UMass-Amherst Announces Tuition, Fees Jump for Fiscal Year 2023

AMHERST, MA — Still feeling the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and a nearly $12 million deficit from 2021, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst has announced that both in-state and out-of-state students will see an increase in their tuition starting in fiscal year 2023.

School officials announced last week that the university will increase tuition by 2.5 percent for in-state students and 3 percent for out-of-state students in order to provide a balanced budget for fiscal year 2023 without adding additional stimulus funding.

With enrollment numbers still uncertain, school officials said they are planning on using current base budget figures for their fiscal year 2023 budget and said that funding of existing strategic priorities will need to result from the reallocation of existing resources, the school said.

In a memo to the university community, Andrew Mangels, the school’s vice chancellor of administration and finance, said that increases in revenue must be achieved in an “increasingly competitive environment” which he said is influenced by declines in the number of 18-to-20-year-olds in the Northeast.

In addition to the tuition increases, students will also see a 3 percent jump in housing and dining costs, the school said.

The university is anticipating an incoming class of freshmen of around 5,300 students as compared to the 4,800 that enrolled this fall, Mangels said. In the memo, the school said that state funding will only cover collective bargaining increases for state-funded positions and not other strategic investments.

The school reported a fiscal 2021 deficit of $11.9 million and while it will receive more stimulus funding for 2022, it cannot rely on these payments as a long-term funding source, Mangels said. The school said it $9,167,622 from the Department of Education in the spring of 2020, based 75% on the number of pell grant recipients and 25% on the total number of non-pell students.

As part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the school said that 7,770 students received a total of $8.3 million in emergency federal aid funding.

“In summary, the campus will need to continually monitor current and projected budget planning assumptions during fiscal years 2022-2023 in order to achieve a full recovery from the impacts of the pandemic,” the university wrote in the memo.