Show me the money: Let's get honest about tuition hikes
People are yelling. People are crying. It’s a Sunday night during midterms at American University in Washington DC and about 30 students have chosen to spend their time in a classroom to talk about financial aid.
From the moment they start the college application process, students are worried about the cost of higher education and so are their parents. Price and financial aid play a major role in choice of college, but as the American University students found out costs are not always steady. College tuition keeps rising and so every year parents and students may face bigger bills. But protest from actual college students is rare. Why aren’t the people who will be most affected--college students--more active in fighting tuition hikes? And what if anything are schools doing to adapt their financial aid policies to cope with the high price of a four-year education?
It’s no secret that the cost of a secondary education has gone up significantly in recent years. According to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics, “At private nonprofit four-year institutions, average tuition and fees were $33,500 in 2016–17, 15 percent higher than they were in 2010–11 ($29,200).”
Although tuition increases are standard at many elite universities, protests are not. One category of students in particular may not be troubled about rising costs and may even benefit from them. As college becomes less affordable as a whole, wealthy students are able to continue to attend elite universities and may even benefit from less competition. Indeed, the recent college admissions scandal highlighted the extraordinary amounts some rich families are willing to spend to game the admissions system to access highly competitive schools.
At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, something that might deter low income college students from protesting is the campus climate surrounding financial aid. For most elite universities, students receive financial aid based on the demonstrated need their family has. Shakera Vaughan (21), a senior at Georgetown University, receives need based financial aid. Vaughan’s financial aid package played a “huge huge role in why I came... if I had not received the aid from Georgetown I definitely would not have come.” Students like Vaughn who depend university for giving them a chance they otherwise could not afford feel indebted to the university and hence unwilling to complain publicly. Moreover, need based aid is likely to be raised to cover changes in tuition during a student’s career.
Ironically, those who depend heavily on aid may feel disempowered when it comes to rallying their classmates to protest against rising costs. Vaughan notes that her status as a student with financial aid impacts her socially. “It’s definitely a stigma since Georgetown doesn’t give any type of merit scholarships [that] a lot of students think the financial aid kids slipped through the cracks and slid through the application process and were kind of pushed forward because they were poor. It’s definitely a stigma that we’re not as smart as the other students who don’t get any type of financial aid--and it’s frustrating.” Such stereotyping may make need based aid recipients think twice about drawing attention to their status as scholarship recipients.
Students at Georgetown’s neighbor American University, held a town hall and a protest over the tuition increase for the 2019/2020 school year. While American University gives out need based scholarships, it also awards scholarships based on academic merit. Many of the attendees of the town hall and protest came from the program “AU Scholars,” meaning they automatically receive the same $8,000 a year scholarship from the university and live together in a “living learning community. This award might have heavily influenced their decision to attend, but does not adjust upward when tuition rises. These students see themselves as equals because of the merit aid they receive, not burdened like Vaughan.
At the town hall students were very candid about their experiences with their financial aid at the university. One anonymous student lamented about how her family was refusing to help her pay for college after she came out as gay to them. Another student confessed that even after completing her degree in three years, she would be more than $120,000 in debt. The prospect of incurring serious debt drives students to take action--though not all make the same choices about how to cope.
During spring semester 2019, freshman Grayson Bigelow (18), made the decision to transfer from American University to University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. “It definitely had an impact when I realized that my tuition was going to go from $63,000 a year to about $23,000, so I can basically get the entirety of my bachelor’s degree for a little bit more than one more year here.”
At 22, town hall organizer, junior Mitchell Lenneville is a year older than most of his classmates because he took a year off from his studies after his sophomore year so that he could earn money to help pay for his and his younger brother’s tuition. After the university announced a four percent tuition increase coupled with a $2,000 increase in required dining plans for sophomores, Lenneville knew he had to do something, so he worked with other American University students to organize a town hall and protest against these increases. With this project came a lot of research into how universities spend and receive money.
University financing is very complicated and not all schools are alike as students quickly learn once they try to discuss costs with their school administrations. One major way universities receive money is through an endowment, defined by the American Council for Education as “an aggregation of assets invested by a college or university to support its educational mission in perpetuity…[comprising of] hundreds or thousands of individual endowments. An endowment allows donors to transfer their private dollars to public purposes with the assurance that their gifts will serve these purposes for as long as the institution continues to exist.” Endowments can serve as a way to fund a university outside of tuition and some elite colleges can turn to these funds to give major financial aid or to soften rising costs.
