ATLANTA (AP) — The thousands of students at Georgia’s 33 technical colleges will pay hundreds more this year in tuition.
The board that governs the state’s technical college system approved a 16 percent tuition hike at a meeting at Coosa Valley Technical College in Rome on Thursday. That means starting in January, tuition will go from $31 per credit hour to $36, raising annual costs from $1,488 to $1,728 for full-time students.
The increase, the first in two years, comes after Gov. Sonny Perdue slashed a proposal earlier this year to give the schools an extra $7 million. Last year, the system enrolled 147,852 students.
Though that enrollment is a slight drop from previous years, technical college officials had argued that they were seeing fewer students in low-cost programs like computer technology and higher enrollment in more expensive programs like health care classes.
Lawmakers added the extra dose of state funding to the budget but the governor wouldn’t go along with it.
The board that governs the state’s technical college system approved a 16 percent tuition hike at a meeting at Coosa Valley Technical College in Rome on Thursday. That means starting in January, tuition will go from $31 per credit hour to $36, raising annual costs from $1,488 to $1,728 for full-time students.
The increase, the first in two years, comes after Gov. Sonny Perdue slashed a proposal earlier this year to give the schools an extra $7 million. Last year, the system enrolled 147,852 students.
Though that enrollment is a slight drop from previous years, technical college officials had argued that they were seeing fewer students in low-cost programs like computer technology and higher enrollment in more expensive programs like health care classes.
Lawmakers added the extra dose of state funding to the budget but the governor wouldn’t go along with it.