The University will increase tuition and fees for undergraduates by 3.5 percent for the next fiscal year, following a 3.5 percent increase last year and a 4.5 percent increase the year prior. Rising tuition costs cannot be sustained in the longterm, but they are currently necessary for the University to maintain its competitiveness with peer institutions, said Provost Mark Schlissel P'15, who heads the University Resource Committee, the body that makes recommendations about University budget decisions.
Some committee members stated that continuing to raise tuition by 3 to 5 percent each year "cannot continue indefinitely," but finding a feasible solution is difficult, wrote Evan Schwartz '13, one of the two undergraduate representatives on the committee, in an email to The Herald. The total charge for an undergraduate to attend Brown next year will be $55,016, reflecting an increase of more than $17,000 over the past ten years, a rate that far exceeds that of inflation. Tuition currently accounts for more than 40 percent of the University's operating budget.
"I think all universities are worried about outstripping families' abilities to send their kids to school, even with financial aid," Schlissel said. Penn, Dartmouth and Princeton have also released their tuition rates for next year, each increasing their tuition by 3.9 percent or more.
Though Schlissel said tuition cannot keep going up, freezing or decreasing tuition would have a negative impact on the University.
"The costs of running the University are inexorably increasing," he said. Each year, the University increases staff and faculty salaries, maintains new facilities, hires new faculty and offers competitive deals to the best faculty so they are not "lured away" by other schools, Schlissel said. Schlissel said the University is looking to combat rising tuition rates by diversifying funding sources through an executive master's program for mid-career professionals and by "aggressively trying to increase our philanthropy."
Taking a stand
Despite the trend of rising higher education costs, some schools are pushing back, attempting to lessen the financial burden on families trying to educate their children. This year, Mount Holyoke College, a private liberal arts college in Massachusetts, instituted a freeze in tuition rates.
"It was a combination of our mission, our philosophical commitment to increase democracy and the fact that we have an unsustainable model where we can't continue to raise tuition" that prompted the college to keep tuition rates stable for the next year, said Mount Holyoke President Lynn Pasquerella PhD '85.
Mount Holyoke hopes to be able to keep tuition costs stable for the next several years, but it is hard to determine what to expect given the unstable economic climate, Pasquerella said.
Over the last five years, inflation-adjusted tuition and fee rates at four-year private colleges and universities have actually decreased by over 4 percent, the College Board reported in November.
Schlissel said he found this information surprising. "Maybe what we lose track of is that there are thousands of colleges and universities in the U.S.," he said. "I guess we're only thinking of a small subset."
Increasing aid
As tuition increases, the financial aid budget must expand to cover growing need. The University's financial aid budget will climb to $90.3 million, up from $88.2 million last year, said Jim Tilton, director of financial aid.
As tuition rates are being discussed each year, Tilton said he runs models based on different scenarios to determine what type of financial aid budget will be needed.
Pasquerella said the tuition freeze will benefit Mount Holyoke because they will not have to give out as much need-based aid, allowing them to give out more merit aid to attract strong students. But Tilton said this was not a consideration for Brown since the University does not offer merit scholarships.
"I think Brown has a very competitive financial aid program," Tilton said. Unlike Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, the University still includes loans in some packages, "but our financial aid programs are as competitive as Dartmouth, Cornell and others and substantially better than the vast majority of institutions in the country."
Though the financial aid budget increases as tuition increases, Tilton said, "it's also the commitment the institution has made to financial need" that is responsible for its growth.
Moving forward
Schlissel said it is crucial that the University "strike the right balance between moderating the impact on the families that send their kids here and then achieving the full ambitions of the University."
Even at Princeton, where the endowment per student is nearly ten times that of Brown's, tuition rates are still increasing.
"All of our peer institutions are ambitious - they want to be part of a culture of continuously improving," he said. "The ability to adjust tuition in proportion to the new and exciting things they do is real - it's very tempting."
But not everyone believes the University should attempt to compete with peer institutions by expanding expensive initiatives.
"I would say that the biggest issue Brown has is a lack of a long-term vision that answers not only the question of how it wants to get to where it wants to be, but also where it wants to be," Schwartz wrote in an email to The Herald.
"Rather than try to compete with other schools at their own game, Brown should redefine the game and excel in the direction it really wants to go," he wrote, stressing that this vision should be developed collaboratively.
