In October 2012, following months of discussion and analysis, the Roger Williams University Board of Trustees adopted an initiative called Affordable Excellence^®. These two words reference a host of actions devoted either to making an RWU education more affordable to a broader cross-section of families of high school graduates hoping to enroll at a high-quality private university, or to enhancing the quality of that education even beyond its already very high level.

In recent years, the parents of prospective college students have become openly critical of the relentless increase in the cost of higher education at a rate significantly greater than the growth in median family income. In response, a handful of campuses have, in the past several years, moved away from the system for pricing tuition that has been responsible for these dramatically rising costs: the so-called “high-cost/high-aid” model. (Nevertheless, despite widespread criticism from the press, politicians and parents of a model that relies on significant annual increases in published tuition prices, the overwhelming majority of private colleges and universities continue to use “high-cost/high-aid.”)

Most of the campuses that chose to use a different model did so because they had experienced significant enrollment shortfalls in previous years, and, in order to encourage more applications for admission, most elected to “reset” the posted tuition at a substantially lower price point. In almost every instance, however, these institutions also reduced their financial aid budgets proportionately: the list price for tuition was lower, but the net price – the amount the typical student paid – was essentially the same. Many observers quite rightly noted that the result was a classic case of “a distinction without a difference” – the cost to the students and their families was the same as before the reset. Additionally, these campuses subsequently went right back to having annual tuition increases: they did not abandon the “high-cost/high-aid” model at all, but instead restarted the model from a lower price point.

Roger Williams University enjoyed strong enrollments in years previous to 2012, but we recognized that if we continued to raise our tuition, the cost of attending our university would, over time, outstrip the financial capacity of the students we were endeavoring to serve. Moreover, we were only too aware of the projected decline in the number of high school graduates in the Northeast over the next decade, meaning that competition among colleges and universities for new students would become even more intense than in previous years.

Accordingly, we approached the idea of increasing our affordability in a way quite different from any other university to that time: for the entering class of 2013 (and for all of our continuing students still enrolled that year) we froze tuition at the 2012 level ($29,976) and we guaranteed that tuition would not increase for those 2013 freshmen during their four undergraduate years, thereby making the four-year cost of an RWU education far more predictable for students and their families. At the same time, we began increasing the amount of institutional financial aid from $38 million annually to $45 million, and directed the bulk of these increased funds for high-achieving students with demonstrated financial need.

Unlike campuses that undertook a one-time reset of their tuition (or, much more commonly, that did nothing at all to address their rising costs), Roger Williams University extended its frozen tuition model for the entering class of 2014, and we have recently announced that the tuition will remain frozen at the 2012 price for the entering class of 2015. In addition, the four-year guarantee that tuition will not increase is being applied to the entering classes of 2014 and 2015 as well.

But while we understand that price is important, what is even more important is the perception (by the student and his or her family) of the investment value of the student’s college education. So, unlike any of the other colleges that have been focused exclusively on controlling cost, we at Roger Williams also focused on enhancing the demonstrated quality of an RWU education. Specifically:

• We greatly expanded the number of Living Learning Communities in our residence halls, as a means of helping students with their transition from high school to college.
   
• We are completing a comprehensive overhaul of our General Education Core Program, ensuring consistency in learning outcomes across all courses and sections in each of the five distinct curricular areas of the Core.
   
• We have systematically increased the number of students involved in project-based, “real-world,” learning (internships; research with faculty; participation in community-based projects through the Community Partnerships Center and other entities) in order to ensure that students are graduating with practical experience in their field(s) of study.
   
• We are undertaking a redesign of our Career Center – now called the Career Investment Center – to work with and mentor students at a far earlier stage in their undergraduate studies.
   
• We are creating a new “one-stop” Center for Student Academic Success, combining offices in advising, tutorial, student advocacy and accessibility services that were previously housed in different buildings.
   
• We are moving to a cloud-based system for housing software, thereby saving students hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of dollars by giving them the opportunity to use inexpensive tablets in place of high-end laptops.
   
• The Library is being transformed into the Learning Commons, combining both traditional library services with technology services and assistance in a single location.
   
• We continue to advise our students to major in something they love, but to minor (or double major) in a program that is complementary to their major. For example, dance or theatre majors may find it challenging to earn a living as a performer – but combining their major with a minor in arts management will allow them to be involved in the business end of the arts. Similarly, even though engineering or construction management students find themselves quickly employed after graduating, for their long-term career interests we encourage them to minor in business or in one of the liberal arts.

We are often asked how we have been able to enhance the quality of our students’ educational experience and expand our financial aid budget, even as we hold the line on tuition – the single largest source of revenue for almost every college or university. (Some of our competitors have suggested that we must be short-changing our students in terms of the quality of their education – how else could we cover inflationary increases?) In short, what’s the catch?

