University Times

The news that Pitt’s Oakland campus will hike its base tuition by $1,000 next fall for new in-state, full-time undergraduates doesn’t seem to be discouraging high school seniors from applying here.

As of Nov. 7, some 9,335 prospective new students had applied to enroll at Oakland next fall. That’s up from the 7,521 students who had applied here at the same point last year, said Betsy Porter, director of Pitt’s Admissions and Financial Aid office.

The Oakland campus is on a pace to receive a record 22,000 applications for next fall, up from last year’s best-ever total of 17,494, she said. See chart at bottom of page.

Pitt announced last month — more than 10 months in advance — that, beginning in fall 2004, new students here will pay higher tuition than continuing students. Differential tuition plans already are in place at Penn State, Ohio State and the University of Illinois, among other schools.

“The timing of our announcement was pretty good,” Porter told the University Senate’s budget policies committee (SBPC) last week. Pitt’s new tuition system “won’t come as any surprise to prospective new students and their families,” she said.

The announcement of Pitt’s differential tuition plan followed tuition hikes of 9.5 percent this fall and 13.9 percent in fall 2002 for Pitt in-state undergraduates. Nonetheless, the University is not pricing itself out of reach for qualified Pennsylvanians from lower-income households, Porter said in reply to an SBPC member’s question.

Many such students would qualify for annual, maximum grants of $4,000 from the federal government’s Pell grants program and $3,300 from the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) program, she said. “That’s $7,300 before the University provides any assistance at all,” and Pitt has been increasing its financial aid budget annually.

But Pitt is becoming increasingly less affordable for out-of-state students from less-than-affluent households, she allowed. Non-Pennsylvanians don’t qualify for grants or loans from PHEAA and few other states provide substantial aid for study here. “Pitt can provide some help, but there are only so many grant sources to go to,” Porter said.

Currently, Oakland campus tuition is $8,614 per year for full-time, in-state undergraduates in the arts and sciences. For out-of-state A&S undergrads, tuition rose by 7.5 percent this fall to $17,926.

The academic qualifications of Oakland campus freshmen, as measured by SAT scores and percentages of students who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes, have risen steadily since fall 1995.

Among current freshmen, Porter said, 43 percent graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes (up from 19 percent eight years ago) and the average, combined SAT score was 1213 (up from 1110 in fall ’95).

“What we say to prospective students is, ‘If your SAT score falls within the 1140-to-1300 range you’re in pretty good shape for being accepted [at the Oakland campus] assuming that your academic performance in high school was pretty solid.”

To be a lead-pipe cinch for acceptance here, an applicant would need to have scored at least 1300 on the SAT and graduated in the top 10 percent of his or her high school class — “although, there are even some qualifications with that,” Porter said. “For example, the School of Engineering would be looking for specific grades in a student’s high school math and sciences courses.”

The ratio of in- and out-of-state students hasn’t changed much at the Oakland campus in the last eight years: In fall 1995, 19 percent of freshmen here were non-Pennsylvanians. This fall, it’s 21 percent.