Although recent years have seen average tuition increases of 4.8 percent (from 2009-14, well out-pacing inflation rates), and lowering this number is long overdue, I would like to laud College President Phil Hanlon for his efforts to rein in out of control tuition increases. Rather than cutting back, the consensus on some parts of campus seems to be that tuition can be raised endlessly, and students will still matriculate. I attended one of Hanlon’s faculty meetings in the fall, where he affirmed his commitment to trying to tie tuition levels to inflation. I witnessed firsthand what a contentious topic this was among the faculty.
The recent 14 percent application drop (a product, I believe, of a combination of many factors, some as prosaic as a new supplemental application essay and the new policy of not accepting AP credit for future students) begs us to reconsider the idea that students and their families will pay endlessly high prices to come to Dartmouth. Although the Board of Trustees ultimately decided upon and approved the relatively slight tuition increase, I think the credit for this strong step in the right direction lies primarily with Hanlon. At the fall meeting, Hanlon made a point of stating his belief that tuition needed to be lowered. Although it has previously been published in The Dartmouth that some experts tie Dartmouth’s relatively small increase in tuition to the 14 percent drop in applications, it is worth noting that Hanlon brought the topic of reducing tuition to the forefront of conversation months before the final applicant numbers were known.
All the other schools in the Ivy League (excluding Columbia University, which has not announced its tuition costs for the 2014-15 year) raised their cost of attendance for the 2014-15 academic year. Princeton University increased its tuition by 4.1 percent, and Cornell University increased its cost of attendance by 3.26 percent. Harvard University increased fees by 3.9 percent, the largest increase seen in seven years. Information on Columbia excluded, Dartmouth remains the school with the highest cost of attendance. It has long been puzzling to me that Dartmouth, located in a rural setting, could have the second highest total cost of attendance, including tuition and fees, in the Ivy League for the 2013-14 academic year (only slightly behind Columbia, which is located in the middle of New York City).
So what does it really take to be on campus taking classes? With an overall cost of attendance of now $65,133, it’s sometimes easy to lose perspective of the College’s cost. As students, I think most people would agree we are first and foremost at Dartmouth to learn and attend classes. Let’s consider the cost of attendance on a class-by-class basis. The average student will take about nine classes per week, spread over 30 weeks of three quarters in a single year. For students living on campus, the average cost of attending a single class at Dartmouth — calculated from the 2014-15 cost of attendance, which includes not only tuition, but also room, board, books and miscellaneous fees that cannot be avoided — comes to $241.23. This number certainly illustrates just how much it costs to attend Dartmouth. If anything, Dartmouth ought to seek tuition reductions.
In addition to approving a tuition increase of 2.9 percent, the Board also approved an operating budget of $1 billion (that’s billion with a “B”) for the fiscal year 2015. A small liberal arts college in rural New Hampshire should not need an operating budget of $1 billion to function. Perhaps this astronomical number denotes greater problems within the College’s institutional structure that need to be reexamined. Hanlon has taken another step in the right direction by making Dartmouth’s overall budget more transparent by teaching classes this spring on the topic. More money ought to be spent on maintaining quality faculty members, rather than myriad offices nebulously dedicated to “academic and student” support.
Regardless of the current budget for the fiscal year 2015 and the average 4.8 percent tuition increases over the previous five years, Hanlon should be more widely praised among students for his successful efforts to lower tuition increases. The recently announced tuition increase of 2.9 percent is the College’s lowest since 1977 (ironically the year when Hanlon graduated). I am grateful for Hanlon’s efforts to reduce tuition and hope to see his goal of pegging tuition to inflation eventually realized.
