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-by Riley Wyant | September 1, 2020 at 8:36 PM EDT – Updated September 1 at 8:49 PM

“CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) – With COVID-19 cases within the University of Virginia community continuing to rise, the school decided to convert four additional dorms into quarantine housing over the weekend.

The last-minute decision left hundreds of students, including those in the International Residential College (IRC), Johnson, Malone and Weedon Houses and Shea House, only 24 hours to find an alternative.

Students are bewildered and wish the administration handled it better.

“The overall feeling was just betrayal honestly,” IRC Prime Minister and student Charmi Patel said. “Of course we were frustrated, but also we were just deeply saddened that UVA took this action without giving any prior notice.”

“The reassignments were all across grounds,” another IRC student Soumil Madhiwala said. “You could put your preferences, but where you get placed would be obviously random.”

IRC students including Patel and Madhiwala were left wondering: Why this wasn’t this decided earlier and why their room assignments?

UVA declined the opportunity to be interviewed but provided a statement saying this decision was made in ’real time’ as they learned from the mistakes of other universities and consulted with public health experts.

For students like Patel, this knee-jerk decision raises larger concerns. “If they’re already worried about making new spaces for quarantine housing, what does that really mean about UVA’s ability to welcome students back safely?”

The university’s administration claims they made the decision based on the low occupancy of IRC housing, which stood at below 35%.

For Madhiwala, the low occupancy was the main reason he opted to return to grounds. “But then things unfolded over the weekend and I started to look at more of the coronavirus stats that were coming out with UVA,” he said. “I made a decision that I would just cancel my lease and do virtual instruction isolated at home.”

Now, he’s worried about his friends who are still caught up in the mess. “It’s very tough for them because some of them absolutely hate where they’ve been reassigned,” he said.

“There’s nothing that housing can do for them because housing didn’t make this decision. It was the UVA executive team that made the decision,” Madhiwala added.

While both students understand the low occupancy reasoning behind UVA’s decision, they wish they would have given them more time and not targeted their multicultural community.

“We have a lot of international students and tearing apart this multicultural community was sort of the opposite of what they could do to help the situation that’s going on at UVA and in our country,” Patel said.

Copyright 2020 WVIR. All rights reserved.”

UVA’s Full Statement regarding the situation:

“Since the Fall 2020 committee was formed in May, the University has been planning to have a number of isolation and quarantine spaces for students who test positive and for students who are exposed to those who are positive. The very recent experiences of other colleges and universities informed our decision to increase the number of such spaces on Grounds. The dorms identified have relatively low occupancy and afforded us an opportunity to consolidate residents and free up vacant rooms for isolation and quarantine use. This decision was made in real time as we were learning from other universities and consulting with our public health experts.

As the University’s senior leadership and the Fall 2020 committee deliberated on the decision that was announced yesterday afternoon, many across Grounds worked to increase our isolation and quarantine space. The Office of Housing & Residence Life surveyed existing residences, identifying those with low overall occupancy and suited to isolation and quarantine. We also identified alternative places for those residence staff and students to live.

This decision needed to be made quickly and was made after consultation with the Provost, the Chief Operating Officer, and the Vice President and Chief Student Affairs Officer. The decision to stay the course this semester was announced late Friday, and Housing & Residence Life made every effort to provide the notice that they could to resident assistants, to consult SDAC, and notify students living in these residences. All impacted RAs have been assigned to new RA rooms elsewhere on Grounds. This was a difficult decision and we wish it were otherwise.

Of the 4,400 students living in our residences, this decision impacted a couple hundred students. While the decision was abrupt for many of them, most have been understanding given the circumstances and the need to designate additional isolation and quarantine space. The University will do everything it can to manage the transition for RAs and students, and to welcome them into their new residences.

A few additional details:

• There is adequate space to accommodate all impacted students on Grounds. Students have been given an opportunity to share their preferences for reassignment through the housing portal, and Housing & Residence Life will make every effort to accommodate those preferences.
• The occupancy of each dorm converted into isolation/quarantine housing was below 35%.
• IRC, JMW, and Shea House residents who cancel their 2020-2021 housing contracts will not be charged housing fees, as long as they contact HRL”

-by Patrick Thomas

“Business school students are bracing for an uncertain job market this coming school year as many traditional corporate recruiters shelve their usual fall hiring plans.

At a time of year when many business school students are polishing their networking skills and getting their business haircuts, a number of big companies, including consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, say there will be no jobs on offer to second-year M.B.A. candidates, beyond those who interned this summer, looking to lock down a position before they graduate.

The murky job market has both students and schools worried. M.B.A. students can pay $200,000 or more to attend some of the most elite programs, once two years of living costs are factored in, for the promise of an accelerated career and higher salary. Schools market strong job-placement rates to prospective students; those rates ranged between 80% to 90% for many highly ranked programs before the pandemic hit.

PwC said it has no plans to hire up to 100 second-year M.B.A. students as it usually does each fall. This year, only those who had summer internships with the firm got job offers this month for positions that will start after graduation in the spring of 2021, said Rod Adams, the U.S. recruitment leader at the company.

“Those that have interned with us have generally performed better when they start full-time,” he said. “You are not starting from ground zero.”

Other companies say they are taking a wait-and-see approach. Consulting giant Bain & Co. is reducing the number of second-year M.B.A.s it plans to hire but has made offers to this summer’s entire M.B.A. intern class, said Keith Bevans, a partner who leads recruiting for the firm. Because of job market uncertainty, Mr. Bevans said he expects a higher percentage of interns than usual to accept.

EY, one of the largest professional services firms in the world and the umbrella organization for its U.S. affiliate, Ernst & Young LLP, is waiting to see how a potential second wave of Covid-19 infections plays out before it finalizes hiring plans for the year.

“In a normal year, we’d have everything buttoned up and schedules set, we would have already been on campus in several places,” said Dan Black, global recruiting lead for EY. “The next four to five months are going to determine a lot of things.”

While EY’s M.B.A. hiring is uncertain, the firm plans to make a lot of job offers to undergraduates, who typically take roles in tax and assurance when they graduate, Mr. Black said. Those units involve annuity work that needs to be done regardless of what is happening in the broader economy.

“M.B.A.s primarily fill roles in consulting and strategy and transaction, which tend to have more project work that is affected more by the relative strength of the economy,” he said.

Kevin Stacia, an M.B.A. career coach and corporate-relations manager at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, said students and employers are stuck in limbo for now. “Nobody is making commitments yet,” he said.

Mateusz Madry, who is working to complete his M.B.A. at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School in Boston, said he pursued a business degree to kick-start a career in digital marketing. But he struggled to land an internship this summer and instead worked at the university.

“The job search for us M.B.A.s is so important in terms of connections and getting to know people. When Covid[-19] hit, I feel like I lost those connections,” the 30-year-old said. “All of us are entering into this unknown in the fall. It’s a hard time for everyone.”

Students who weren’t able to land a summer internship—or had their offer rescinded—fear they could have a tough time finding the job they thought the pricey degree would give them upon graduation. RelishCareers said in a recent survey more than a third of 2021 M.B.A. candidates have had job and internship offers rescinded or changed because of the pandemic, compared with about 20% of M.B.A.s who graduated this year. The survey found offers extended to the class of 2021 have been hit hardest by the pandemic because companies consider internships less essential in an emergency.

Several big companies, including McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group, had already pushed back the start dates for spring graduates who expected to begin full-time roles this summer. Many who had locked down summer 2020 job offers back in the fall of 2019 are still waiting to hear when they can report to work. PwC says some new employees may not start until November.

A recent survey of more than 1,000 employers found that companies across an array of industries planned to hire nearly 60% fewer management positions this year, shrinking the number of landing spots for newly minted M.B.A.s along with other white-collar workers, according to the Association of M.B.A.s and Business Graduates Association, one of the three main accreditation bodies of business schools, which conducted the research.

Some sectors, including retail and tourism, have been predictably hard-hit by pandemic closures, which has curbed their ability to hire, survey respondents said. Other sectors were a surprise. Logistics companies, for instance, who are riding a pandemic-fueled surge in e-commerce to higher profit and revenue, reported some of the largest management hiring drop-offs.

“Some blue-chip organizations that every year took a few M.B.A.s into their cohort might take a break for a year,” said Andrew Main Wilson, who runs the Association of M.B.A.s. “Many companies feel if they are being responsible, the first thing they’ll stop is recruitment and save existing jobs of good employees.”

More than half of respondents in banking, energy, engineering and construction said they were hiring fewer leadership roles in 2020 compared with 2019, and nearly two-thirds of organizations polled in legal services and pharmaceuticals said they were in the market for fewer managers this year. In contrast, about a fourth of companies polled in insurance, entertainment and computers and electronics said they planned to hire more management roles.

