That was my question, too.

This is from the May 20th email:

The budget includes a modest flat tuition increase of $450, applied equally for in-state and out-of-state undergraduate and graduate students.

That was the only tuition increase discussed in that message.

I suspect that the table above is based on the old formula and fails to mention the $450 fee. In the spring, I took one three-credit-hour class, and the tuition and “mandatory student fee” that GMU charged me in January are almost exactly the same as the table above.

This chart also shows why a “flat fee” is stupid: the fees for an in-state student taking only one credit hour will jump from $542 to $992 - almost a 100% tuition increase. Meanwhile, for full-time students, the fee increases their costs by 6%.

It’s just wildly disproportionate for no reason. The same revenue could have been generated by making it a simple per-credit-hour increase, which would be barely different for full-time students and much more reasonable for part-timers.