FAIRMONT, W.Va. — Students at Fairmont State University are going to get a break next academic year.

The university’s Board of Governors voted last week to freeze in-state tuition and consolidate out-of-state rates for the 2025 academic year.
President Mike Davis said previously there were two tuition rate classifications for out-of-state students. Potential students in border states had access to the reduced metro rate. Students from other states, including student athletes, were required to pay the higher out-of-state tuition rate.
“Decrease tuition for every other student from outside the state of West Virginia to what that metro rate was, so we’ll only have a single out-of-state rate instead of two different rates,” Davis said.
Postsecondary institutions now compete for a smaller pool of potential students out of high school that have increasingly more options. Traditional institutions have to become more competitive with the emergence of increasing popularity of technical and vocational education options that can allow students to enter the workforce faster and potentially with less debt.
“We need to figure out a way to be more competitive,” Davis said. “We know there’s a decrease in the number of students graduating from high school in the state of West Virginia, so we need to have more markets where we can talk about how great Fairmont State University is and where we can be more competitive economically.”
Davis hopes the change for out-of-state students can enrich the student body across the board. New rates could give the institution nationwide appeal and bring more students to the community who could become future permanent residents.
“This is also going to help our athletic programs, our band, our debate teams, and programs we’re going to recruit from around the country,” Davis said. “It won’t just bring in additional students; it will bring in students with specialties.”
The continued strong year-over-year financial position of the university allows the BOG to make the move with confidence. Davis said the move substantially improves their affordability on the national scale.
“Prior to this move, we were less expensive than the 74 universities east of the Mississippi that are public institutions,” Davis said. “Now, there are 175 that we are less expensive than east of the Mississippi.”
Out-of-state students will no longer pay more than $5,000 per year more than students on the metro rate, and tuition for in-state students who pay $7,000 less than the metro rate will see no increase.
“We’re not a for-profit institution, so our goal is to provide a great education to students at the lowest cost we can and still be able to run a top-flight university,” Davis said.
Story by Mike Nolting, WAJR