New London’s Colby-Sawyer College will cut tuition to $17,500 per year starting in the fall of 2023, slashing the sticker price from more than $46,000, with an eye toward competing with New Hampshire’s public colleges.
Colby-Sawyer President Sue Stuebner said 100% of Colby-Sawyer students get financial aid of some kind, and almost no one pays the sticker price. But not everyone knows that, she said, and too many prospective students stop looking at Colby-Sawyer after they saw that high sticker price.
A recent study from federal student loan servicer Sallie Mae found more than four out of five families will dismiss a college based on the price of attendance, without any other research.
“We realized we’re not even getting to have those conversations with families,” Stuebner said about the school’s generous financial aid. “A big part of this is reaching a wider applicant pool than we’ve been able to in the past.”
Growing the pool of prospective students is getting more and more important for colleges in New England because of the region’s demographics. There are fewer students in high school than recent decades, and colleges are in fierce competition for those that remain.
Colby-Sawyer hasn’t been immune, Stuebner said. The college counts only 750 undergraduates, though a growing number of graduate and professional programs are helping keep enrollment steadier.
For smaller colleges, shrinking college enrollment and less tuition coming in can make it harder to invest in the campus and faculty, or even lead to financial instability.
Stuebner said a group of the college trustees have been meeting since the beginning of the year to talk about the future of the small college against these headwinds.
The high-tuition, high-aid model is typical for liberal arts colleges, but Stuebner said she and the trustees quickly started to ask if that was the future for Colby-Sawyer, with that competition for students, and growing alarm about the cost of a degree.
The college brought in a consultant who has helped colleges in Pennsylvania, the Midwest and the Southeast to figure out where to set a lower tuition rate. The college settled on $17,500 largely because it’s what most students actually end up paying for tuition. Room and board at Colby-Sawyer adds another $16,000 to the cost of attendance.
Stuebner said the tuition reduction shouldn’t mean any major changes to the college. That’s in contrast with the move from Southern New Hampshire University to slash the cost of attendance to $10,000 per year — with students living on campus, but receiving most instruction remotely.
Colby-Sawyer won’t be the cheapest college in New Hampshire, Stuebner said, but it will be a lot less expensive — and crucially, she said, the sticker price will be closer to the state’s public colleges and universities.
Out-of-pocket costs for students and their families will be about the same, Stuebner said, so the move won’t really impact current students or hurt the college’s bottom line. The biggest change, Stuebner hoped, will be more transparency around what it might cost to go to Colby-Sawyer.
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