As traditional M.B.A. employers in consulting and financial services dial back recruiting plans, new employers in technology are emerging to fill the gap, said Raj Echambadi, dean of Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business.

“We are hoping the losses in traditional industries can be actually taken care of by different types of organizations,” he said.

Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. started their B-school recruiting process for jobs and internships earlier than ever before and indicated they plan to make more job offers to second-year M.B.A.s than usual, according to Drew Pascarella, associate dean of M.B.A. programs at Cornell University’s SC Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Among M.B.A. pursuers is ServiceNow Inc., a cloud-computing company that launched its B-school intern program last year and next spring aims to hire about 10 to 20 additional M.B.A.s than it did this past year.

“This is a long-term commitment,” said Chirantan CJ Desai, ServiceNow’s chief product officer, who manages the company’s B-school hires. “M.B.A.s help us create better products. I’m optimistic about the graduating class of 2021.”

-by Patrick Thomas
April 22, 2020

“As companies continue work-from-home edicts, many students see their offers rescinded; ‘It’s demoralizing’

Alexandra Pirsos, a junior studying marketing at Elon University in North Carolina, had been planning to intern for Wayfair Inc. since October. Last week, the online purveyor of home furnishings canceled its summer program.

Ms. Pirsos, 21, joins a growing cohort of college students who have had their summer-internship plans quashed or shortened to just a few weeks of online work experience amid the spread of the new coronavirus, which has sent millions of employees home to work remotely.

While college seniors from the class of 2020 now face graduating into a recession in May, students with more time left in school are adjusting their career plans as internships crucial to their future professional development disappear. Internships can be valuable to college students who use them to build their résumés and develop an industry network—and often lead to full-time job offers.

“Knowing I won’t have that opportunity to network, to learn, to grow but then to also possibly have a job after I graduate is definitely scary and unsettling,” Ms. Pirsos said. “Online school is over in three weeks, and I have no idea what the future holds.”

Jasmine Cadavez, 20, is a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh and plans to graduate next spring. Because she is finishing college a year early, she is frustrated that her internship at a regional bank was shortened several weeks because she said it was critical to remaining competitive in the job market.

“It’s out of my control,” she said. “There’s nothing I can really do.”

An April 17 survey of companies from the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that 16% of respondents had revoked their summer-internship offers and an additional 23% were considering rescinding them. The poll also found that 39% of employers are planning to move their internship program completely online.

For two-year graduate students, internships lead to full-time jobs after graduation or provide crucial experience for career switchers.

“We are late in the internship recruiting process now. Many employers have filled all of their opportunities and are no longer accepting applicants, which leaves students with significantly fewer positions to be considered for,” said Kevin Stacia, an M.B.A. career coach and corporate-relations manager at Georgia Tech.

Mercy Iyere, a first-year graduate student studying city planning at Rutgers University, is still searching for a summer internship. She said many employers have told her in recent weeks that they have frozen their intern-hiring plans. If she can’t find anything for the summer, Ms. Iyere said she might move in with her mother in Massachusetts and brush up on her data skills in Python, a coding language, or look for a temporary job at a warehouse for Amazon.com Inc.

“It’s not like an undergrad where you have four years. You have one summer to work for someone full-time,” said Ms. Iyere, who used to work as a staff geologist in Atlanta. She has another year of grad school before earning her degree in the spring of 2021. “A lot of people I know have had internships canceled or put on hold. It’s demoralizing.”

Some employers are still choosing to honor their intern commitments and moving summer programs online or finding other ways to compensate students rather than completely rescind offers, said Jeff Beavers, executive director of Michigan State University’s career-services network.

“For many employers, their internship program is critical to their talent pipeline for future open positions,” he said.

Moelis & Co., an investment bank in New York, shortened its summer internship program to four weeks online beginning in early July. At the same time it revamped the internship program, the bank also extended full-time job offers to all of its undergraduate and M.B.A. summer interns, promising them jobs that start in 2021.

Oil-field services company Halliburton Co., which suspended its summer 2020 internship program, is giving its roughly 100 would-be interns a one-time stipend, a company spokeswoman said. She declined to specify how much the stipend is. The company plans to cut more than 1,000 jobs in Texas and Oklahoma and said in March that it had furloughed 3,500 employees in Houston.

“Our intent with summer internships is to provide college students with a meaningful experience that offers the chance to learn more about our company, culture and professional job opportunities,” she said. “Unfortunately, we do not believe we can provide such an experience in this current environment.”

-by Jillian Berman

Christian Baran has been thinking about the value his college tuition is supposed to be buying since the spring.

Baran, 21, was a sophomore at Cornell University when the school, like most others, rushed students home and into online classrooms in March as the reality of the pandemic began to set in. Baran thought his family might get some sort of tuition refund, given that the experience was so different from what he thought his tuition was buying.

“But we didn’t get anything,” Baran said. Like almost every college in the country, Cornell didn’t give back any tuition money, but the school did provide rebates for housing and dining contracts.

Now, as the start of the fall semester at the school approaches, the school is moving forward with a planned tuition increase of 3.6% that was approved in January before the pandemic. Cornell, which is planning to bring students back to Ithaca and offer some in-person classes, is expecting to increase the amount of financial aid it awards, and will be drawing more than typical from its endowment in fiscal year 2021 to generate an additional $15 million.

Still, it’s not enough for Baran. “It seems ridiculous to keep paying the same amount for what seems to be an inferior hybridized education,” he said. And that’s a best-case scenario, assuming the school doesn’t end up shifting completely to remote instruction, as some have already done.

So instead of paying Cornell tuition, Baran decided to enroll in community college for the fall semester and hopefully return to Cornell in the spring. “I don’t think that it’s worth it,” he said.

Cornell is one of at least 39 U.S. institutions whose endowments are in the top 100, that is going ahead with a planned tuition increase for undergraduates this upcoming academic year, according to a MarketWatch analysis. We found that 35 others are planning to keep tuition the same as last year and five are discounting tuition from previously announced levels. (Of the other institutions in the top 100 endowments, four are based in Canada, four are institutions serving only graduate students and several did not provide the requested information by press time. We will update when we hear back).

1 Harvard University Increase 4% Rachael Dane, a Harvard spokesperson wrote in an email that “the overwhelming reason for the decision to deliver all instruction remotely is Harvard’s commitment to protecting the academic enterprise and preserving academic continuity for all of our students. Continued remote instruction ensures that academic continuity for all students is maintained, even if travel restrictions, visa issues, or health considerations keep them away from campus.” The school is also adjusting financial aid by providing a room and board allowance of $5,000 for students living off campus who receive financial aid, among other provisions.

2 The University of Texas System Increase 2.60% The increase was set by the University of Texas System Board of Regents in November 2019 and is based on the rate of inflation per the higher education price index for institutions across the country.

3 Yale University Increase 3.90% In an FAQ page, officials note that first-year students and sophomores who enroll in both the fall and spring semesters, but take at least one remotely, will be eligible to take two summer courses in 2021. “the special arrangement covers tuition for two courses, whether taken in one of the two five-week sessions, or spread out across both, and whether taken on or away from campus, in person or online,” the FAQ reads.

4 Stanford University Increase 4.90% In a June message to the university community, Stanford officials wrote. “Anticipating a greater need for financial aid, the trustees approved a 3% increase in payout from endowment funds that support student financial aid. This funding will help Stanford fully cover tuition costs beginning in the 2020-21 year for undergraduate families with annual incomes below $150,000, up from the previous $125,000 threshold.”

5 Princeton University Discount 10.00%

6 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Freeze In a July announcement to the university community officials wrote, “tuition will be held at last year’s level, eliminating a planned 2020-21 increase announced earlier, and undergraduates will receive a $5,000 grant to offset their annual cost to attend MIT.”

7 University of Pennsylvania Freeze In an August message to the university community, officials wrote, “tuition for the fall semester will be rolled back by 3.9%, thus freezing tuition at last year’s rate, and the General Fee will be reduced for the fall semester by 10%.”

They added that “student financial aid budgets for tuition and general fees will remain at current levels, despite the decrease in cost to students, and students remaining at home will still receive aid for food commensurate with our off-campus dining rate.”

8 The Texas A&M University System Increase 2.60%

9 University of Michigan Increase 1.90% — From a tuition FAQ: “The key reason for increasing tuition is inflation and the long-term decline in state funding.”
— “This budget includes spending more than $400 million from our endowment, even though the value of the endowment will undoubtedly be diminished by the severe COVID-19 induced economic recession. The budget also calls for using reserves to cover an expected deficit due to the pandemic of at least $19 million.”

