Photo by Megan White

President Carl Strikwerda broke the news Wednesday, Sept. 12 in a campuswide meeting in Leffler Chapel and Performance Center that Elizabethtown College will drop tuition 32 percent starting the 2019-2020 school year as part of its new “Tuition Transparency” program.

This change marks the College’s break from the high cost, high discount tuition model, which displays how a majority of Etown students receive a substantial amount of financial aid to meet the high costs of tuition.

This high cost, high discount model thus resulted in a high “sticker price” for the College, which caused a portion of high school students to not even consider Etown as a potential college choice for them. They believed they could not afford the high price of tuition, and they did not understand the substantial financial aid Etown students normally receive, as mentioned in Wednesday’s announcement.

These changes to the College’s tuition policy are an attempt to make Etown more marketable to potential students. The current students who sat in Leffler Chapel reacted with loud cheers to hear the 32 percent drop in tuition, but as the announcement went on and more was explained, students realized what this drop meant for them: a tuition freeze for 2019-2020 which guarantees their out-of-pocket expenses for tuition will not exceed the amount they paid for 2018-2019.

“I think many students initially understood the announcement to mean a 32 percent reduction in their actual costs,” professor and department chair of political science Dr. April Kelly-Woessner said. “This was unfortunate, because I think the new tuition model does have a real net benefit for our current students, but that message was lost in people’s disappointment.”

Current students will switch into the new tuition model, along with new students, in the 2019-2020 school year.

As part of the tuition freeze, current students will pay as much as they did out-of-pocket for the 2018-2019 school year, as long as their financial aid eligibility remains constant.

This contrasts with the past annual increases in tuition, which averaged 4.2 percent in the last five years.

However, to account for this decrease in the “sticker price” of tuition, current students’ Etown gift aid will be lowered proportionately so that students will not pay more than they did previously.

The only increase that students will pay for the 2019-2020 school year will be for room and board, but the increase is guaranteed to not exceed three percent, so the difference between out-of-pocket expenses for the 2019-2020 school year will be a few hundred dollars, as long as financial aid eligibility remains the same.

Even if tuition increases after the 2019-2020 school year, students will still be saving money, since percentage-based increases will be applied to a lower tuition base.

Thursday, Sept. 13, Strikwerda, Interim Vice President for Enrollment Management George Walter and Vice President for Student Life Dr. Celestino Limas met with Student Senate and other students to speak more about the tuition transparency program’s implications for current students and answer any questions students may still have.

At the start of the meeting, Walter, Strikwerda and Limas all expressed that they could have done better with the announcement the day prior, and that the announcement was marketed towards the wrong audience.

“We realize we could’ve done a better job yesterday,” Limas said. He also wanted the students present to know that he and the administration were listening to the feedback students gave.

“We gave the wrong message first,” Walter said. Before the meeting, Walter said that it would have been better to announce the tuition freeze for current students first, since the initial announcement of a tuition decrease was “a headline for the external audience.”

After giving students an in-depth overview of how the new tuition model will be affecting them, the three administrators opened the floor for questions.

Most of the questions pertained to scholarships. Sophomore Rachel Freed asked why scholarships were being cut at a higher percentage than the tuition decrease.

Walter explained that more drastic cuts were made to scholarships to balance the budget, but he assured students that their out-of-pocket costs for tuition would stay the same.

Students also asked how 4+1 programs will be affected by the tuition decrease, and Walter said that the programs will use the new model as well. Current students going into graduate school programs at the College will have their fifth-year scholarships assessed based on their tuitions as undergraduate students.

Additionally, students were concerned about fee increases apart from tuition, since room and board will have a maximum of a three percent increase for 2019-2020, though the exact amount of the increase, if there even is an increase, is undecided yet.

“Will other fees get thrown at us?” senior Kyle Lumbert asked.

“We have no plans to do any other fees,” Strikwerda said.

Throughout the meeting, as students and the administration went back and forth about the new tuition model, Strikwerda encouraged that their dialogue continue throughout the tuition rollout.

Running concurrently as the Student Senate meeting was a faculty meeting to answer professors’ questions about the new tuition program.

Professor of communications and Faculty Assembly Secretary Dr. Kirsten Johnson said that a lot of the questions and concerns raised by faculty were about Wednesday’s announcement.

“Faculty seemed to be happy with the decision to reset the tuition but weren’t necessarily happy with the way it was presented to students,” Johnson said.

“I think it would’ve helped on Wednesday to have announced first the tuition freeze and lower tuition increases in the future because the people in front of us were the current students,” Strikwerda said. “But I think we cleared that up and most people understand that now.”

This is not the only initiative Etown is taking to improve the College for new and current students alike, since Walter has stated that this tuition decrease model has been successful at other colleges when it is coupled with other improvements.

“This is just one more piece that we value as important,” Walter said.

More information, as well as frequently asked questions (FAQ), can be found on the Etown website under the admissions and financial aid pages.