Barrett, the Honors College is proposing to increase its student fee by $250 next school year, and plans to double the fee for current students by 2012.

Mark Jacobs, dean of the honors college, outlined the proposal to 38 honors students Wednesday at an open forum on the Tempe campus.

Four years ago, Barrett began charging each student a $500 fee per year to pay for the expansion of honors programs.

In March, the honors college will petition the Arizona Board of Regents to raise that fee to $750 starting next fall for already enrolled students. Under the proposal, new students in fall 2010 will pay the full $1,000 fee.

For students already in the honors college, the fee will increase gradually over the next two years, bringing its total to $900 in 2011 and $1,000 in 2012.

The fee then would remain at $1,000 in the 2012-2013 academic year. The proposal does not seek additional increases after that time.

While Barrett is on all four ASU campuses, the increase would apply only on the Tempe, Downtown and West campuses, not the Polytechnic.

The current fee makes up $1.6 million of Barrett’s $5 million annual budget, with $3 million coming from the state and $400,000 a year from the Barrett endowment.

Dwindling state funding has caused the honors college to look for alternative methods of funding, Jacobs said.

“[Barrett] is experiencing a large decrease in state funding right now,” he said.

The $1.6 million collected in fees came from the school’s 3,200 honors students, a population that has been steadily rising.

“The increase in fees would give us $1 million more the first year and $1.4 million more the second,” Jacobs said.

Under the proposal, the revenue from the new fee would expand programs, decrease class sizes, hire additional honors faculty and advisers, increase financial aid and create a fund dedicated to study abroad trips among other things, Jacobs said.

“The uses equal the source,” Jacobs said, adding that any money left over is rolled over into the next year.

“Salaries would not increase,” he said.

Daniel Duan, an economics sophomore in the honors college, said he supports the proposal.

“I was actually on the fee committee, so I was there for the planning stages of how the money was going to be spent,” Duan said. “What really swayed my opinion was that a lot of the money already being spent is in programs that are successful. This fee would be expanding on that.”

Michael Vetrano, a computer systems freshman in the college, said the proposed fee is too much.

“A thousand dollars is nothing to sneeze at,” he said. “[Barrett] does want to use the money in a responsible way but it is just another burden on students.”

The Barrett Honors College Council distributed an online survey to honors students Thursday to evaluate the level of support for the fee, said president Emily Reynolds, but data about the responses was not available Thursday night.

Reach the reporter at kpatton4@asu.edu