Monday, Jan. 21, Washington Post writer Nick Anderson mentioned Elizabethtown College in his latest article, “Attention, college shoppers. These schools are slashing their prices.”
Etown, among many other colleges across the nation, is slashing its prices and breaking the hefty price tag associated with attending a private institution.
According to Anderson’s article and the College Board, a nonprofit organization representing many higher education institutions, the average inclusive sticker price for private colleges is approximately $48,500 per year.
However, prices ranging from $50,000 per year to $60,000 per year are not uncommon. Before Etown’s tuition transparency announcement last September, the cost of tuition and fees to attend the College for the 2018-2019 school year was $47,290 with a price of $12,486 for room and board and other expenses.
Following this national trend in a decrease in tuition, the College announced its commitment to tuition transparency last September, which would decrease its roughly $50,000 per year sticker price by 32 percent to $32,000. According to the College’s Tuition Transparency FAQ, “national studies report that more than 50 percent of high school seniors and parents surveyed say that a high ‘sticker price’ will cause them to eliminate a school from consideration during their college search.”
Fortunately, Etown is not the only higher education institution breaking free of the standard high cost/high discount model.
Along with Etown, according to Anderson, “St. John’s College slashed tuition from $52, 734 in this school year to $35,000 in the next.”
More than 20 other schools nationwide including Saint John’s College in Maryland, Sweet Briar College in Virginia and La Salle University in Pennsylvania join Etown in ditching the high cost/high discount model; a model that currently leaves a gray area between the price a student thinks they will be paying at a private institution versus the price that student will actually be paying once they factor in financial aid awards, grants and other scholarship opportunities.
Specifically here at Etown, the Tuition Transparency model will go into effect for enrolled students in the 2019-2020 academic school year.
Therefore, those who were paying the sticker price of “$47,290” will now be paying a maximum of $32,000 per year for their liberal arts education. However, Etown’s shift from the traditional high cost/high discount model only includes tuition expenses. Scholarships and financial aid packages will be adjusted according to the new tuition model, and the cost of room and board will not be decreased.
However, Interim Vice President for Enrollment George Walter stresses that the high cost/high discount model cannot stand as the sole solution to increasing enrollment at every college across the nation.
“This isn’t for everybody,” Walter said. “Colleges with full-paying students will not benefit as much as a school like Etown, where 90 percent of our students receive some kind of financial aid package. We have taken steps to more simply explain what the cost of attending Etown will be.”
Senior Japanese major Sherika Marshall remembers choosing to attend the College not because of the price of tuition, but because of the opportunities with which Etown presented her.
“I decided to attend Etown because it was one of the few local colleges that had a Japanese major,” Marshall said. “Although Etown was more expensive, it had much more to offer than any of the other colleges I toured while I was searching.”
Senior engineering major Abby Kopytko remembers a similar experience when she was searching for private institutions to attend after high school.
“I chose to attend Etown because it was within the distance I wanted to be away from home,” Kopytko said. “I was looking for a school that offered small class sizes and had a D3 women’s lacrosse team. The price of the College factored into my decision a little bit, but I had scholarships to help lower the price.”
Kopytko also stated that meeting the engineering department’s faculty and staff offset any worries she had about the price of attending the College.
“I attended the Accepted Students’ Day, and I had the opportunity to meet the engineering department’s students and staff,” Kopytko said. “I really enjoyed the culture of the department and the opportunities they had to offer me. The price of the College was never my biggest concern.”
With the addition of the four-year graduation guarantee and the addition of new academic majors in fall 2018, along with the opening of the Bowers Center for Sports, Fitness and Well-being in fall 2019, Walter states that the College has done more than decrease tuition for its current and prospective students.
“Success is defined as both professional and personal,” Walter said. “Price is certainly one factor, an important factor, of the decision-making process, but we’re investing. These new policies and on-campus facilities indicate that, as a higher-education institution, we are moving forward and helping our students to become successful individuals upon graduation.”
