In-state undergraduate students enrolling for courses at the University of Illinois this fall will have to pay a little extra tuition.
The hike in fee has come after almost 20 years.
Undergraduate tuition at Urbana-Champaign campus is $11,834 annually; $10, 406 at Chicago and the fee at Springfield is around $9,247.50.
Meanwhile, students living in campus at Urbana-Champaign will pay around $24,729 (up by 2.1 percent); $23,615 in Chicago (increase of 1.8 percent) and tuition at Springfield has been raised by 3.6 percent, which is $21, 489.
The figures for students living in campus include their tuition and room and board expenses.
Vice President for academic affairs, Christophe Pierre, told abclocal website that the decision to raise tuition is to generate more revenue for professors' payments and develop projects and goals to attract worthy students.
Pierre said that the university wishes to recruit the highest class of students to the university. So, it certainly requires increasing tuition to a minimum.
University President Robert Easter told the channel that cost cutting measures for the past few years have allowed the management to introduce a hike.
At the same time Easter also said that being a land-grant institution, the hike in fee should still be affordable to most students in the state.
This hike is not applicable to current students, who will be paying the existing tuition till their course gets completed.
The pending state budget for the university is valued at $502 million for this fiscal year.
"We're going to embrace a period of risk," trustees Chairman Christopher Kennedy told the newspaper. "But its better that we embrace the risk rather than individual families."
