Photo Credit: Andrew Davis Tucker/UGA

The University of Georgia will hire 56 new faculty members in the coming year, UGA announced today.

Some new faculty will start teaching in August the university said. Ten faculty members were hired last fall to teach 80 courses with high demand.

By fall 2016, UGA will have added 319 course sections in 81 majors, and the majority of classes will have fewer than 20 students.

UGA’s current student/faculty ratio is 18–1.

The university will spend $4.4 million on the new faculty members. The hiring will not come without a cost to students, who are seeing their tuition rise by 9 percent this year. UGA also got a small funding bump from the state and raised a record $156 million in donations in fiscal 2015.

UGA laid off dozens of employees and froze more than 100 open positions during the recession, and President Jere Morehead said during his State of the University address that UGA still has a lot of catching up to do as a result.

In other news, UGA received a $1.1 million federal grant to hire three full-time staff members to support first-generation college students from low-income families with programs like tutoring, career guidance, financial aid advising, financial literacy, life-skills workshops, social and cultural events, and dedicated computer labs and study spaces.