Fees discussed for biomedical engineering, business students

The Student Fee Advisory Subcommittee met on Friday afternoon to hear proposals on new student fees for business and biomedical engineering students.

Who spoke?

Nancy Allbritton, chairperson of the department of biomedical engineering, presented an increased fee for biomedical engineering students to match fees at N.C. State University.

In 2015, UNC and N.C. State created a joint undergraduate biomedical engineering degree. Allbritton said this program is groundbreaking.

“No other university has a B.S. that spans two universities where the students are going to be students at both universities at the same time,” Allbritton said.

She said this allows students to have freedom to take advantage of double the opportunities one school could provide.

“We’ve got innovative design spaces on both campuses and they can take advantage of either campus and move back and forth,” she said.

The fees would be used to provide students with resources, such as wet lab facilities, to keep UNC’s biomedical engineering program competitive with schools across the country.

“We don’t want our UNC students to become disadvantaged relative to the N.C. State students in all the extra programs that are being put on,” Allbritton said.

She proposed that the fee would be $250 per student per semester starting in 2017, $500 in 2018, $750 in 2019 and $1000 in 2020. The fee is not supposed to exceed the fee at N.C. State.

Douglas Shackelford, dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School, presented an additional fee for undergraduate business students to help increase the business school's offerings.

Shackelford said the majority of undergraduate students who want to major in business are rejected despite being qualified.

“If we had admitted another 100 students, the average grade point average of our class would have been unaffected,” Shackelford said.

The fee would be used to help improve soft skills and global business communication, Shackelford said.

“Empathy and understanding and appreciation for people who come from a completely different world,” he said. “Those are the kind of things that can trip you up when you discover in the business world that not everybody is like the person or the people on the street that you grew up with or maybe like the people you’re best friends with on campus.”

Sophomore Joe Nail, student body chief of staff, said many business school students are aware of the importance of soft skills, but do not think the focus on soft skills warrants an increase in tuition.

“I personally have talked to 223 students," he said. "I’m happy to go through that methodology with you. We found that 70 percent of students who were surveyed were actually opposed to it.” 

In September, the Student Fee Audit Committee did not recommend the business school fee increase.

The business school received positive feedback after hosting invite-only information sessions and talking to nine business school students who the school saw as community leaders, said senior business major Craig Amasya. 

For majors, the fee would start at $1,000 a semester in the 2017-18 school year, increase to $1,250 a semester in the 2018-19 school year and reach a plateau at $1,500 a semester in the 2019-20 school year.

The fee would allow admission to the business school to increase by 20 percent by the 2020-21 school year, said David Vogel, co-director of the undergraduate business program.

What happens next?

The subcommittee will continue discussion on the two fee proposals and make recommendations for further action at their meeting next Friday.

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