At Wednesday’s Board of Trustees meeting, Rowan University President Ali Houshmand vowed not to raise tuition beyond the rate of inflation. A Rowan Announcer Extra Edition was sent out on Monday, April 3 with this promise.

Although the full budget will not be adopted until a meeting in June, the board took the opportunity to hold a student hearing on the matter in order to gauge student opinion on the subject, as it does every year. With nobody signing up to speak before the deadline, Houshmand himself delivered an update on the topic at hand.

He noted that the university’s $85.4 million state appropriation would be divided three ways, with two portions going to the medical schools and the final portion going to the main campus.

Houshmand also talked about the potential tuition increase. Based on a variety of factors at hand, he estimated that there would be a 2.4 percent increase in tuition for undergraduate students on the main campus, as well as a 3 percent increase for students at Cooper Medical School and a 2.5 percent increase for Rowan School of Osteopathic Medicine students.

The increases in tuition are calculated by monitoring several different economic sources and aggregating their combined information into a single prediction about economic inflation, as explained at the meeting.

When asked about the likelihood of those numbers remaining the same between now and the final budget meeting, Senior Vice President of Finance, Joseph Scully, said that the odds were very good that the predictions would hold.

“We’ve been looking at the forecast over the last several months, and we continue to monitor that,” Scully said. “As of last week, we still looked at them, and they were still averaging 2.4 percent. Unless there’s a significant change in the next month, we anticipate that it will probably be in that range.”

When asked about his tuition increase plan after the meeting, Houshmand said that he was, first and foremost, looking to minimize the financial burden to the student body.

“Cost is of great importance. Every time you increase tuition significantly, that puts additional burden to borrow or to take from their parents, or to work harder in order to pay it. It’s a national problem. For us, the issue of affordability and making sure that we do not balance our budget on the back of the students is very important.”

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