cycle in which the Board of Regents will be approving the budgets and setting tuition and fees only for Tennessee’s community colleges and colleges of applied technology.  The new local governing boards for each of the six universities that were formerly part of the Board of Regents system will be approving their universities’ budgets and tuition and fees for the 2017-18 academic year.