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State governments, hard-pressed by persistent budget deficits and vastly underfunded pension plans, are cutting costs, including aid to state colleges and universities. After decades of growth, state funding for higher education has fallen 15 percent since 2008, adjusted for inflation. Federal funding for university research is also declining.
Responses to the crisis in higher-education financing are developing and varied. Some institutions are raising tuition. Some are reorienting their programs away from the liberal arts and toward training for careers.
While some institutions are considering tuition freezes as a way of containing costs, the University of the South, known as Sewanee, has gone even further. Last February, Sewanee cut tuition and fees for the 2011-2012 academic year by 10 percent. Last November, the school announced that for current students, costs for the 2012-2013 year were frozen at $41,518. Then in January of this year, the university froze the annual costs for incoming freshmen in 2012 at $44,630 for four years, or through the spring of 2016.
Sewanee ExperimentSewanee wants to address the spiraling costs of higher education, the lingering effects of the recession and the siphoning-off of prospects by state schools where student costs are rising in many cases due to cuts in state funding, even though costs remain lower than at private colleges. The tuition cut and freezes also reduce the pressure to buy attractive students with merit scholarships and help Sewanee compete with other private schools, where tuition and fees continue to rise much faster than the consumer price index. Sewanee now plans to concentrate its financial aid on needy students.
The marketplace has responded very positively to these actions. Applications for this fall have risen 15 percent from last year, and the quality of applicants has improved. The entering freshman class in 2011 numbered 433, up from 401 in 2010.
The school has also become more selective, offering admission to 56 percent, compared with 60 percent earlier. It will be interesting to see if other colleges follow Sewanee’s lead.
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