By Kristina Goetz
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Sophomore Prathima Reddy of Cincinnati conducts an experiment Tuesday plotting absolute zero in a nitrogen bath in a physics lab on the UC campus. The Cincinnati Enquirer/MICHAEL SNYDER

UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS - The University of Cincinnati's Board of Trustees voted Tuesday to increase in-state, undergraduate tuition by 9.9 percent beginning in the summer term.

This is the second consecutive year that UC students have been hit with such an increase, the maximum allowed by the state of Ohio. The action raises annual tuition to $8,379, up from $7,623.

"We don't like the situation any better than the students and parents, but we're trying to take care of it over the long haul," said UC president Nancy Zimpher. "The long-term view is really what we're working on."

UC officials say this year's estimated $345 million general fund budget for the main campus will increase by $31 million in new costs, driven by faculty and staff salaries, increasing health-care costs and ongoing reductions in state contributions.

To balance the budget, UC will trim $15 million and raise the rest, or about $16 million, through tuition increases. The total budget for the university this year is $802 million.

UC expects no relief from the state. School financial officers predict $3 million less than the $144 million UC received this year.

The university will hold budget hearings for college deans and vice presidents in May to choose spending priorities based on the academic master plan now being crafted.

Ultimately, that plan will help the city's largest employer - with 14,000 workers - rank academic programs and develop strategies to increase research funding. Popular programs that have high enrollments or generate revenue, for example, would be rewarded.

School officials are also working on five- and 10-year enrollment and retention strategies, as well as entrepreneurial programs to create more revenue. That way, Zimpher said, UC will be less reliant on state funds in years to come.

But for now, the news was tough to swallow for some of UC's more than 33,000 students.

Kenneth Dale Allen II, a senior from Goshen, has one more year to go to complete a degree in electronic media. For the first time in his college career, he was forced to take out a $5,500 loan to cover his expenses this year. And with the tuition increase next fall, he expects to take out an additional loan of $5,000 to $6,000.

"Part-time employment is few and far between," Allen said. "I have bills, books, rent to pay, utilities to pay, health insurance to pay. Pretty much the only way for me to do that right now is to get another loan. And that is going to ruin me because I plan to go on to graduate school after this."

Over the past 15 years, UC has taken $120 million in budget cuts before asking students to provide an additional $80 million in tuition increases, UC officials said.

For the first time in school history, students' tuition made up a greater percentage of the budget this year than the state's contribution. Students anted up about 26 percent while the state provided 23 percent. The rest came from government and private grants, contracts and other sources.

In January, the college cut $6.6 million from its $802 million budget, one of the biggest mid-year slashes in school history.

Although UC welcomed its largest freshman class in a decade with 4,553 freshmen in the fall, the university was still about 1,000 students short of its overall enrollment goal, school officials said. And the university is still weathering the cumulative effect of a decade-long enrollment shortfall with its related loss of tuition income.

The effect of those cuts is now surfacing, UC officials told board members Tuesday. The college of arts and sciences, for example, will increase its reliance on part-time faculty and delay the replacement of computer equipment. The cuts will make it tougher for the law program to compete with top-tier schools. The nursing program will be forced to reduce the number of off-campus student clinical rotations and the sections it offers.

E-mail kgoetz@enquirer.com