Key Tuition Up 5 Percent For Next Year The university's benchmark tuition, paid by Homewood undergraduates, Ph.D. candidates around the university and a number of other Hopkins students, will rise 5 percent next year, to $20,740. The university's board of trustees voted at its February meeting to hike the tuition rate $990 from this year's figure of $19,750. It will be the fourth straight year the benchmark tuition has increased by about 5 percent. As recently as six years ago, the increase was more than 7 percent. In 1989-90, tuition jumped as much as 16.7 percent for Homewood freshmen. Although the 5 percent increase exceeds the expected increase in the consumer price index, it reflects the reality that the cost of higher education is increasing more rapidly than the overall cost of living, Hopkins administrators said. For example, the cost of adding computer facilities and services to the Homewood campus has risen 120 percent in the past five years. Federal antitrust law prohibits universities from exchanging advance information on future tuition and fees. For the current year, however, Hopkins ranks in the bottom third for undergraduate tuition among the 18 universities--the Ivy League plus schools such as Duke, Georgetown, Rice, MIT, Chicago, Stanford, Rochester, Northwestern and Washington University--that belong to the Consortium for Financing Higher Education. The new $20,740 benchmark tuition applies also to full-time graduate students in Arts and Sciences and Engineering, doctoral students at SAIS, doctoral and some master's degree students at Nursing and Public Health, and Ph.D. students in Medicine. At the School of Medicine, where M.D. students pay the same tuition throughout their four years, the rate for entering students will be $22,800, up 4.6 percent. Tuition increases in other full-time programs range from a low of 3 percent, to $20,000, for master's degree students at SAIS, to a high of 6.8 percent, to $20,500, for M.P.H. students at Public Health. Tuition for part-time Continuing Studies master's degree courses in liberal arts and education in Washington, D.C., will remain at this year's level, $315 a credit hour. The largest percentage increase in part-time tuition is 12.9 percent, to $350 a credit hour, for master's-level business courses at the Columbia and Montgomery County centers. Room and board rates for Homewood undergraduates have not yet been determined.