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UW-Madison to revisit idea of raising tuition for engineers

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is reviving a proposal that would require engineering students to pay $1,400 more in tuition than other undergraduates.

The Board of Regents is expected to vote on the proposal next week. If approved, tuition for engineering majors would go up $600 next fall and $400 in each of the following two years.

The plan was proposed last year but tabled as the UW System studied whether so-called differential tuition for specific majors and programs was a good idea. Earlier this year, a committee recommended continuing the trend, and Engineering Dean Paul Peercy said that gave his plan the green light.

UW-Madison business majors already pay $1,000 more per year than other undergraduates.

The engineering proposal is expected to eventually generate $3 million per year. The money would go toward hiring more engineering faculty to teach high-demand courses and updating the curriculum to reflect technological advances.

As in the business school, only engineering students accepted into the college pay the higher amount. That typically happens at the beginning of a student’s junior year.

The plan calls for increasing undergraduate enrollment from about 3,300 to 3,700 over three years as a way to address an engineering shortage, Peercy said. The college will accept more freshman into pre-engineering and more transfer students from other majors and colleges, he said.

The additional revenue would be enough to hire about 24 more faculty and staff, which will speed up the time it takes for students to graduate, Peercy said. The college also will add more laboratory courses and update its equipment, he said.