Holding the line on college tuition

VALUE DRIVEN: Roger Williams University President Donald J. Farish said the school’s tuition freeze is part of its “focus on value.” / COURTESY RWU
VALUE DRIVEN: Roger Williams University President Donald J. Farish said the school’s tuition freeze is part of its “focus on value.” / COURTESY RWU

For the second year in a row, tuition at Roger Williams University will remain at $29,976, not including fees, room or board. Undergraduates who enroll in the 2014-15 academic year with that rate and remain continuously enrolled will also be charged that fixed amount for four years at the Bristol university.
At only one other private college in Rhode Island is there anything like that offered – the New England Institute of Technology. The school has raised rates on and off for the past 31 years but guarantees that once enrolled and continuously in attendance, students will lock in the tuition rate and fees they start with for the duration of their associate or bachelor’s degree program.
Although tuition and fees rose by 2.9 percent to $21,900 in the 2013-14 academic year, “the tuition is really frozen for the student” going forward, said Bob Theroux, vice president of finance and business administration at the East Greenwich institution.
For both schools’ presidents, the chief motivation has been to give students and parents one more reason to commit to a college education, especially in economically trying times.
“We’re not trying to sell the campus on the basis of price,” said RWU President Donald J. Farish. “What we’re trying to do is focus on value, and the value comes from the educational outcomes, which are designed to ensure as best we can that students will be successful when they graduate.”
NEIT’s fixed tuition freeze “was created to support the large number of students at NEIT that were first-time college students within their families,” NEIT President Richard Gouse told Providence Business News in an emailed statement. “At the time it was initiated, a large portion of the population was from blue-collar families and [it] provided some financial relief and allowed the students and their families to plan for the cost of their education.”
But Farish is the first to also acknowledge that, aside from the influence of demographics, the Great Recession and a slight drop in enrollment in the 2012-13 academic year, the proposition of freezing tuition and locking in that rate for four years is one he’s just as often had to defend as promote.
“I get this a lot,” he said, of the question, “Why aren’t more schools doing this?”
“The less polite way of saying it is, ‘If this is such a good idea, why isn’t everybody else doing it?’ I think it is because people are afraid to step away from what they know. [Some] might interpret this as, ‘They’re desperate.’ We’ve already heard from people saying, ‘Their quality will go down because they don’t have the money.’ The challenge is to diversify your revenue stream and not rely entirely on tuition.” RWU and NEIT are part of a select national group of private colleges and universities that have made this type of commitment.
According to the National Association Independent Colleges and Universities, of the 29 private schools reporting a tuition freeze this year, only RWU and The Sage Colleges of Troy, N.Y., are offering both a tuition freeze and a guarantee for continuously enrolled students.
(NEIT is a member of the association but hadn’t informed it of its fixed tuition guarantees, said Pete Boyle, NAICU’s vice president for public affairs.)
Nationally, over the past five academic years, tuition freezes have more than doubled, from 11 in 2009-10 to 29 this year, but that is still a small portion even of the NAICU membership, which numbers 962, Boyle said.
“Affordability is top of mind for college and university presidents, so institutions are looking creatively at a number of ways to do this,” said Boyle. “There are a handful making cuts, there are a handful doing freezes. They’re being creative to try and find new revenue streams and avoid passing on large tuition increases.”
At Sage, a small university with three graduate schools and 1,500 undergraduates who qualify for the combined freeze and guarantee, the latter was just added this year, said college Vice President Dan Lundquist. His 22-page Power Point presentation to Moody’s illustrates not only increases in enrollment and student retention, but a steady rise in total revenue despite the $28,000 tuition freeze – from $37.8 million in 2008 to $57.3 million in 2012.
Like Lundquist, who was able to show full-time undergraduate enrollment increases from 2,124 in the fall of 2008 to 2,521 in the fall of 2012, Farish at RWU said enrollment and retention growth rates have made the tuition freeze and guarantee viable.
This year, the freshman-to-sophomore retention rate at RWU reached 84 percent, the highest in the school’s history and 6 percentage points higher than last year’s retention rate of 78 percent.
And $1.8 million in added revenue gained from the jump in retention actually exceeded what revenue the university would have generated through a 3 percent tuition increase, Farish said. After hiring consultants Maguire Associates of Boston to investigate when he first began exploring the idea of a tuition freeze, Farish determined that he would have to “demonstrate” to his board of trustees that revenue would come from other sources. The bump up in retention was a bonus, he said.
Other revenue generators included doubling the size of summer school this year; increasing the amount of work the school is doing with continuing studies; and doubling philanthropy. As of this past June, Roger Williams collected $2.5 million in unrestricted giving.
Cost savings from future energy contracts for electricity and gas and averting an anticipated large increase in health care costs also helped make the tuition freeze affordable, Farish said.
Part of the motivation, too, was an isolated drop in enrollment from 1,171 students in 2011-12 to 999 students in 2012-13. Since then, for this academic year, enrollment has climbed back up to 1,110.
That dip “surprised us,” Farish said. “We were not anticipating [being] down 3 percent.”
While the enrollment drop didn’t “cause” RWU to offer a tuition freeze, Farish said, “it affirmed the direction we were heading in. Once we had the enrollment numbers, we said, ‘This is no longer a theoretical exercise.’ We had to move forward.”
Other Rhode Island colleges and universities say they are trying to hold the line on tuition increases as best they can.
“Our administration, finance committee and board are looking carefully at the question of cost in higher education,” said Matt Boxler, spokesman for Salve Regina University, “but we have not made a decision with regard to next year’s tuition.”
Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee and the General Assembly did provide funding to allow the state’s three public schools – the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College and the Community College of Rhode Island – to freeze tuition for the 2013-14 academic year, said Michael Trainor, special assistant to the commissioner of higher education, but continuing that is not yet a given.
A spokeswoman for Chafee, who is not seeking re-election, reiterated the governor’s commitment to college affordability, which he considers the key to job growth.
“It is his hope to hold the line on tuition,” Chafee spokeswoman Christine Hunsinger said. •

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