I fully understand the skepticism from those who believe that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Surely there must be some hidden, but significant, negative impact on our students from our decision to hold tuition flat, now for three years in a row. If it were easy, wouldn’t everyone be doing it?

Well, I never said implementing Affordable Excellence would be easy. But our Board of Trustees would never permit us to jeopardize the quality of our academic programs and our hard-won reputation for excellence just to hold the line on tuition increases. They have – quite rightly – insisted on seeing how our annual budget projections justify any decision to hold tuition flat – and they review the end-of-year numbers very carefully to ensure that we did, in fact, meet our budget projections.

So how do we do it? First, we start with the goal of not increasing our tuition as we begin the budget planning exercise for each new academic year. We create specific targets for the numbers of (and net revenue from) new freshmen, new transfer students, new graduate students and new continuing education students (the last group are mostly adult students, taught at our Providence campus in face-to-face, blended or entirely online classes). We set goals for the retention of freshmen students to their sophomore year as well – and we target growth in our summer school programs (who wouldn’t want to be a summer school student at RWU and experience the pure pleasure of summer in Rhode Island on a campus situated on an arm of Narragansett Bay?)

We further enhance our revenue from tuition with summer rental of our facilities for camps and conferences – and we have been successful in significantly increasing our philanthropic support from some incredibly generous benefactors (including the parents of more than 30 percent of our current students!).

On the expense side, we have been successful in very substantially reducing the portion of our budget dedicated to debt service (to repay bonds we took out in past years to construct new buildings) by refinancing these bonds at significantly lower interest rates. Money freed up from mortgage payments is then used to support financial aid and our academic and student life programs.

I cannot promise that we will never increase our tuition price. We are taking things a year at a time. But the irony is that, far from “leaving money on the table” (as one of my presidential colleagues said, in reference to our decision not to increase tuition), we have been pleased to see higher yields (the percentage of students who are offered admission and who ultimately enroll), and higher freshman-to-sophomore retention rates. The result is, in a year (Fall 2014) when 42 percent of private colleges failed to meet both their enrollment and their revenue targets, RWU exceeded our targets in both categories. We have the largest number of undergraduate students on our Bristol campus in our history (slightly more than 4,000). We are earning less money on each student, but we make up for that decline by having more students.

In short, Affordable Excellence has, to date, been a resounding success at Roger Williams University. We have also demonstrated that, if a campus truly wishes to do so, it can enhance its quality even as it holds the line on price.

At Roger Williams University, we believe that higher education is too important to our country’s continued economic success to limit it only to those with substantial financial resources at their disposal. To be sure, we are not inexpensive – but each year that we hold the line on tuition, we become just slightly more affordable to those prospective students and their parents who are seeking the greatest educational value for their money.

For the past 18 months, I have made numerous posts wherein I have described my reactions to seeing the gradual disintegration of both the public and private models of higher education, in a manner akin to watching a slow-motion train wreck.

Well, the rate of disintegration is increasing. The slow-motion train wreck is speeding up. Consider five categories of evidence from the news media in recent weeks:

(1) The gap between the wealthy privates and everyone else is becoming a chasm.

My claim in my blog post of Oct. 15, 2013, that, in some respects, the wealthy colleges and universities seem more like investment companies that do a little teaching on the side now seems more prophetic than ever. Two recent articles make the case.

In “How American Universities Turned into Corporations,” Time, May 22, 2014, documentary film director Andrew Rossi points out that the American model of higher education, from the time of the founding of Harvard in 1636, has depended on “constant improvement and expansion” – and that the resulting educational arms race is no longer sustainable, except for the most affluent of institutions. “As universities succumb to this cost disease, they begin to resemble businesses more than nonprofit schools charged with a public mission. The future of higher learning and, more broadly our society hangs in the balance.”

The second article, “Princeton’s Top Money Managers get 46% Pay Raise in 2013,” Bloomberg, May 20, 2014, underscores both the widening chasm between the wealthy privates and the rest of higher education, and the notion that these institutions have effectively become businesses. The top investment official at Princeton received total compensation of $3.9 million in 2013. (Princeton’s president, by comparison, earned just $979,636.) The top investment official at Harvard was paid $7.9 million, while Harvard’s president earned a “mere” $1.04 million. Whether or not one believes that any college president is worth $1 million, the fact that the chief investment officer is earning between four and seven times as much as the president provides telling testimony regarding how the institutions value the services of the institution’s leader, as compared to those overseeing investment returns. And all this time you thought the most important person on a college campus was the football coach!

(2) Many public institutions continue a downward slide.

Shortfalls in state budgets, often accompanied by enrollment declines, have put many public institutions in significant jeopardy.

