Although college tuition cost increases took a breather during the height of COVID amid the lock downs, they appear to be creeping up again.
Over the years, colleges and universities across the nation have implemented cost increases consistently to meet inflation and rising costs. U.S. News & World Report reported that the average tuition and fees at private national universities jumped 144 percent over the past 20 years, with out-of-state tuition at public national universities rising 171 percent. In-state tuition and fees at public national universities showed the highest jump, with tuition and fees rising an average of 211 percent over the past two decades. While tuition and fees increased steadily for many years, these hikes ground to a halt a couple of years ago.
Nearly two years ago, when COVID-19 closed college and university campuses around the country, students and professors quickly switched to a remote teaching and learning model. Many institutions credited accounts or refunded campus fees like housing and meal plans, but did not offer tuition rebates since course instruction was continuing, albeit from home computers.
At the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, most schools continued with a remote learning model or switched to a hybrid model, offering some in-person classes for the first time in six months. Many institutions offered on-campus housing or allowed students to continue learning from home. Because the situation was so unusual, understanding how the pandemic had affected the economy and because parents and students were dissatisfied with the level of instruction they were receiving while paying full tuition rates, many colleges and universities decided to freeze tuition and fees for 2021-2022.
But now that campus life has resumed, and most schools are offering in-person classes, colleges and universities are resuming their tuition and fees increases. Some are implementing small increases, while others are raising their cost-to-attend amounts by a hefty amount.
These rate hikes are understandable, as schools have to deal with the same high increases as the rest of the country. Energy prices have skyrocketed over the past year. Heating oil, electricity and natural gas prices are up by 29.3 percent over last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Food prices have risen by 6.3 percent.
For the 2020-2021 academic year, Ohio State University froze tuition increases while some of the other public universities in Ohio implemented the 3.5 percent tuition hike allowed by state law. For this year, Ohio State resumed tuition increases, but only by an amount that covers the cost of inflation – or roughly $112 per semester. The university’s board is now considering how much it will increase tuition for the coming academic year.
University of Illinois also announced an increase in tuition and fees for the coming year, for all incoming freshman, who will pay just less than 2 percent more at the Urbana-Campaign and Chicago campuses. This is only the second increase within the past eight years. It was approved in January 2020 for in-state incoming freshman but after the pandemic, the board approved funding to cover cost increases to prevent students from paying more. Housing and student fees will increase along with tuition.
Undergraduate students at Loyola will pay $1,690 more in tuition beginning with the fall semester. The school has increased tuition every year since 1989. This year’s increase of 3.65 percent is the highest in recent years. University leadership cited the school’s investments in faculty recruitment and retention, campus infrastructure and scholarships in justifying the hikes. The university is tuition-dependent, with approximately 95 percent of scholarships given out by the university financed with university revenues and not through the university’s approximately $1 billion endowment.
The University of Delaware has announced that it will increase undergraduate tuition. During the 2020-2021 academic year, the university raised tuition by 2.7 percent for in-state students and 1.1 percent for out-of-state students. The university will continue distributing Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds through the CARES Act to qualifying students.
While the University of Virginia will raise the base undergraduate tuition and fees by more than 8 percent over the next two years, it has held these costs down for the past two school years. The school cites “rising university costs across a wide range of sectors” to justify the increase. The school says it will enable UVA to offer competitive professor salaries, to support a world-class student experience and meet the needs of the University’s financial aid program.