10 University of California Freeze

11 UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME INCREASE 3.50% IN A JUNE MESSAGE TO THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY, OFFICIALS WROTE THAT THEY EXPECTED THAT STUDENTS AND FAMILIES WOULD NEED AN ADDITIONAL $30 MILLION IN NEED-BASED FINANCIAL AID THIS YEAR. ALREADY, A STUDENT RELIEF EMERGENCY FUND HAS RAISED MORE THAN $8.4 MILLION.

12 Northwestern University Increase 3.50% From Northwestern spokesman, Jon Yates: “The University will provide $245 million in aid to undergraduates in 2020-2021, an increase of more than 5% over the current year total. The additional aid will allow Northwestern to provide increased funds for students with demonstrated need and will also support students from middle-income families.”

13 Columbia University Information not provided by press time.

14 Duke University (DUMAC, Inc.) Freeze In announcing the decision to rescind a planned 3.9% tuition increase, Duke president Vincent E. Price said: “We recognize that COVID-19 has led to immediate and significant financial stress for our students and families that the university can help address through these changes.”

15 The University of Chicago Freeze In announcing tuition in April, University of Chicago officials said: “In response to these challenging times, there will be no increase in the combined total of tuition, housing, and fees for College students in the 2020-2021 academic year.”

16 Washington University in St. Louis Increase 3.80% From the school’s plan for fall 2020: “Student fees for dining and the housing single room rate will be reduced to reflect the shorter fall semester with final exams being conducted remotely over winter break.”

— “Should the university decide that all students should return to their primary residence during the course of a semester as a result of the pandemic or other emergency, the university would provide a prorated refund of room costs to students who were living in Residential Life housing. Students receiving full financial aid would also be eligible for this prorated university housing refund to provide additional support.”

— The school is opening applications for its crisis response fund on Sept. 1, 2020

17 Emory University Freeze The school wrote in a statement, “Emory University is holding undergraduate tuition at the 2019-2020 rates for the coming academic year in response to how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting families financially.”

18 Cornell University Increase 3.60% Jonathan Burdick, vice provost for enrollment, in a message to the university community in March: “We know this crisis may have a negative effect on many Cornell students, and we are fully committed to continuing to meet their need. One of the university’s top financial priorities in the current circumstance is to make sure that students can get the money they need to begin or continue their studies.”

19 The University of Virginia Information not provided by press time 3.60%

20 Rice University Increase 3.70%

21 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY DISCOUNT 10% FROM KAREN LANCASTER, UNIVERSITY SPOKESWOMAN: “JOHNS HOPKINS LEADERSHIP UNDERSTANDS THAT THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS CREATED UNEXPECTED FINANCIAL BURDENS FOR MANY FAMILIES, AND THAT THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES MAY HAVE CHANGED IN THE LAST SEVERAL MONTHS. THE UNIVERSITY IS PREPARED TO HELP STUDENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES MEET THESE BURDENS THROUGH A RANGE OF SUPPORTIVE MEASURES.“

— IN ADDITION TO THE TUITION DECREASE, THE UNIVERSITY HAS BUDGETED FOR NEARLY $15 MILLION IN ADDITIONAL UNDERGRADUATE FINANCIAL AID “TO HELP FAMILIES WHO ARE FACING FINANCIAL UNCERTAINTY RELATED TO THE PANDEMIC.”

22 The Vanderbilt University Increase 3.89% A statement from the university: “Our approach to setting tuition has not changed. COVID-19 has presented new challenges and new opportunities for us as an institution, and we have been able to rise to the challenge.”

— “The university also remains committed to Opportunity Vanderbilt, one of the nation’s leading financial aid programs that replaces student loans and grants with scholarships. Opportunity Vanderbilt allows the university to have need-blind admissions – accepting students based on merit, not their family’s ability to pay. Through Opportunity Vanderbilt, 65 percent of our undergraduates receive financial aid, and 79 percent of undergraduate students graduate without debt.”

23 University of Southern California Increase 3.50% Thomas McWhorter, the dean of financial aid, wrote to students in July: “This pandemic has uprooted so many lives and created so much economic devastation in our communities. The challenges are real, and we are doing our best to address your concerns and to keep up with an evolving situation.”

— “Students who would have received financial aid for room and board, but who have decided to live at home due to COVID will receive an Undergraduate Living-at-Home Scholarship in the amount of up to $4,000 for the fall semester and up to $4,000 for the spring semester if you remain at home.”

24 Dartmouth College Increase 3.90%

25 The Ohio State University Increase 3.90% From university spokesman, Benjamin Johnson: “The new in-state rates only apply to new, first-year students. Returning students from Ohio are covered by the Ohio State Tuition Guarantee. The guarantee provides students with predictability about college costs by locking in-state tuition, mandatory fees, housing and dining for each incoming class of undergraduate students from Ohio. The university will increase financial aid packages for Pell-eligible students so that these students are unaffected by the change.”

26 The Pennsylvania State University Freeze Penn State’s President Eric J. Barron told the university community following the school’s board of trustees’ vote to freeze tuition: “Maintaining the accessibility and affordability of a Penn State education are long-term University priorities, and given the current economic hardships induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is particularly important that we not raise our tuition rates for the upcoming academic year.”

27 New York University Increase 2.95% From NYU spokesman John Beckman: “We expect to spend close to $400 million of institutional funds for undergraduate scholarship (ie, grant) aid in 2020-2021, up nearly $20 million from 2019-2020, and in addition, another $25 million of emergency aid, made up of both federal CARES Act funds (all of which we are directing to student aid) and institutional funds to address the needs of students not eligible for CARES Act funds.”

28 University of Pittsburgh Freeze

29 Brown University Increase 3.75% Brown spokesman Brian Clark wrote in an email: “In consideration of the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, we’re working to support students through a wide variety of measures, both financial and otherwise.”

— Those include expanding the school’s financial aid budget, creating new emergency funding sources and supporting undergraduate students with travel, moving and instructional expenses, among other provisions.

30 University of Minnesota & Foundation Freeze

31 UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL AND FOUNDATIONS FREEZE UNC’S BOARD OF GOVERNORS VOTED IN MAY 2020 TO FREEZE TUITION AT THE SYSTEM’S 16 SCHOOLS FOR THE UPCOMING ACADEMIC YEAR. AT UNC CHAPEL HILL, ACCORDING TO A UNIVERSITY SPOKESWOMAN, THE SCHOOL IS PROVIDING SCHOLARSHIP AID, INCLUDING THROUGH AWARDING CARES ACT FUNDING OF AT LEAST $1,000 TO EVERY STUDENT WHO IS ELIGIBLE FOR CERTAIN SCHOLARSHIPS AND GRANTS, INCLUDING THE PELL GRANT.

32 University of Wisconsin Foundation Freeze

33 Michigan State University Freeze MSU spokesman Dan Olsen wrote in an email: “Throughout the pandemic, MSU has remained committed to its core mission of providing an outstanding MSU education for all students. Regardless of whether classes are remote, in-person or hybrid, the university is delivering courses taught by world-class faculty, and continuing to offer tutoring services, faculty office hours, academic advising and access to our libraries. The value of an MSU degree is significant and the modality of instruction does not reduce that.”

34 California Institute of Technology Increase 3.90% In a July message to the university community, officials wrote that students’ financial aid offers will be calculated “using a COVID-19 on-campus living allowance of $5,779 per term to help defray living expenses for students even if they live off-campus. Caltech is fully committed to ensuring that our academic programs are accessible to our students during this challenging time.”

35 University of Washington Increase 2.40% Victor Balta, a university spokesman wrote in an email: “ In general, we have not changed our policies as we prioritize the highest-need students first, but we have used flexibility in our policies to recognize the unique nature of the pandemic.” That includes provisions, like not adjusting financial aid packages for room and board funds even when students moved home, “allowing students to keep more funds to help with moving and storage costs or to help their family with rent or food.”

36 The President and Trustees of Williams College Discount 15% In a message to the university community announcing the cut, the school’s president Maud Mandel wrote: “This reduction recognizes the fact that the pandemic and associated challenges are requiring us to cancel Winter Study as well as fall athletics competition and many student activities, among other opportunities that we usually encourage families to expect as part of their student’s education.”

37 UCLA Foundation Freeze

38 Purdue University-Purdue Research Foundation Freeze

39 Carnegie Mellon University Increase 3.20%

40 Trustees of Boston College Increase 3.69% Jack Dunn, a university spokesman wrote in an email that “To maintain the University’s commitment to providing access to students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, the trustees voted to increase need-based undergraduate financial aid by four percent, or $5.6 million, to a total of $146 million.”

41 UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND INCREASE 3.95% CYNTHIA PRICE, A UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND SPOKESPERSON, WROTE IN AN EMAIL THAT THE SCHOOL’S PRESIDENT AND EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENTS HAVE ALL TAKEN A 10% PAY CUT AND THAT ALL VICE PRESIDENTS HAVE TAKEN A 5% PAY CUT. IN ADDITION, THE SCHOOL HAS IMPLEMENTED A HIRING FREEZE.