One major perk of a large endowment is the ability to attract students by enticing them with strong financial aid offers. For example, after Michael Bloomberg donated $1.8 billion to his alma mater Johns Hopkins University, the university was able to implement need blind admissions with the guarantee of addressing 100% of students’ demonstrated financial needs. Other schools may use funds strategically to try to woo students to attend by offering small amounts of merit aid.
Julianna Kubik (18), a freshman at American University was involved in the planning process for the town hall confessed that she “did not know that schools had an endowment or how that worked until we were in the process of putting together this protest.” Similarly, students may not be aware of how rising costs may not be driven by the expenses involved with teaching, particularly at research universities. Jason Brennan, a professor in Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business explains: “You know if you’re a great teacher and you win the university teacher award, you get $10,000. If I publish one article in a top journal or one book with a top publisher, I get a research bonus in the summer with 2/9 of my base salary.”
Students may be more focused on what changes in tuition mean for them directly. American University’s Student Government president Valentina Fernández spoke at the town hall about what student government plans to do about rising costs. A recipient of financial aid herself, Fernández drew attention to a budget committee created by the university at the beginning of the school year to research what could improve with a specific percentage of a tuition increase. Fernández also warned students that if tuition were cut the first thing to go would be student services such as the Center for Diversity and Inclusion and financial aid packages.
To those in attendance Fernández’s response seemed too much in line with the stance of the University itself. For Bigelow, “I think that [what she insinuated] is more than a little ridiculous and feels like a card the university would be playing to scare students into accepting the hikes or risk losing or even further lowering the quality of essential services.” Fernández was contacted about her remarks she made at the town hall meeting but did not respond.
Brennan does retort that “Every student service we have here comes at the expense of students. So the ironic thing is that if you have a department of sustainability for poor students then that increases tuition prices and makes [college] more unaffordable.” According to Brennan, “Over the past 50 years... the ratio of faculty to students has stayed almost completely constant. But what’s increased the most is administrative staff.” Armed with such information, students at American University suggested cuts to administrative services in their action plan.
Most students make their biggest decision about finances when they choose a college to attend. Budget conscious students often chose to attend in state schools or schools that provide them with more financial aid. Gabby Lewis (18), a senior at River Hill High School in Clarksville Maryland, will be attending University of Maryland at College Park next year not the University of California, Berkeley. The decision for Lewis was not easy. “I always wanted to go back to California for college, and UC Berkeley was one of my top choices. I wasn't awarded any scholarships since those are for in-state students, and it wasn't worth it to take out about $58k in loans when UMD offered a price where I wouldn't graduate with any debt and I'd have a nationally ranked program for my major.”
For American University student Kubik the choice was the opposite. The Californian’s family decided to make financial sacrifices so that their daughter could attend American. Kubik knew she wanted a career in international relations, which narrowed down her in-state options because, “The schools in California don’t have strong programs unless you can get into Stanford or UCLA, which I got rejected from. Most other schools in California didn’t have programs in that, and so I mainly applied to east coast schools, and AU was the top one that I got into with the strongest program. And so my parents were like, you like this school, this is where you’re going to go and we’re going to make sure you can go there.” Kubik’s family was so determined to fund her education, her older brother almost dropped out of community college to relieve some of the family’s financial burden.
Fortunately for Kubik, after student protests the AU board of trustees lowered the tuition hike from 4% to 3% for the 2019/2020 and promised the cost of attendance would only be increased 2.3 and 2.4% for the next two years. Despite the tuition increase, Kubik plans to finish her degree at American University. Like for most of the students at the town hall, she felt connected to the institution.
Protest can be productive. Although this is a small victory, the high price of private four year universities is a systematic problem that requires even more hard work.
Major steps should be taken to guarantee that once students enroll in a private four-year university they can afford to stay there. The first step colleges should take is implementing a fixed tuition plan as has been done at George Washington University. Its financial package states, “Up front, you and your family know the cost of a GW education, not just for the first year, but through the conclusion of a degree program.” Brennan supports this plan stating that, “I think anything that constrains universities and their costs is a good idea.”