By Michael Naughton

With tuition for the 2004-05 academic year set to go up 4.5 percent, according to a senior administration official, some students voiced their concerns over the additional $576 they will be forced to pay each semester.

The tuition increase is one portion of the university’s budget for next year that will also include the hiring of 100 new tenure-track professors over the next five years, the official said.

Some students feel the increase in faculty will not have a direct effect on them and that their money should be used to try and improve problems within the university .

“I’m in the College of Arts and Sciences,” said Lindsay Koran, a middler history major. “My guess is that those teachers aren’t going to be for my college; they’ll probably be for business or engineering, so I don’t get anything out of it besides a tuition hike. If they’re going to raise my tuition, they had better fix the ‘NU Shuffle.’ You get sent to like six different places for one problem, and no one wants to deal with you.”

Though this year’s jump is the lowest in the last five years, some students still feel the university needs to become more resourceful with its funds.

“They’re putting too much money to useless stuff, like afterHOURS and Springfest, flat-screen TVs everywhere and fancy things in the Cyber Cafe,” said Mark Lamping, a junior mechanical engineering major. “They should just lower tuition and not spend money on that stuff.”

The administration’s ability to handle finances and provide students with a reasonable service for the price of tuition is also being questioned.

“It’s already unbelievably expensive to go here,” said Susan Bergey, a physical therapy major. “It doesn’t seem like they use their money well if it’s already gone up in the past year.”

Though tuition has been raised almost 30 percent in the past five years, the more than $500 increase is not a problem for some students.

“I’d say we get a lot [for our money], I mean we have a great campus, good teachers, nice buildings, but for the price we pay, we don’t get enough,” said Tom Bergeron, a middler math major. “We could get that for less at other colleges.”

Other students are simply not concerned with the increase because some parents can afford to pay the bill and the tuition increase will not directly affect them.

“Most schools are going up in tuition, and a lot of people get help from their parents,” said Mike Smith, a middler mechanical engineering major. “Price isn’t always one of the biggest concerns. I think Harvard [University] is just about where we are too.”

In fact, student leaders have long pushed for the faculty increase that is being attributed, among other factors, to the tuition increase.

“We need more full time and tenure-track faculty,” said Student Government Assoc-iation President Michael Romano. “It must happen if we are to provide students the quality and depth of education we are charging them for.”

Professors have also pushed for the increase, but instead of attempting to improve their staff, they are attempting to require enough classroom professors so they will be able to equal out their workload, resulting in more time spent on research.

Students will have the opportunity to voice their concerns over this year’s budget proposal at both the public presentation of the budget to the Student Government Association tonight at 6 p.m., as well as a number of public forums the university will hold over the next month.

– News staff writers Steve Babcock and Sarah Metcalf contributed to this report.