HANOVER — Dartmouth College trustees last week approved a 2% increase in tuition, room, board and fees for fiscal year 2022, raising the total to $78,010.

The trustees, who met virtually for their annual spring meeting on Thursday and Friday, also approved a $1.2 billion operating budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, Dartmouth said in an announcement on its website Tuesday. That compares to a $1.13 billion budget approved at this time last year, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic hit New England hard and prompted some cutbacks, layoffs and early retirements at Dartmouth.

Tuition at the Thayer School of Engineering also will increase 2%, to $58,953, while the cost to attend the Tuck School of Business ($77,520) and the Geisel School of Medicine ($67,532) will remain the same, Dartmouth said.

Dartmouth last year raised undergraduate tuition, room and board and fees by 3.9%, to $76,480.

Dartmouth also intends to increase financial aid to undergraduates by more than 13%. The college has said previously that more students need assistance because of cutbacks their families have suffered in the pandemic.

Dartmouth in September announced that its endowment had generated a return of 7.6% for fiscal year 2020 and had risen to a record $5.98 billion.

Trustees last week also approved a $38 million capital budget, which includes $4.9 million for schematic designs for the upcoming renovation of the Hopkins Center for the Arts and $2 million in upgrades at the Center for Comparative Medicine and Research, a Dartmouth laboratory on the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center campus in Lebanon that uses animals for its research and tests.

And they met virtually with Shontay Delalue, Dartmouth’s incoming senior vice president and senior diversity officer who plans to make recommendations on strengthening diversity and equity at Dartmouth when she formally starts in July.

“In order to achieve excellence in any field — especially in academia — you must be diverse. It cannot just be an aspiration, there must be accountability,” Delalue, who is currently a vice president at Brown University, said in the Dartmouth announcement.

Last summer, hundreds of members of the Dartmouth community, many of them people of color, signed a letter to Hanlon and trustees raising concerns about “built-in structural racism” and other issues on campus, including the retention and turnover of Black faculty and staff.

Government professor Dean Lacy, the associate provost for faculty recruitment, told trustees that Dartmouth has worked on outreach and that about one-third of the faculty, fellows, and postdoctoral students hired last year identify as Black, Latino, Native American, or Pacific Islander, the college announcement said.

John P. Gregg can be reached at jgregg@vnews.com.