The University announced on March 2 that it will increase next year’s tuition by 5.5 percent and combine the fees for room and board into one bill. Tuition, which is currently $34,630 without the student activity fee, will rise to $36,536. Next year’s total costs will be $46,936 for lowerclassmen and $48,318 for upperclassmen, as reported in the Wesleyan Connection.
“The tendency is to react to the sticker price and the rise year to year and act as if that is the whole story,” said Vice President for Public Affairs Justin Harmon. “But it’s a lot more complex.”
The new housing fee replaces the system in which students are charged according to residential type and instead breaks down charges according to two categories, lowerclassmen and upperclassmen.
“It’s more efficient in that sense,” said President Doug Bennet.
According to the Wesleyan Connection, the consolidated housing fees will be $10,130 for freshmen and sophomores and $11,512 for juniors and seniors, an increase of $590 and $550, respectively,
Administrators attribute the 5.5 percent increase to rises in the cost of salaries, benefits, energy, and housing that outpace inflation.
“It’s a truism—but it happens to be true—that university costs go up higher than the [Consumer Price Index],” Harmon said. “The real challenge is looking at how family income goes up relative to the real cost of higher education.”
According to Harmon, economists have attained a more nuanced understanding of the relation between university tuition and family income in past years by considering the impact of financial aid.
“Families are about where they were 10 years ago,” he said.
In his mind, the real barrier to higher education for lower-income families is not the prohibitive cost of tuition, but rather the failure to prepare and properly educate students and their families from elementary school onwards. According to Harmon, Bennet sent a letter to Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell on the occasion of her reelection, stressing the importance of early preparation.
“One of the real challenges is to communicate with families from the time they have small children so that planning college is possible,” Harmon said.
Bennet, whose son is superintendent of the Denver public school system, said that the University is encouraging the state legislature to pass the governor’s education proposals.
In addition to emphasizing preparation for higher education, University officials, according to Vice President for Finance and Administration John Meerts, will continue their commitment to financial aid.
“The Wesleyan financial aid budget for undergraduate scholarships will increase by $1.6 million (5.7 percent) over this year’s budget to reflect the increase in student charges and to fund a new initiative to reduce loans for the lowest income students,” Meerts wrote in an e-mail. “Students on financial aid will find that their aid will cover the increases in student charges in addition to now also covering the differential housing costs that were previously covered by loans.”
According to Meerts, education at the University is subsidized above and beyond financial aid. Tuition and housing charges account for less than 80 percent of the full costs each student respresents. The University makes up the remaining 20 percent through endowment spending and fundraising.
Administrators regard the increase as part of the University’s long-term plan to bring finances into order and recoup the money necessary to grow the endowment.
“It’s very much in line with the long-term projections,” Bennet said.
Meerts echoed this sentiment, saying that the University had built in annual five percent increases in tuition into its projections for the next 10 years.
“As to the question of long range tuition increases, they will vary from year to year and, as in this year, will track overall costs in higher education at places such as Wesleyan,” Meerts wrote.
Leave a Reply