42 Indiana University and Foundation Freeze Chuck Carney, a university spokesman, wrote in an email that the school is offering a discount on fees to students whose courses are entirely online, so that they won’t be paying for services they won’t use. “We have been and continue to take a number of steps in support of students during this time,” Carney wrote, including spending $31 million in CARES Act funding on financial aid for students across IU’s campuses.

43 Amherst College Information not provided by press time

44 University of Illinois & Foundation Increase Between 1% and 3.5% depending on the campus A University of Illinois spokesperson wrote in an email that “follow a five-year tuition freeze for in-state students and are needed to fund faculty additions that lagged behind seven straight years of enrollment growth.” In addition, the system has launched a fund to provide at least $36 million to help students with COVID-related costs and will cover this year’s tuition increase for all in-state students.

45 Pomona College Freeze In an emailed statement, Robert Goldberg, vice president, chief operating officer and treasurer, wrote that the freeze is “in recognition that the economic downturn has impacted students and their families due to the pandemic. ” The school is also providing financial aid to cover off-campus attendance for eligible students, converting a portion of the student employment allotment of financial aid packages to grants for some students and providing technology resources to those who request assistance, he wrote. “Pomona is redirecting resources to ensure that our online education will be every bit as engaging and challenging as always but adapted to our times.”

46 Boston University Increase 3.90% The university expanded its financial aid program to meet the full need for all students who qualify for financial aid, the school announced last year.

47 The Rockefeller University Graduate university only It’s a private graduate university, so probably not relevant here.

48 University of Rochester Increase 3.90% Sara Miller, a university spokeswoman wrote in an email that, “Although a student may not return to campus, the cost of their education doesn’t go down. This is because the many new protocols to ensure health and safety measures during the pandemic have actually caused the cost to provide a University of Rochester education to increase.” In addition, students who are not living on campus won’t pay room and board.

49 Wellesley College Increase 4.20% From Wellesley’s coronavirus page: “We understand that students and their families may be experiencing financial challenges, and we affirm our commitment to meeting students’ full calculated financial need.” Students who aren’t living in college housing won’t be paying room and board. For students receiving financial aid, the school has replaced the contribution of summer work with grant aid.

50 Georgia Institute of Technology and Related Foundations Freeze

51 SWARTHMORE COLLEGE FREEZE IN A JUNE MESSAGE TO THE UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY, SWARTHMORE’S PRESIDENT, VAL SMITH, WROTE, “IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF DISRUPTION BROUGHT ABOUT BY COVID-19, WE ELIMINATED THE PLANNED TUITION INCREASE FOR THE 2020–21 ACADEMIC YEAR AND INSTEAD SET TUITION AT THE SAME RATE AS THE 2019–20 ACADEMIC YEAR.”

52 University of California, Berkeley Foundation Freeze

53 Trustees of Grinnell College Increase 4.30% In a page outlining the school’s financial investment in light of COVID, Grinnell notes that the school awarded every student a $2,500 COVID-19 response grant for the academic year. “The value of our grant exceeds this year’s tuition increase and represents a $4 million investment in additional grant aid,” the page reads. The school has also set aside more than $2 million in additional financial aid.

54 Virginia Commonwealth University Freeze In an email, Michael Porter, a VCU spokesperson wrote that the school’s board of visitors voted in May to freeze tuition and increase fees by $56. The school received about $10 million in CARES Act funds that was distributed to eligible students. “Students impacted by COVID-19, but not eligible for federal funds, may also be eligible for emergency funding that is being offered through Student Affairs, ” he wrote.

56 Smith College Freeze The freeze is a reversal of a planned increase

57 Tufts University Increase 3.80% Patrick Collins, a university spokesman, wrote in an email that, “in the face of the financial challenges posed by the pandemic, Tufts has reaffirmed its commitment to meeting the full demonstrated financial need of all admitted and current students, continuing as one of the few colleges and universities in the country to do so.” The university is planning for an increase in financial aid of about 9%.

58 Case Western Reserve University Increase 3.96%

59 University of California San Francisco Graduate university only

60 University of Florida Foundation, Inc. Information not provided by press time

61 Georgetown University Discount 10.00% In announcing the tuition cut, the school’s provost, Robert M. Groves, wrote “In recognition of the impacts of this decision, all students in credit-bearing undergraduate and graduate courses, will be offered a tuition discount.” The announcement came shortly after the school announced it would be holding classes remotely.

62 THE KANSAS UNIVERSITY ENDOWMENT ASSOCIATION FREEZE IN ANNOUNCING THE TUITION FREEZE IN JUNE, SHANE BANGERTER, THE CHAIR OF THE KANSAS BOARD OF REGENTS, SAID “OUR INSTITUTIONS ARE FACING INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT CHOICES AS A RESULT OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC. IN THE FACE OF REVENUE LOSSES, INCREASED COSTS AND CONTINUED UNCERTAINTY, UNIVERSITIES MADE GREAT EFFORTS TO ENSURE THAT STUDENTS DO NOT BEAR THE COST.”

63 The George Washington University Discount 10.00% The cut is for undergraduate students at their Foggy Bottom campus who won’t be living there. The school is holding all of its undergraduate courses online. In announcing the tuition cut and shift to remote instruction, school officials said: “We recognize, however, that many undergraduate students will not have access to certain in-person resources they would have had as residential students. And we further recognize that the pandemic has caused unprecedented financial dislocation for many members of our community.”

64 Bowdoin College Freeze In a message to the university community in June, Clayton Rose, Bowdoin’s president, said “As an acknowledgment of the challenging economic times faced by virtually all families, there will be no increase in the comprehensive fee or tuition for the Fall 2020 semester over what was charged in 2019–2020.”

65 University of Missouri Increase 2.30% In announcing the tuition increase, Mun Choi, University of Missouri system president said, “with this small increase, the UM universities remain among the lowest in tuition increases throughout the country. These increases do not fill the gaps in revenue the university has experienced, but they will help us maintain our commitment to teaching excellence. We are focused on achieving our missions of teaching, research, service and economic development while reducing our costs.”

66 Texas Christian University Increase 4.90% In a July message to the university community, the school’s chancellor, Victor J. Boschini, Jr., wrote that TCU’s board of trustees, “unanimously approved $50 million in additional financial aid assistance for the fall semester for students whose courses have been designated online by the University and up to $15 million for students who qualify for need-based aid.”

67 Washington and Lee University Increase 4.50% Drewry Sackett, a university spokesperson, wrote in an email that the tuition decision “was made at our February Board of Trustees meeting and has since been reviewed as part of our planning for reopening the campus for the Fall Term.” In addition, the school is working to cut costs by reducing departmental budgets by 10% and reducing retirement contributions by 2.5% for the upcoming academic year.

68 Southern Methodist University Increase 3.50% This year the school is seeing the number of families qualifying for financial aid and the size of the grants they’re receiving increasing because of the pandemic, a spokesperson wrote in an email. In addition, donors have committed nearly $1.6 million to a new fund specifically to help returning students who might not be able to graduate without emergency funding and scholarship awards.

69 Liberty University Information not provided by press time

70 University of Iowa & University of Iowa Center for Advancement Freeze In announcing the tuition freeze, the school’s office of strategic communications noted that Board of Regents, State of Iowa, which sets tuition, may reevaluate tuition for this spring in fall 2020 and that “that tuition and fee decisions, which may depart from the five-year tuition model established last year, will be made to give as much financial predictability to students and families as possible amid the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

71 The Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama Freeze

72 RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY FREEZE A UNIVERSITY SPOKESPERSON WROTE IN AN EMAILED STATEMENT THAT THE SCHOOL WOULD ALSO CUT CAMPUS FEES 15%: “THE RUTGERS BOARD OF GOVERNORS TOOK THE UNPRECEDENTED STEP OF FREEZING TUITION AND FEES FOR THE 2020-2021 ACADEMIC YEAR. THIS ACTION WAS TAKEN IN RECOGNITION OF THE ECONOMIC STRESSES THAT CONFRONT EVERY MEMBER OF OUR COMMUNITY AND DESPITE COST INCREASES IN VIRTUALLY EVERY AREA OF OUR OPERATION.”

73 University of Delaware Freeze Andrea Boyle Tippett, a university spokeswoman, wrote in an email that the school has dedicated roughly $20 million in additional financial aid funds this year “to ensure students can attend our institution despite the tough financial situations many have found themselves in because of the pandemic.”

