In a 2016 video titled “An Affordable Path for All,” La Salle University president Dr. Colleen Hanycz made claim that many have voiced but few might have anticipated coming from a school administrator.
“In this country, tuition is broken,” Hanycz said. “A college education is becoming less accessible now than it was even 20 years ago.”
There’s no denying that college costs have risen dramatically over the past several decades. The average cost of tuition at a private college was $33,480 in 2016-2017, according to the College Board. In 1996, it was an average of $12,823.
“We’ve gotten to a place where we’ve made higher education unaffordable for low and lower-middle class students,” said David Bergeron, senior fellow for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress.
There is a growing recognition among a number of institutions that the current model of escalating costs is unsustainable. Students have begun to balk at prices, and some schools have found it harder to attract students as a result.
While the rate of tuition growth has slowed overall, a handful of schools are taking it a step further by “resetting” their tuition prices, cutting their price by upwards of 40 percent. La Salle is one of about a dozen who have pursued a tuition reset in an effort to streamline tuition costs in recent years.
As tuitions have gone up, schools have had to heavily discount their published, or “sticker” price to keep enrollments steady. The discrepancy between the discounted and sticker price is significant: the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) found that the discount rate was 44.2 percent in 2016 across private nonprofit institutions.