The magnitude of the problems of public institutions varies enormously from state to state, but some state colleges and universities are seeing a level of difficulty beyond anything they have experienced in decades – if ever.

The University of Maine system recently approved a budget that not only required spending more than 75 percent of its emergency reserves, but also necessitated eliminating more than 150 positions – and the budget is still not entirely balanced. (The Maine system has been steadily losing enrollment for seven years.) (Bangor Daily News, May 19, 2014)

Although Gov. Jerry Brown of California is proposing an increase in state appropriations for the public universities, the state is currently spending between 35 and 40 percent less per student in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did 10 years ago – and Gov. Brown was quoted as saying “They’re going to have to have a serious conversation with the professors, the staff, of how you lower the cost structure.” (San Jose Mercury News, May 13, 2014)

Vermont’s funding of public institutions amounts to just $2,655 per full-time equivalent student, making the colleges and universities highly susceptible to enrollment declines – and at least two of the colleges have seen drops of five to 10 percent in the past four years. The result has been to cut staff. (Vermont Public Radio, May 14, 2014)

North Carolina has cut per-student funding by more than 20 percent since 2008, resulting in a 35 percent increase in tuition – yet over that same time period the flagship UNC-Chapel Hill campus has had to eliminate almost 500 positions and 16,000 course seats, and has increased class sizes. This year, Gov. Pat McCrory has proposed another $49 million cut for higher education. (Charlotte Observer, May 19, 2014)

(3) Many private institutions have again missed their enrollment targets.

The data are just starting to arrive, but institutions in many regions of the country are facing serious budgetary problems due to enrollment shortfalls.

In the Philadelphia area, many of the private colleges and universities came up short. Widener University, for example, is down almost 10 percent. Almost two dozen others are still accepting students, and many are attempting to lure students who have committed to other institutions by offering very generous aid packages. (One student with a high school GPA of less than 2.5, and a 940 on the SAT, was offered up to an 80 percent discount at several schools – a measure of the desperation felt by some institutions to increase their enrollment.) (Inside Higher Ed, May 21, 2014)

Enrollment at Iowa’s 33 private colleges is collectively down by four percent over the past four years, but a quarter of the schools face declines in excess of nine percent. (The Gazette, May 12, 2014)

(4) The reluctance to consider changes in the model is as strong as ever.

Colleges and universities continue to endorse the “high-cost/high-aid” model, despite overwhelming evidence that the model is no longer effective – and faculty on many campuses are unwilling to consider pedagogical changes.

Despite continued warnings from pundits about the coming impact of online education (“What Lies Ahead for Digital Education,” Forbes, May 7, 2014; “Why MOOCs Are More Like Health Clubs Than Hospitals,” Forbes, May 15, 2014), the great majority of universities continue to resist changing their model (“Rutgers Graduate Faculty Rejects Online Degree Compromise,” Inside Higher Ed, May 9, 2014). It is that attitude that leads to predictions that up to half the colleges in the country will close in the next 15 years, despite the broad acknowledgement that, as a country, we need to educate a larger fraction of our populace at the college level.

(5) Student debt is only going to get worse.

In the face of stagnant family incomes, rising college costs, and increased interest rates on federal student loans, more graduates will be leaving college with even larger debt loads.

A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that the four in 10 households led by people who were under the age of 40 and who had student loans averaged $137,010 in total debt, whereas similar households with no student loans averaged just $73,250 in total debt. (abqjournal, May 15, 2014)

Interest rates on federal student loans for undergraduates are scheduled to jump from 3.86 percent to 4.66 percent, starting July 1, 2014 – a 21 percent rate increase. Graduate loans will increase from 5.41 percent to 6.21 percent – a 15 percent rate increase. Direct PLUS loans will increase from 6.41 percent to 7.21 percent – a 13 percent increase. (Inside Higher Ed, May 8, 2014) Higher interest rates will require higher monthly payments on a loan of the same amount, and will increase the already astronomically high level of overall student debt, even if students do not increase the amount they actually borrow – something they almost surely will do, should colleges continue to increase their tuition.

The consequence to the economy of even the current level of student debt was the subject of a recent article in The New York Times (May 14, 2014). Student debt has grown from $300 billion to $1.1 trillion in just the last decade. In the same time period, the percentage of 27- to 30-year-olds with mortgages has dropped from 30 percent to 22 percent – and much of that drop has been among people with student debt. A similar pattern has occurred with auto loans. The inevitable conclusion? Student loan debt is holding back the economy.

Each of these issues is concerning. Collectively, they are truly frightening. The slow-motion train wreck is picking up speed – and there’s very little evidence that the resulting catastrophe to our young people and to our national economy can be averted.

At the local level, however, those with the will to do so can make a difference – and Roger Williams University intends to try.