74 University of Cincinnati Information not provided by press time

75 University of Colorado Foundation Freeze Ken McConnellogue, a university spokesman, wrote in an email that the school is “working on ways to direct more financial aid to students and families most affected by COVID. Our Board of Regents has asked for a plan to reach that end, which is in process.”

76 University System of Maryland Foundation Freeze In announcing the tuition freeze, the University of Maryland System’s Board Chair Linda Gooden said, “Our students worked hard to adjust to the unexpected changes brought on by the pandemic while also completing their academic work—they ‘pushed through’ these challenges all the way to the final weeks of the 2020 spring semester. The board’s decision today allows the system to show support for our students and families by holding tuition and room-and-board rates steady so they can better navigate what we know for many has been great economic hardship.

77 University of Nebraska Board of Regents Increase 3.50% Leslie Reed, a university spokesperson, wrote in an email that “This increase was established by the Nebraska Board of Regents in 2019 for the current two-year budget period and scholarship and financial aid already has been budgeted toward for students.” In addition, she noted that the school began its Nebraska Promise program in April 2020, which covers tuition for students whose families are earning less than $60,000 per year. The program resulted in a $2 million increase in the financial aid budgeted to students who attend the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the flagship campus.

78 Tulane University Increase 3.60% Michael Strecker, a university spokesman, wrote in an email that “Tulane continues to provide a very robust array of institutional scholarship programs to assist our students with their educational costs. In response to the ongoing pandemic, Tulane created a financial aid program to assist those students whose families have experienced economic hardships, especially significant income losses during the current 2020 calendar year directly due to the coronavirus.”

79 Lehigh University Freeze In a July message to the university community, officials wrote that “Because of the economic impact of the pandemic on families across the country, Lehigh will hold tuition at the 2019-2020 rate and reverse the increase that we announced in the Spring.”

80 University of Kentucky Increase 1% for in-state students, 2% for out-of-state students

81 NC State University and Related Foundations Freeze

82 SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY INCREASE 3.90% IN AN EMAILED STATEMENT, SARAH E. SCALESE, SENIOR ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT FOR COMMUNICATIONS, DIVISION OF MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS AT SYRACUSE, WROTE THAT THE SCHOOL WILL BE INCREASING ITS FINANCIAL AID BUDGET BY 7% FROM LAST YEAR. “WE APPRECIATE HOW DIFFICULT IT IS FOR OUR STUDENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES TO NAVIGATE THE UNCERTAINTY AND UNIQUE STRESSORS PRESENTED BY THE PANDEMIC AND SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY IS DOING EVERYTHING IT CAN TO LIMIT THE FINANCIAL IMPACT.”

83 Wake Forest University Information not provided by press time

84 Virginia Tech Foundation Freeze

85 The University of Tennessee Freeze In announcing the tuition freeze, University of Tennessee President Randy Boyd said, “our students and their families are struggling right now, many financially. Our chancellors and I strongly believe that we need to do everything we can to provide them the support they need to continue their education at UT, and to make our University as affordable as possible for our incoming students.”

86 The University of Georgia and Related Foundations Freeze In announcing the tuition freeze, Steve Wrigley, the chancellor of the University System of Georgia said, “One of the University System of Georgia’s top priorities is affordability, and that has never been more important than now for our students and their families.”

87 Baylor University Increase 4% In an email, Lori Fogleman, a university spokeperson wrote that the tuition increase was decided more than a year ago. A Baylor page announcing the increase states, “This represents the lowest percentage tuition increase in more than 20 years and is well below the average percentage increase over the last 26 years.” Fogleman added, “we understand that many families are facing financial challenges due to COVID-19. We are in the process of reviewing students’ financial aid files upon request.”

89 Texas Tech University System Increase 2.4-2.6% The Texas Tech Board of Regents made the decision to raise tuition in December 2019, according to Chris Cook, a Texas Tech spokesman. The increase is in line with the Higher Education Price Index, which tracks cost drivers in higher education. The school has extended scholarship deadlines as well as encouraged families to complete the financial aid special circumstances process if their financial situation has changed.

90 Baylor College of Medicine Graduate university only Not an undergrad institution so probably not relevant

92 Trinity University Information not provided by press time 4% Based on my own calculation using only tuition and fees

94 Saint Louis University Information not provided by press time There are so many different schools and there’s no announcement on their approach to tuition this year.

95 THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH DECISION NOT FINALIZED THE UTAH BOARD OF HIGHER EDUCATION VOTED IN LATE MARCH TO AUTHORIZE A 2% INCREASE IN TUITION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH FOR THE UPCOMING ACADEMIC YEAR. THE UNIVERSITY IS NOT IMPLEMENTING THAT TUITION INCREASE IN FALL 2020 AND HAS NOT YET MADE A DECISION ABOUT WHETHER THEY WILL IMPLEMENT THE INCREASE IN SPRING 2020. THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH IS ALSO PROVIDING STUDENTS WITH A $150 CREDIT — OR A 25% DISCOUNT — ON THEIR FEES FOR FALL 2020.

96 University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and Foundation Freeze John Thomas, a University of Arkansas spokesperson, wrote in an email that the school has added $5 million in scholarships for in-state students this year, established a student emergency fund and considering the effects of COVID-19 in appeals for funding through the Arkansan Non-Resident Tuition Award Scholarship, which pays for the majority of the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition.

97 Berea College Students don’t pay tuition here They don’t pay tuition at Berea

98 Middlebury College Increase 3.73% The increase was approved in February 2020

99 Princeton Theological Seminary Graduate institution only

100 Vassar College Information not provided by press time

Tuition cuts are rare, but it’s also an extraordinary year

That some schools are discounting tuition represents an extraordinary break from colleges’ typical policies — college costs have skyrocketed 161% over the past 30 years and between the 2009 and 2010 academic year and the 2019 and 2020 academic year colleges increased tuition nearly 2% on average per year, according to the College Board.

But this is also an extraordinary year. A global pandemic and accompanying economic downturn has made it more difficult for many families to afford college. At the same time, the pandemic has changed what families are paying for. Under the best of circumstances, students will return to campuses devoid of many of the usual college activities — spontaneous meetings in the student union, robust club events, and yes, parties.

And if the experiences of schools that have already brought students back is any indication, those plans are likely to go awry, forcing students into even more restricted environments or sending them home.

These dynamics stretched colleges’ business models, which had been showing signs of weakness for years. “Generally speaking, the pandemic is not going to create a significant shift in the price of tuition,” said Dominique Baker, an assistant professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University.

That’s because colleges lost housing, dining and other revenue when they sent students home this spring and, in addition, they’ve had to spend more on technology, plexiglass and other adjustments to make a fall semester work, Baker said. Schools will also lose funds if enough students decide to take a gap year and enrollment dips significantly.

“The only ways to try to make this up are to hold on to revenue streams you already have because if you don’t do that this leads to massive furloughs and layoffs, among other cost cutting measures,” she said.

Colleges begin thinking about tuition policy months in advance

Colleges usually begin thinking about their tuition strategy in the fall of the previous academic year, said Jim Hundrieser, the vice president for consulting and business development, at the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

They typically start by thinking about what increased costs they will have and whether those will be one-time costs or fixed costs, he said. Colleges have looked for ways to cut some of their typical costs this year, including furloughing employees, freezing pay and limiting retirement contributions, but many of their largest fixed costs, like faculty salaries and health care remain large and possibly growing.

Schools will also look to see whether they expect sources of revenue other than tuition to be able to cover some of these costs, Hundrieser said. Philanthropy, one of the typical sources of revenue for schools, is likely to be down this year if previous downturns are any indication.

Colleges will also turn to their endowment to cover expenses, typically drawing around 4% per year from the fund, Hundrieser said. But it can be difficult to tap the endowment for more than officials initially planned because the funds are often restricted and because the idea behind the endowment is to make sure the university runs in perpetuity, Hundrieser said.

“Endowments aren’t just one pot of money, they’re a bunch of small pots of money,” said Robert Kelchen, an associate professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. “Colleges don’t like spending large amounts of money out of an endowment in any given year,” Kelchen said. “On the other hand, the endowment is also there for a rainy day and it’s pouring right now.”

Perhaps one of the biggest factors driving a college’s tuition policy is how much money they’re going to give away, Hundrieser said. At private schools in particular, most families don’t pay a college’s advertised or “sticker” price.

Instead, they get a discount. The average discount rate — or the amount of grant aid colleges offer as a percentage of their tuition and fee revenue — for the 2019-2020 academic year was 47.6% according to NACUBO.

Families don’t learn what kind of discount they’ll receive until a student applies, gets accepted and receives a financial-aid package from their school. Often, colleges award these scholarships based on financial need, but in some cases, colleges use what’s called merit aid — or scholarships for good grades or other characteristics — to lure families who can afford to pay the full, or near full sticker price and will be persuaded to sign the check if they believe they’re getting a deal.

