Tuition for Homewood undergraduates will climb 4.3 percent this fall, the smallest increase in percentage terms since the early 1980s.

The $980 increase, to $23,660, was approved by the trustees at their February meeting. It also applies to Ph.D. candidates in all divisions and to many other full-time Hopkins graduate students.

A relatively small number of full-time students in some divisions, however, are charged tuition on a different scale. All full-time Peabody Conservatory students, for instance--both undergraduate and graduate--will see a 4.8 percent increase to $21,700. Undergraduate and MSN candidates at Nursing will pay $17,250, a 3 percent increase.

The university's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies is holding its tuition increase for master's degree and other non-doctoral students to 3 percent or less for the fourth year in a row. Full-time SAIS tuition this fall will go up $600, or 2.8 percent, to $21,800.

M.D. students at the School of Medicine pay the same tuition in each of their four years at Hopkins. The rate for entering students this fall will be $26,000, a 4 percent increase. (For a complete list of next year's full-time and part-time tuition rates in all divisions, see tables below.)

The 1999-2000 academic year will be the ninth in the past 10 in which the rate of increase in the benchmark tuition has declined. It will be the third straight with significantly less than a 5 percent boost in that price. Previously, the benchmark tuition had climbed at around 5 percent a year for four consecutive years, and between 6 percent and 16 percent a year for the eight years before that.

"The university continues to be very concerned about the increase in costs," said Herbert L. Kessler, dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. "The trustees have made it very clear, and we support this, that our rate of increase has to slow."

In fact, Kessler and Whiting School of Engineering Dean Ilene Busch-Vishniac hope to keep the increase in next year's total costs for a Homewood undergraduate--tuition, plus room and board--below 4 percent. That figure will not be final, however, until the trustees act on it later this spring.

"The real challenge is to control tuition without impacting quality," Busch-Vishniac said. "Working hard at both fund raising and budget control, we are able to keep our increase in tuition to a reasonable level."

Last May, the trustees voted to make endowment for financial aid a top priority for the last two years of the Johns Hopkins Initiative fund-raising campaign. In November, the university announced that part of a $45 million gift from trustee chairman Michael Bloomberg will allow Hopkins to increase scholarship aid to next year's freshman class at Homewood by 25 percent.

Beginning next year, Hopkins also will increase grant assistance to current Homewood students to ensure that their debt load at graduation does not exceed that of this year's seniors. The exact amount of increased aid has not yet been determined.

Federal antitrust law prohibits universities from exchanging advance information on tuition, so it is not yet clear how the university's 1999-2000 charges will compare to those at other private universities. This year, however, Hopkins undergraduate tuition is anywhere from about $200 to about $1,300 lower than all eight Ivy League schools, the University of Chicago, Duke, MIT and Brandeis. Total costs at Johns Hopkins range from about $50 to about $1,400 below those same schools.

(1) Per credit hour
(2) Does not include $125 per student technology fee.

(1) Per credit hour
(2) Per course
(3) Non-degree program
(4) Does not include $125 per student technology fee.

(1) Per credit hour
(2) Medical students pay their entry-year tuition rate all four years. Tuition includes mandatory parking fees.