UW System and UWRF to raise tuition

The University of Wisconsin System is preparing to raise tuition across all of its campuses, including UW-River Falls. This will be an average increase of about five percent across several colleges, and will be going into effect this fall for the 2023-2024 school year. 

In addition, UW-River Falls has proposed an increase in resident undergraduate tuition of $283.42 per year. There are two areas, or differentials, that are pushing these tuition increases, and those are the Falcon Promise, which will result in an increase of $30 per year and the Matrix Advising and First-Year Experience, which are new differentials that will result in an increase of an additional $95 per year. 

“The Falcon Promise has been around for well over a decade,” said Beth Schommer, the Chief of Staff in the Chancellor’s Office. “When the original increase was approved by the Board of Regents, it was supposed to be phased in, and the last thirty dollars was supposed to be in effect around ten years ago. Then, when they froze tuition, we never got it. So this thirty dollars is basically just making good on a promise for this Falcon Promise program from a while ago.” 

UWRF is also going to implement program-specific differential tuition. This includes an increase of $63 in additional tuition for students in Agriculture and Environmental Engineering, as well as an increase of $360 dollars in additional tuition for juniors and seniors in Biomedical and Health Science. This increase would help to pay for equipment and specialized laboratories. 

UWRF’s segregated fees will also be increasing, by $60.04 per year. Segregated fees support UWRF’s various services, programs, and facilities. “Segregated fees are managed in consultation with the students, so the student government has a very important role in deciding what they’re used for,” said Schommer. There is a full breakdown of what segregated fees are and what they are used for on the UWRF website. 

“The [Board of] Regents sets our tuition rates as a system, and that’s your base tuition. Then if a campus wants to do anything else on top of that, then they have two other options. One is differential tuition, which is extra tuition tied to a specific initiative or program. [Another is] segregated fees, which are managed in collaboration with the students themselves,” said Schommer. 

Residence halls will experience an increase of $224 per year, and meal plans will have an increase of $130. In addition, there will also be a $2.14 increase for textbook rentals, and increases for nonresident undergraduates, resident and nonresident graduates, and master’s degree students in Communicative Disorders. 

Even though UWRF will be experiencing one of the UW System’s higher proposed tuition increases, with a 5.4% increase, or about $822 more for the entire year, it will remain one of the lower-cost universities in the UW System, with only UW-Parkside and UW-Whitewater costing less than UWRF per year.