‘This is the question many, many chief finance officers are asking and really beginning to evaluate — if we’re just going to raise [tuition] and give it all away what’s the point?’— Jim Hundrieser, vice president for consulting and business development at the National Association of College and University Business Officers

This high-tuition, high-aid strategy started to ramp up in the wake of the Great Recession and some institutions are growing more skeptical of it, Hundrieser said. “This is the question many, many chief finance officers are asking and really beginning to evaluate — if we’re just going to raise [tuition] and give it all away what’s the point?” he said.

The strategy also puts strain on families, particularly low-income families who see a college’s high five-figure sticker price and immediately dismiss it as a possibility, said Mark Huelsman, associate director of policy and research at Demos, a progressive think tank.

In addition, many of the schools with the most generous financial-aid packages for low-income students, don’t educate a large share of the low-income student population, he said. Even as most colleges have increased their financial-aid budgets during the pandemic, the messaging of the sticker price is still important, he said.

‘Imagine any financial transaction you make and someone says the price of this thing is $100,000, but you are very likely to pay nothing, but first you have to fill out all these forms.’— Mark Huelsman, associate director of policy and research at Demos

The focus on discounting can also make it difficult for colleges to reverse course once they’ve made a tuition decision, Hundrieser said, because they’ve already awarded the aid they’re going to give out and tweaking tuition will affect the amount of revenue they bring in. Still, some schools have been able to make changes in light of the pandemic.

Some schools have been able to offer tuition cuts

At Hampton University, a Historically Black College in Hampton, Va., the school’s president, William Harvey, announced in early July that the school would offer only remote instruction in the fall and a 15% discount on tuition and fees.

“This is going to be a financial burden for us, but it’s also a financial burden for parents and others,” Harvey said he remembers thinking as he weighed and investigated the idea of a tuition cut with other university officials.

Ultimately, he decided to go through with it and one of the reasons Hampton was able to do so is because the school is “pretty financially sound,” Harvey said. Though not in the top 100, the school’s endowment has grown over the past several decades and is now worth more than $250 million. Resources like an enrollment stabilization fund and a real-estate foundation, help too, he said.

In addition, after the school made the decision to cut tuition, they received a “god-given gift,” from MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, of $30 million, Harvey said. Those funds can be used at the discretion of the president, he said, and the school plans to use part of the money to help mitigate the financial impact of the tuition cut.

Daniel Kim, a senior at Duke University, started an online petition last month asking his school to decrease tuition after he saw that at some other schools where petitions circulated, officials cut the sticker price. In early August, Duke announced that, instead of increasing tuition 3.9% as originally planned, it would freeze tuition at $55,880 and adjust certain fees based on where students plan to live this fall.

Duke invited freshmen and sophomores back to on-campus housing this fall and is hoping to bring juniors and seniors back in the spring, according to Erin Kramer, a Duke spokesperson. The school is offering a mix of in-person, remote and hybrid classes. Right now, Kim is planning on taking his classes from his childhood home in Northern Virginia.

Daniel Kim started a Change.org petition asking for his school, Duke University, to reduce tuition. Kim, who is majoring in theater and minoring in biology and cinematic arts, wasn’t pleased with his remote courses in the spring. “I kept pounding my head against the floor, group chats were popping during it.” he said. But at least so far, his classes this semester have been satisfactory. “I’m hoping just to grind it out.”

Annisa Salsabila, a sophomore at the University of Texas, is skeptical she’ll get the value she’s paying for from her courses. The 19-year-old is a neuroscience major and won’t have access to the labs and research experiences she would under typical circumstances.

UT is offering some courses in person, but is also giving students the option to take all of their courses online, which Salsabila is electing to do because she believes it’s the safest option.

At UT, tuition will be 2.6% higher this fall than last year, an increase approved in November 2019 by the University of Texas System Board of Regents. The uptick is based on the rate of inflation per the higher education price index, according to a spokeswoman, an inflation index that tracks the cost drivers of higher education.

“The cost of education is a major concern for students and families, more so now than ever,” J.B. Bird, a UT spokesperson, wrote in an email. “We have focused our fall planning efforts to deliver an exceptional educational experience while also maintaining the health and safety of the UT community.”

Still, to Salsabila the increase feels “ridiculous.” She expects to borrow more in student loans to cover the uptick. “It just places more financial burden on me and my family in the long run,” she said.

Public colleges don’t have complete control over their tuition policies

Like many public colleges, UT is governed by a board of regents, whose members are appointed by the governor. At some public colleges, the governing board is actually elected by the state’s voters. Either way, state leadership does play a role in how public colleges set their tuition, though there’s often a back and forth between the school and legislatures.

If the last recession is any indication, public colleges will likely face cuts in the funding they receive from the state lawmakers, a factor which could push them to look for money from other sources — like students’ and families’ pockets. At the same time, these schools may face pressure from state legislatures to keep tuition low.

That dynamic could exacerbate inequities already present in our higher-education system. Public colleges, particularly regional state schools and community colleges, that are likely to face funding challenges over the next few years, are also those that serve the bulk of the country’s low-income and Black and Hispanic students, Huelsman said.

“At the same time you have institutions that not only can weather the storm because of their own resources — whether that’s an endowment, or a brand name or a demand for their services — that they feel like they don’t have to respond to the economic pain facing a lot of Americans,” he said, “the families and the students who are most impacted by the economic crisis were more likely to go to colleges that were also more impacted by this economic crisis.”

Though we’re unlikely to see broad cuts in tuition in the years following the pandemic, it’s possible that some, individual students could get a break, Kelchen said. Colleges were already bracing for demographic trends that mean there will be fewer 18-year-olds heading to college in the coming years and the pandemic will only exacerbate colleges’ hunger for students.

“If you can get students to pay that full price, there’s less of a reason for you to cut that listed price because you’re giving up revenue,” he said. “It’s easier for colleges to give discounts to those who ask.”

-University of Virginia, please click on the image for greater detail.

-by Shawn Hubler

Schools face rising demands for tuition rebates, increased aid and leaves of absence as students ask if college is becoming “glorified Skype.”

After Southern California’s soaring coronavirus caseload forced Chapman University this month to abruptly abandon plans to reopen its campus and shift to an autumn of all-remote instruction, the school promised that students would still get a “robust Chapman experience.”

“What about a robust refund?” retorted Christopher Moore, a spring graduate, on Facebook.

A parent chimed in. “We are paying a lot of money for tuition, and our students are not getting what we paid for,” wrote Shannon Carducci, whose youngest child, Ally, is a sophomore at Chapman, in Orange County, where the cost of attendance averages $65,000 a year. Back when they believed Ally would be attending classes in person, her parents leased her a $1,200-a-month apartment. Now, Ms. Carducci said, she plans to ask for a tuition discount.

A rebellion against the high cost of a bachelor’s degree, already brewing around the nation before the coronavirus, has gathered fresh momentum as campuses have strained to operate in the pandemic. Incensed at paying face-to-face prices for education that is increasingly online, students and their parents are demanding tuition rebates, increased financial aid, reduced fees and leaves of absences to compensate for what they feel will be a diminished college experience.

At Rutgers University, more than 30,000 people have signed a petition started in July calling for an elimination of fees and a 20 percent tuition cut. More than 40,000 have signed a plea for the University of North Carolina system to refund housing charges to students in the event of another Covid-19-related campus shutdown. The California State University system’s early decision to go online-only this fall has incited calls for price cuts at campuses from Fullerton to San Jose.

At Ithaca College — student population, 5,500 — the financial services team reports more than 2,000 queries in the past month about financial aid and tuition adjustments. Some 340 Harvard freshmen — roughly a fifth of the first-year class — deferred admission rather than possibly spending part of the year online, and a parents’ lobbying group, formed on Facebook last month, has asked the administration to reduce tuition and relax rules for leaves of absence.

Universities have been divided in their response, with some offering discounts but most resisting, arguing that remote learning and other virus measures are making their operations more, not less, costly at a time when higher education is already struggling.

“These are unprecedented times, and more and more families are needing more and more financial assistance to enroll in college,” said Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president for the American Council on Education, a higher education trade group. “But colleges also need to survive.”

The roster of colleges that have rescinded plans to reopen their classrooms has been growing by the day. In the past two weeks, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia, Princeton and a host of other colleges announced plans to hold all or most of their classes online, citing concerns about the coronavirus. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, less than a quarter of the nation’s 5,000 colleges are committed to providing instruction primarily or completely in person.

At Illinois State University, an 11th-hour shift infuriated Joseph Herff, a 22-year-old business major. He had locked into an off-campus lease and taken out $10,000 more in student loan debt by the time the school announced that its fall would be mostly online — the result of public health guidance and a shortage of coronavirus tests, according to the university’s president, Larry Dietz.

