Ohio State’s freeze on tuition for resident undergraduates, which is in its third year, will end in July. A special committee of the Board of Trustees will meet this month to hear recommendations for tuition next year and beyond.

The date of that meeting, which will be open to the public, has not yet been determined, but will be announced a week before the meeting, said Bill Shkurti, OSU’s outgoing chief financial officer and senior vice president for Business and Finance.

Addressing a meeting of the University Senate Thursday, Shkurti said that although he was “not at liberty to discuss the specific numbers because we haven’t shared those with the Board,” the state of Ohio has limited next year’s tuition increases for its public colleges to 3.5 percent.

The Board committee, which will report to the entire Board at its May meeting, will also discuss tuition for graduate and professional students and the surcharge for out-of-state students, which are not subject to the state limits, Shkurti said. The committee will take into consideration this year’s 2.5 percent increase in tuition for graduate and professional students when making tuition decisions, Shkurti said.

The increase in tuition will be met with an increase in financial aid, Shkurti said.

“We don’t have enough money to continue that, but I want to stress that even if that happens, that financial aid will increase proportionally to whatever the tuition increases are,” Shkurti said.

A system in which students pay tuition according to the number of credit hours they take is also “on the table” for discussion, Shkurti said.

The issue was raised a few years ago, but because OSU required more credit hours to graduate than many other schools, the school decided not to adopt a per credit hour tuition payment system, Shkurti said. With the upcoming conversion to semesters, the number of credit hours required to graduate will be comparable to other schools, he said.

If OSU does decide to use a per credit hour system, the school has to figure out a way to implement the plan “so that we don’t use semesters as an excuse to take more money from our students without them getting something in return,” Shkurti said.

The last time OSU considered a per credit hour system, it found that the students who took the most credit hours were often among its best students. This means that OSU would also have to figure out how to implement a per credit hour system “in a way that we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot,” Shkurti said.