CRANBERRY TWP - For the fourth year in a row, students at Butler County Community College will pay more for their education.

On Wednesday the BC3 trustees decided to increase tuition rates by $4 per credit hour.

Effective July 1, tuition will be $71 per credit for county residents and for residents of counties in which the college has agreements.

All other non-county residents will be charged $142 per credit hour and out-of-state students will pay $213 per credit.

The college has about 3,200 students.

In addition to the tuition increases, students will now pay $17 in student fees per semester. Those fees are $13 currently.

During the trustee meeting, finance committee chairman Greg Zappala said the tuition increase cannot be avoided, and he expects similar moves by other community colleges in Pennsylvania because of the consistent state budget cuts over the past two years.

Vice president of finance Lynn Burtner said the college needed the increase to maintain its operating expenditures.

"The main reason for this tuition increase is benefits," Burtner said, pointing out faculty and staff salaries are up as well as health insurance benefits.

President Cynthia Azari said the increase does not cover all of the college's needs for the coming year, and some areas were cut from the budget to keep from raising tuition rates even higher.

Trustee Edith McCandless expressed concern at raising tuition rates yet again and asked if the increase this year would prevent another one from happening next year.

Zappala said if some grant money the college has applied for to use for certain maintenance costs comes through, the money that would have been used from the tuition increase to cover those costs could be moved into reserve to hopefully prevent another tuition increase in 2006-07.

But he warned it is too soon to predict if that would be a definite possibility.

One of the largest concerns for spending next year is the BC3's new site in Mercer County, which opened earlier this year.

Zappala said the college received a $374,000 grant during the site's initial year that covered the entire operating cost of the building. However, for the upcoming fiscal year, that grant has been reduced to $90,000, leaving BC3 with some expenses to continue to fund the site.

However, Azari said enrollment is booming at the new site, which currently has 150 students, and she expects the growth trend to continue. Because of the continued growth, the site should prove self-sufficient, she said.

Zappala said that is one of the only ways the college can continue to financially support satellite sites.

"These operations have to be self-sufficient because we don't want Butler County to be paying for programs in other counties," he said.

Trustee chairman Ray Steffler announced for that reason, the college is likely to shut down its branch campus in Armstrong County.

Of the campus' 120 or so students, all but 20 commute to the main campus in Butler, making the satellite campus financially impossible to keep open.

Steffler said Armstrong County has not helped support the branch site, so it likely would close at the end of this semester.

"We've come to the point where we can't afford to do business there anymore," he said.

The college plans to unveil its 2005-06 budget, which includes the tuition increase, at a meeting at 12:30 p.m. May 18 in the Lawson Board Room in the Administration Building on main campus.