University, College Presidents Discuss High Tuition Costs
BOARDMAN, Ohio – Balancing the need to provide services to students against the bottom line is a difficult tightrope for educational institutions to walk, university and community college leaders agreed Tuesday during a roundtable discussion conducted by The Business Journal at the Holiday Inn Boardman.
The presidents of five colleges and universities -- Cynthia Anderson from Youngstown State University, Richard Dornan from Westinster College, Richard Jewell from Grove City College and Laura Meeks from Eastern Gateway Community College -- as well as the dean of Kent State University's Trumbull Campus, Robert Sines, took part in the discussion. The transcript will be published in the Feb. 12 edition of The Business Journal.
Tuition costs were among several topics disussed during the session.
“This really is a challenge for everyone,” said YSU's Anderson. Every student coming into YSU has a different need or set of challenges and issues, she noted. “We’re leading our universities at a time when we should most likely be providing more and more of these services and we have less to do it with. Believe me, coming from the student affairs realm, nothing hurts my heart more than increasing tuition.”
YSU has tried to fight tightening budgets by collapsing offices without impacting programs for students, downsizing its workforce and keeping debt to a minimum “because at some point that debt goes onto the students,” Anderson said.
According to a 2008 report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, college tuition and fees rose 439% over the prior 25-year period, said Richard Jewell, president of Grove City College, Grove City, Pa.. That compared to a 251% increase in medical costs over the same period. At the same time, the family median income rose 149% -- a little over a third of the rate of increase for college – and the Consumer Price Index rose 106%. “Nothing has been more expensive on a year-over-year basis [than college tuition],” Jewell remarked.
One phenomenon contributing to the increased tuition cost for small liberal arts colleges like Grove City and Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa., is the additional expense of providing services that students “need, want or expect,” Jewell said. Colleges are “building climbing walls and putting in better food because that’s the only differentiator,” he continued.
“That ‘arms race’ in which so many schools have been involved has really added to the cost. In concept, college presidents and boards are creating destinations but not educational destinations,” he commented. “There are so many ancillary things that are being offered and they’re not really talking about the core competency that we’re all here for -- that’s the instruction of our students and the preparation of them.”
The market is part of the problem, observed Westminster’s president, Richard Dorman. “Parents are both the victims and the perpetrators of the problem in terms of the expectations that they have for their sons and daughters, and that has helped to drive up the cost as well,” he said. “We have various structures in place that have contributed to increasing costs as well.”
Dorman cited Vartan Gregorian, a past president of Brown University, who observed that colleges and universities today are “very much like little city-states,” with their own hotels, restaurants and police forces, he said.
“They are mini-societies in and of themselves and it’s very, very expensive to run those kinds of things. For schools like Grove City and Westminster which have a smaller student body, we don’t have the efficiencies that a large community college may have or a state university may have as well," Dorman said.
But colleges and universities “don’t make widgets,” Dorman cautioned. They are providing services, which by their very nature cost more to deliver than manufacturing a product. Also, everyone learns differently “so learning has to be tailored to the individual,” and to the extent education can be personalized, costs are going to increase.
In Ohio, the funding model for state institutions appears to be becoming like the model for private institutions, said Robert Sines, dean of the Kent State University Trumbull Campus, Champion. For the 2012 fiscal year, “less than 20% of my budget came from state funding,” he said. Since the branch campus lacks revenue generators such as dorms, the only other source is tuition and fees, which he said are “extremely low,” half what it is at the main Kent campus.
Sines said he has been “very judicious” in filling vacancies” and eliminated programs that didn’t’ appear to be effective or have enough students to be viable. Additionally, the administration has tried to build up the endowment and scholarships. And the campus recently undertook an energy audit that is resulting in savings on utilities.
“The biggest part of our operating budget is personnel,” acknowledged Laura Meeks, president of Eastern Gateway Community College, Steubenville. Personnel expenses such as salaries and benefits account for 66% of the budget for the community college, which has campuses in Mahoning and Trumbull counties. Technology is another big driver of costs, she pointed out, noting that just 20 years ago there wasn’t very much technology in classrooms.
“Now you don’t do blackboards, you don’t do whiteboards – you do multimedia classrooms,” she said.
One way Eastern Gateway has attempted to deal with rising costs is by entering into partnerships, such as the one it is using to fund its new building in Youngstown, Meeks said. The community college also now subcontracts services such as its bookstore and day care and security services. “We’re not in those businesses. Our business is education,” she said.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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