“I don’t have an issue with moving classes to online. I do have an issue though that classes are charged the same price,” Mr. Herff tweeted on an account that, until this month, he said in an interview, he had largely reserved for sports talk. “Why is this fair?”

Many colleges were facing financial dark clouds even before the coronavirus arrived. Population declines in some parts of the country have dampened enrollment, and soaring tuition has led many families to question the price of a college diploma. Moody’s Investors Service, which in March downgraded the higher education sector to negative from stable, wrote that even before the pandemic, roughly 30 percent of universities “were already running operating deficits.”

Since then, emptied dorms, canceled sports, shuttered bookstores and paused study-abroad programs have dried up key revenue streams just as student needs have exploded for everything from financial aid and food stamps to home office equipment and loaner laptops.

Public health requirements for masks, barriers, cleaning and other health protections also have added new costs, as have investments in training and technology to improve remote instruction and online courses.

-Harvard, please click on the image for greater detail.

“Starting up an online education program is incredibly expensive,” said Dominique Baker, an assistant professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University. “You have to have training, people with expertise, licensing for a lot of different kinds of software. All those pieces cost money, and then if you want the best quality, you have to have smaller classes.”

Chapman’s president, Daniele Struppa, said the university spent $20 million on technology and public health retrofits for the fall semester, and he estimates that the switch to an online fall will cost the school $110 million in revenue. He has cut spending “brutally” from the $400 million annual budget, he said, freezing hires, slashing expenses, canceling construction of a new gym, ending the retirement match to employees and giving up 20 percent of his own $720,000 base salary.

Only students who can demonstrate financial need will get help, he is telling families. “Tuition really reflects our cost of operation, and that cost has not only not diminished but has greatly increased.”

A survey by the American Council on Education estimated that reopening this fall would add 10 percent to a college’s regular operating expenses, costing the country’s 5,000 some colleges and universities a total of $70 billion.

“For institutions,” said Mr. Hartle, who lobbies for the council, “this is a perfect storm.”

Students are feeling tempest tossed, too.

Temple sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab, founder of the university’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice, said the organization has been “bombarded” with pleas for help from students who can’t cover their rent and don’t know how to apply for food stamps. At least a third of students had lost jobs because of the pandemic by May, according to the center.

Such situations, Ms. Goldrick-Rab said, are particularly risky because they often prompt students to take on second or third jobs or to become distracted, which in turn imperils financial aid that can be revoked if their grades fall.

Laurie Koehler, vice president for enrollment strategy at Ithaca College, said about one in six students reported in a just-completed survey that the pandemic had significantly hurt their ability to continue their studies. At Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., the school’s president, Alison Byerly, said she expects requests for additional financial aid to grow by up to 15 percent this year.

But the shift online also has accelerated fundamental questions about the future of higher education, said the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, Marguerite Roza.

“This is a moment that is basically forcing students and parents to say, ‘What is the value? If I can’t set foot on campus, is that the same value?’”

Will Andersen, an 18-year-old incoming freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, put it this way: “Who wants to pay $25,000 a year for glorified Skype?”

“Education isn’t just information,” agreed Yolanda Brown-Spidell, a Detroit-area teacher and divorced mother of five whose lament last month about remote learning in a private Facebook group for Harvard parents burgeoned into a lobbying push to ease school policies on tuition and fall housing.

“Being able to meet up with friends, have those highly intellectual conversations, walking over to CVS and getting ice cream at 1 in the morning,” she said, ticking off the parts of education her daughter, a rising junior, has missed while working at home on her computer. “And let’s not forget just not being home with your mama, with her eyes on you.”

Some families have sued. Roy Willey, a class-action attorney in South Carolina, said his firm alone has filed at least 30 lawsuits — including against the University of California system, Columbia University and the University of Colorado — charging universities with breach of contract for switching in-person instruction to online classes, and is closely monitoring the fall semester.

Most suits are in their early stages, though several universities have moved for dismissal. “If you and I go down to the steakhouse and order a prime rib, and prepay for it and sit at our table, and a while later the server comes by and says, ‘Here’s two hamburgers, we’re out of prime rib’ — well, we may eat the hamburgers, but they’re not entitled to the money we would have paid for prime rib,” Mr. Willey said.

-Georgetown, please click on the image for greater detail.

A handful of universities have announced substantial price cuts. Franciscan University of Steubenville, a private Catholic university in Ohio with about 3,000 students, announced in April that it will cover 100 percent of tuition costs, after financial aid and scholarships, for incoming undergraduates. Williams College in Massachusetts took 15 percent off in June when it announced it would combine online and in-person instruction this fall.

More typical is the 10 percent cut at Catholic University in Washington, which plans to start the semester online and dramatically scale back the number of students allowed back onto campus. Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Georgetown University, Spelman College and other institutions are offering similar reductions. Lafayette College is limiting its 10 percent to students who study from home for the semester. The University of Southern California has offered a $4,000-per-semester “Living at Home Scholarship.”

Some schools are extending freebies. Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., has offered to tack on a tuition-free year of instruction for currently enrolled students, noting on its website that the current situation is not “the college experience they imagined.” St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., is offering a free semester.

But most colleges have kept prices flat, and a few have even increased them. They can’t afford to do otherwise without mass faculty layoffs, said Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor of higher education, even though the isolated, monitored experience campuses are selling this fall “is going to feel like some combination of a monastery and a minimum-security prison.”

“This crisis is demonstrating that there is real value in face-to-face instruction,” agreed David Feldman, an economist at William & Mary in Virginia and author, with Robert B. Archibald, of “The Road Ahead for America’s Colleges and Universities.” That recognition, he said, will generally protect better-endowed schools and those with state support.

Even so, he said, a culling is at hand for higher education. His prediction: a consolidation of public university branch campuses and a reckoning for some small, private liberal arts colleges that are already operating on thin margins.

“There will be a shakeout,” he said.

New paper argues that colleges can’t afford to improve the pay and working conditions of those off the tenure track. Activists slam the analysis.

March 17, 2016
-by Colleen Flaherty

Even if the adjunct movement for better working conditions succeeds, most adjuncts will lose. That’s one bold claim of a recent paper on the costs associated with a number of the movement’s goals, such as better pay and benefits. While activists and scholars have been quick to criticize what they call the paper’s inherently flawed logic, the study’s authors say it is a first step in a more critical dialogue on the adjunct “dilemma.”

“Our goal in this paper is neither to affirm nor to deny that universities owe adjuncts more than they currently receive,” reads “Estimating the Cost of Justice for Adjuncts: A Case Study in University Business Ethics,” published in the Journal of Business Ethics. “Instead, our goal is to show that any attempt to help adjuncts faces unpleasant trade-offs and serious opportunity costs. Due to budget constraints and other factors, many proposed solutions to the adjunct crisis are likely to harm rather than help most current adjuncts. Even if adjuncts deserve much more, it may not be possible to give them what they deserve.”

Authors Jason Brennan, Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Associate Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business and associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, and Phillip Magness, policy historian and academic program director at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, base their claim on several assertions. They argue that it’s unclear if universities with limited resources wishing to do the “most good” or advance social justice should increase adjunct pay instead of, say, cutting costs or reallocating funds to scholarships. They also note that part-time, non-tenure-track faculty “choose to work as adjuncts over their other, possibly quite bad options,” including unemployment, and that universities “do not literally enslave adjuncts.”

Perhaps most central to their main point, Brennan and Magness say that because many colleges and universities face budget constraints, and because adjuncts are “significantly less expensive than tenure-track faculty, any attempt to improve the pay and conditions of adjunct faculty will encounter unpleasant trade-offs.”

If, for example, a college stopped hiring adjuncts at what some have called “poverty wages” and instead hired them at higher pay with full benefits, it realistically could only do so for a minority of current instructors — and the rest could lose their jobs, they say. “Removing the opportunity to work as an adjunct will harm the typical adjunct, unless that opportunity is replaced with an even better opportunity.”

According to the authors’ rough calculations, institutions across academe currently employ 752,669 adjuncts to teach 1,578,336 courses annually, costing about $4.3 billion. Per-course pay in that estimate is $2,700 — a commonly cited national average.

To illustrate their point, Brennan and Magness put together a “minimally good job” package, including a $50,000 salary (teaching six courses per year), plus benefits and office space, that would cost a university $72,000 annually. To replace these 752,669 adjuncts with 263,056 minimally good jobs would cost universities $18.9 billion, they say — nearly $15 billion more each year.

If that doesn’t sound like much of an increase, the authors argue, that’s just base costs, without merit raises that could be earned in subsequent years or other perks. To replace those minimally good jobs with something even better — 75 percent of the average tenured full professor’s pay of $122,000 — the cost would be about $32 billion a year.

