Rosemont College, a Catholic school just 10 miles west of Philadelphia, and Utica College in New York both announced in the last two days that they’re moving from a “high price, high discount” model to a “low cost, low discount” model.
“For us and for our families, the system that most college and universities are following of having very high sticker prices and high discounts to go along with it was really getting out of hand,” says Rosemont President Sharon Hirsch. “In our case we were advertising a sticker price that wasn’t the true tuition.”
At the 1,100-student campus of Rosemont, tuition will fall from $32,620 to $18,500, a 43 percent decrease, and at the 4,400-student campus of Utica, tuition will fall from $34,466 in 2016 to $19,996, a 42 percent decrease.
As is the case at colleges and universities across the country, the full cost of tuition is not the real price that students pay after taking into account scholarships, grants, loans and other types of aid. At Rosemont, for example, nearly 90 percent of freshmen pay a discounted price.
Hirsch argues that institutions of higher education are playing a role in driving up the cost of tuition by continuing to increase the size of aid packages they offer students. A more clear and straightforward approach to the costs, she says, will not only put Rosemont on the radar of families who previously overlooked it because of its price, but also restore much-needed clarity to a confusing college finance system.
“Most families have no understanding of the true cost of tuition and often make decisions to include or exclude schools based solely on the artificial sticker price of tuition,” she says. “It would be so much better for our families to know from the outset what the tuition would be and know that it’s affordable.”