Dive Brief:
- Some small colleges are looking askance at the common practice of discounting tuition, opting instead to lower tuition across the board and charge more students the full rate.
- Guarantees that tuition will not rise during a student's four years at a school are becoming more commonplace as well; Northland College in Wisconsin this week added itself to that group.
- The rethinking of tuition comes amid an increasingly difficult market for attracting students, where tempting students with big discounts was becoming untenable; some college officials are hoping that applying a lower tuition more consistenly may help them stand out.
Dive Insight:
The president of Roger Williams University in Rhode Island summed up the new attitude toward realistic tuition pricing: "When I got here in June 2011, there were so few people paying full price that one wondered why we bothered. If everybody’s getting a discount, the notion that there is a full price is almost meaningless. It’s a model that makes no sense, and makes you feel like you’re in a Middle Eastern souk bargaining with the tourists who just arrived."