Facing growing costs and a continued deficit of about $1 million, the Graduate School plans to substantially raise its tuition, from $21,660 to $29,550.
The increase will make Duke's tuition comparable to those at peer institutions, said Dean of the Graduate School Lewis Siegel, who earlier this year raised stipends so the school would remain competitive.
Siegel noted that among 12 other top institutions--including Northwestern University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania--Duke currently has the lowest tuition and also has a relatively low cost of living; Columbia charges the highest tuition at $27,530.
He said the sum of tuition and registration fees will increase between 10 and 11 percent each year. Under the proposal, accounting for 3.5 percent inflation, the total would be about $29,550, which would place Duke's tuition in the mid-range of graduate school costs and make the graduate and undergraduate tuition analogous, Siegel said.
"This is not to gouge anybody, but we have gotten to a point where we've become sloppy with revenue and we have been underpricing the Duke degree," Siegel said.
Most graduate students do not, in actuality, pay for tuition or even fees, which are frequently covered by grants. Siegel said training grants sponsored by the National Institutes of Health will account for about 60 percent of the change in price, essentially soaking up the tuition and fee hikes.
Graduate and Professional Student Council President Elayne Heisler said master's students and seventh- and eighth-year humanities students will feel the largest effects. The former often do not have as much financial support as Ph.D. students, and the latter typically take longer with their research.
Siegel said it was important to lessen the impact of a tuition rise on current students, and that the school was considering grandfathering in current master's students, reducing or waiving the tuition difference. He said he is working to find the fairest, most rational way to restructure master's degree costs.
Heisler, a third-year student in sociology, also said there may be concerns about joint-degree programs and other unintended consequences, but she hopes to have open forums to allay students' fears and answer their questions.
"In the long run, it's for the greater good of the school," she said. "In the short term, it's going to hurt some people very significantly."
Provost Peter Lange said the tuition proposal makes sense.
"It's critical," he said. "We've seen an aggressive increase among a number of our peers in the kinds of awards they are making to their grad students. When you combine that with our need for some new interdisciplinary programs, [it results in] significant costs."
Siegel said next year, the Graduate School will raise stipends in the natural sciences to $15,550 and for all other students to $14,000. He said a previous plan to increase both of those by $1,500 had temporarily been scaled back.
In addition, he said the school has received 80 applications for 50 new summer stipends of $5,500 to provide additional student support for year-long research.
The Graduate School has also experienced several increasing costs: $100,000 to help pay for new academic programs, $60,000 to double the English-as-a-second-language program to support a growing number of international students and $200,000 to supplement a new instructional technology initiative.
Those increases have helped push the Graduate School to a $1 million deficit and have forced it to fall back on reserve funds.
The Graduate School has one of the smallest capital campaign goals--$20 million--and often finds itself overshadowed by undergraduate or professional programs.
"I think at the beginning of the campaign, there was a great deal of concern about whether we would be able to raise substantial money for the Graduate School," Lange said. "Among people whose loyalty to Duke is at the undergraduate level, which is by far the biggest part of our alumni base, you'd see why their first desire might be to support the undergraduate programs."
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