The Graduate Student Senate will circulate a petition on campus asking the Board of Regents to keep the tuition and fees increase less than 15.5 percent.

The resolution came after the October Board of Regents meeting, when Government of Student Body President Andy Tofilon made the same appeal to the Board.

At their meeting Monday night, senators said any undergraduate or graduate student can sign the petition at Parks Library and Curtiss Hall. The deadline for the signatures to be gathered and sent to the regents, ISU President Gregory Geoffroy and select members of the state Legislature is Nov. 10.

GSS President Debbie Martinez said she is hoping to get at least 2,000 signatures on the petition by Nov. 10.

“I hope [the regents] pay close attention to what ISU students are saying,” Martinez said. “It shouldn’t be easy to ignore 2,000 students.”

Danelle Haake, GSS senator for the College of Agriculture, said the petition could have a much bigger impact on the Board than individual students writing appeal letters to members of the body.

“It will be a much more united front,” she said. “It allows students to voice their opinions.”

Non-resident veterinary medicine students would be hit especially hard by the proposed increase, according to the petition. In numbers from the Board of Regents Web page, vet med students face a 29.3 percent tuition increase, raising the current tuition by $5,778 from the current cost of $9,688.

“The logic is, since [vet med students] are professional students, people in vet med will make more than people in other professions and will be able to pay the money off,” Haake said.

Martinez said students in the department already have indicated that if tuition is raised, vet med students will have to drop out of school.

While a tuition increase is not good news, Haake said, a more reasonable tuition hike would be more tolerable.

“There is no good increase,” she said. “It’s a matter of what students can tolerate.”