Some 82% of non-Georgian graduate students at Georgia Institute of Technology are from abroad. Citing the high percentage, former Georgia Tech president John Patrick Crecine last year asked the state Board of Regents to authorize the school to raise tuition for non-resident students, including Americans and non-Americans. The board turned him down.
Now, that issue must be faced by his successor, Gerald Wayne Clough when he arrives on the Atlanta campus next month. Thus far Dr. Clough has not indicated his position and Tech spokesman David Arnold said he did not know what Dr. Clough’s plans are on the subject.
Basic quarterly tuition at Tech and the University of Georgia is $633. That’s all Georgians pay. Even though out-of-state Tech students pay an extra $1,530 about 40 percent of their tuition is still financed by Georgia taxpayers. This helps make Tech one of the best educational bargains in the U.S.
Overall, 4,234 of Tech’s 11,633 full-time students are from outside Georgia. That’s 36.4% of the student body, compared to 18.8% at UGA. Of Tech’s out-of-staters, 1,213 are non-Americans, or 10.4%, double the percentage at UGA.
On the graduate level 42.7% of Tech’s 2,711 enrollees are from out-of-state. And 950 graduate school students are non-Americans, meaning that they comprise 82% of non-Georgian enrollees.
Most, but not all of Tech boosters favor increasing tuition to non-Georgians. One dissenter is John P. Imlay, a highly influential alumnus. He says many non-resident students settle in Georgia after graduation, a big benefit to the state. The chairman of Dun and Bradstreet Software in Atlanta says he is “extremely proud” of the international make up of Tech’s student body, something that began in earnest while he was a student in 1954-58.