The paper references Service Employees International Union’s aspirational proposal that adjuncts be paid $15,000 per course (including benefits), estimating that would cost universities $19 billion more annually.

Putting the estimated cost increases into perspective, the authors say it’s “far from obvious” whether universities would be able to afford such a change. According to U.S. Department of Education data from 2013, public and private colleges and universities spent $477 billion on all expenses. About $139 billion went to instruction, with about $100 billion spent on faculty salary, wages and benefits.

Making the proposed pay adjustments would mean increasing that figure by 15 to 50 percent — some $15-50 billion — the authors say.

Perhaps just as importantly, the authors say moving to fewer, better jobs even at a much greater cost would still mean the end of jobs for about 450,000 adjuncts. While the authors take no position on the matter, they say that an “intellectually serious theory of adjunct justice must acknowledge and resolve it.”

Building on that argument, the authors say that increasing pay and benefits and otherwise improving working conditions for faculty would attract “more and better” candidates to such positions, “many of whom will outcompete current adjuncts for their jobs.”

Again referencing the SEIU proposal, the paper says that at four courses each in the spring and fall, “this is $120,000 in pay for nine to 10 months of relatively fun work, with summers and winters off.”

Brennan and Magness argue that any attempt to give adjuncts a better job is also likely to affect course offerings, “possibly to the detriment of its students. … There would be a drop in the number of faculty and the number of classes offered, and so average class sizes would increase.” There’d be less diversity in terms of classes, and many more tenure-track faculty members would have to teach introductory courses, at the expense of upper-level ones, the paper says. Professionals who moonlight as adjuncts in business and law or other fields also would teach fewer courses, costing students their “real-world experience.”

The authors describe the paper as “taking the first step toward serious work on questions of exploitation in academic employment.” While many claim the obstacles to “adjunct justice” are budget cuts, faculty indifference and “administrative greed,” they say, the matter is “far more complex and the obstacles more challenging.”

‘Willfully Ignorant’

Unsurprisingly, adjunct activists found much to criticize.

Joe Fruscione, a former adjunct professor of English and co-founder of Precaricorps, a nonprofit that offers temporary financial assistance to struggling adjuncts, said Brennan and Magness seemed “almost willfully ignorant that many adjuncts are exploited,” with their repeated declarations of having “no stance” on that issue. Over all, he said, their argument seems to imply — falsely — that if “all adjuncts can’t get a raise, none should.”

He said the paper seemed to be “deflecting” some important issues, including by focusing too much on the $15,000 SEIU proposal, which some have said is too ambitious.

“Yes, that’s high, but this doesn’t mean adjuncts should get paid $2,700 per course on average,” Fruscione said. “There’s a large financial middle ground here, and [they’re] seeing the majority of adjuncts as hobby professors who teach for ‘fun.’ This may have been the majority in the 1970s or 1980s, but it’s not true for the majority now. Most adjuncts don’t have a separate, full-time income stream to make college teaching ‘fun.’”

Carol Nieters, executive director of SIEU Local 284, which represents adjuncts at Hamline University in Minnesota, defended the $15,000 per-course pay and benefits figure, saying it’s “really about equality, justice and an indicator of whether a campus is investing in instruction and a stable learning environment.”

Overall, she said, the report “pits students against underpaid adjuncts as a way to avoid the real crisis in higher education where faculty are marginalized and students are saddled with outrageous amounts of debt. When one in four families of part-time faculty are enrolled in one or more public assistance programs, we need a dramatic change.”

Fruscione also took issue with the assertion that adjuncts actively choose to work in higher education over other, presumably worse choices. Such as argument would be fine if higher education were truly meritocratic, he said, “but it’s not.” To say adjuncts prefer low-paying jobs “is again problematic, because academia isn’t a level playing field. Whether they see it or not, adjuncts are exploited.”

Responding to criticism that the paper devoted too much attention to SEIU goal, Brennan said in an email interview that it turned out not to be the most expensive proposal considered. That said, he added, the paper attempts to identify some of the “explicit costs as well as some of the opportunity costs” of adjunct goals. “Any money spent helping improve the plight of adjuncts has to come from somewhere, and is not money being spent to, say, reduce tuition for low-income students or reduce student debt.”

Even if the proposal were simply to increase per-class average pay from $2,700 to, say, $5,000, that’s another $3.6 billion nationwide per year, he said. “That money could be spent helping adjuncts, but it could also be spent doing other valuable things, perhaps things that are more pressing from a social justice-oriented point of view.”

Brennan acknowledged that his institution hadn’t opposed an adjunct faculty union affiliated with SEIU (even though some of its Jesuit peers have objected to such drives on religious grounds), and that Georgetown adjuncts — who already received relatively high pay — have seen modest pay increases under their contract that haven’t thrown the campus into financial straits or resulted in mass job losses.

He attributed that to the fact that Georgetown has “deep pockets” compared to most institutions, but also its values. “The Jesuits have an ideal of cure personalis — care for the whole person. That ideal includes principles that require employers to view employees not merely as people with whom they [have an] economic transaction, but as people who deserve respect and extra concern. Rather than interfere with the SEIU, our administration welcomed them.”

Still, Brennan said he hoped the paper highlighted what “no one else seems to notice,” that “realistically, universities can help some adjuncts, but only by firing the rest. Realistically, the adjuncts’ rights movement will benefit a minority of current adjuncts but require the majority to seek employment elsewhere.”

Adrianna Kezar, professor of higher education and director of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success at the University of Southern California, said the paper nevertheless lacks the impact and “nuance” it’s trying to achieve. The cost calculations are notable to some degree, she said via email, but lack any consideration of university budgets beyond current instructional costs.

In other words, the paper doesn’t examine university budget trends and suggests “costs in other areas could not be decreased to pay for faculty salaries,” Kezar explained. “That is a viable option that is not even considered or addressed. …Assuming many adjuncts have to be fired to pay the remaining more is a flawed examination of the issue[.]”

Another faulty assumption, Kezar said, is that there’s a one-size-fits-all answer of paying all adjuncts equally — something higher education has never done. A better proposal would be for full- or nearly full-time, “mainline,” instructors to earn more as institutions move back to a “true” adjunct model, under which working professionals who teach a class on the side (about 15-20 percent of the faculty) could have a different pay structure.

Beyond the numbers, the paper is a flawed “set of ideological arguments — mostly trying to persuade readers that even beyond cost there is no logical reasoning to make such a redirection of funds,” Kezar said. For example, she said, having more core faculty members teaching introductory courses is actually a good thing, in terms of student success, and her research suggests deans want to see these instructors teaching more lower-level courses and adjuncts teaching more specialized, upper-level courses.

The paper’s one “legitimate” argument might be that class sizes would increase to rectify the pay issue, but classes are generally already “very large,” she said.

Study finds that certain majors are more creditworthy than others due to lower DTI ratios

Certain majors can often beg the question, “What do you plan to do with that?” A valid question, given that college graduates are now leaving school with an average of $35,000 in student loan debt.

Being saddled with a financial burden that large can make it hard to move forward with other goals. In a Gallup survey, one in four people said they pushed back their timeline for important post-grad milestones like buying a house, a car, or starting a family. Nineteen percent even said their student debt burden was an obstacle to getting married.

To avoid having to delay these important post-grad milestones, it’s crucial to take into account how your major can influence your attractiveness to lenders. So what exactly do lenders consider before deeming an individual financially healthy enough to borrow money?

DTI ratio

According to a report released recently by Credible, debt-to-income (DTI) ratio is a huge factor in determining if an individual is financially healthy enough to be given a loan. And when judging a person’s ability to repay a loan, the lower the DTI the better.

“A person’s DTI can be a yes/no factor for a lender, regardless of the person’s job history,” Credible’s chief executive officer, Stephen Dash tells Bloomberg Business. A DTI of 36% or lower is the “sweet spot,” according to the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC).

To find the DTI for different majors, Credible looked at the debt load and college major of students in its study sample and added in their estimated car, rent, and credit card payments. It divided its estimates of monthly debt payments into the average monthly income numbers for each degree type. And in what may or may not come as a surprise, psychology doesn’t rank too high on the “creditworthy” graduates list.

Medicine majors
College graduates who studied medicine were in the best shape, financially, to pay back their student loans — much better than those who studied psychology, says Credible.

Degrees in pharmacy, dentistry, and post-graduate medicine had the lowest DTI ratios, the report showed. More than any other majors, these students go on to land salaries that are high enough to offset their student debt, making them loan-worthy.

The majors that made it the hardest to pay back debt include history, education, and psychology. However, if students attend graduate school for one of those subjects, they’ll be able to shift their salary-to-debt ratio more in their favor, thus lowering their DTI ratio says Dash.