USD tuition exceeds $50,000

As tuition increase trend continues, students seek answers for their growing costs

Catherine Silvey / Feature Editor / The USD Vista 
Mayella Vasquez / Asst. Feature Editor / The USD Vista

This summer, University of San Diego students and parents reviewing their fall semester billing statements were, for the first time, encountered with tuition costs exceeding $50,000, a $1,700 increase from last year’s rate.
According to a 2018 report by U.S. News & World Report, American college students paid an average of $35,676 in net tuition costs and fees to attend private colleges last school year. At many schools, including USD, tuition is not only set to rise this year, but has also shown a pattern of consistent annual tuition increase.
Since 2015, USD’s tuition has risen by around 3.5 percent annually. This means that incoming seniors will have experienced a nearly $5,000 leap in tuition from their first-year rate. Additionally, the steady climb in tuition shows no sign of stopping.
Many students find this data concerning, including junior Alexa Perez.
“It’s honestly scary to see the tuition go up,” Perez said. “It would be nice to know why it’s increasing, what it’s going toward.”
Janet Courtney-Smith, the Assistant Vice President of Budget and Planning, holds a different perspective on the matter. In her position of managing the annual operating budget for the school, Courtney-Smith finds that the budget favors student needs by consistently prioritizing financial aid, even increasing financial aid funds more than the tuition.
“We’re increasing financial aid by more than the tuition rate increase because we need more and more financial aid,” Courtney-Smith said. “We’re trying to build up the financial aid number faster, so we’re increasing the resources for financial aid faster than we’re increasing our tuition revenue.”
Courtney-Smith also cited the university’s growing discount rate (the average discount to tuition students receive from USD) as a reason for increasing financial aid funds.
“What (the discount rate) means is in the planning process, we assumed that in the past that 25 percent of tuition would not be collected, or 25 percent of it would go to financial aid,” Courtney-Smith said. “So technically you’re not collecting that money. It’s slowly been going up and up and up. Now we’re looking at it going up to 40 percent in the near future.”
Another large priority driving the yearly tuition increase is faculty compensation, as USD is to increase the salaries and wages of faculty and staff. This is considered especially urgent, because according to assessments conducted by the university, USD’s faculty is paid far less than the faculty of comparative schools. This has made the recruitment and hiring process of new faculty difficult for the school, and has presented the school with an issue it is eager to resolve.

“We’ve had a consultant come in, and they’ve done a study of our faculty compensation,” Courtney-Smith said. “Particularly in the college, faculty compensation is very low compared to other San Diego schools and also nationwide.”

Although heavy on-campus construction has been occurring over the past several years and will continue into the 2019-2020 school year, Courtney-Smith explained that none of the money used for construction is pulled from tuition revenue. 

“The way that we’re handling all of the new construction is based on fundraising,” Courtney-Smith said. “We put together a capital campaign and have a spending program in place because we wanted to make sure that we weren’t raising tuition in order to pay for buildings … we’re not increasing revenue to pay for capital.”

After determining that an increase in tuition is needed, the next step is deciding by how much. USD’s tuition increase rate has hovered at 3.5 percent for the past couple years, largely due to the competitive pricing strategy used by the university. This strategy balances the needs of the school with tuition patterns of similar colleges. USD closely compares its pricing with schools with a high cross-application volume, or the schools that USD applicants tend to apply to the most.

“We keep track of how much they are increasing their tuition by,” Courtney-Smith said. “So if we need to increase it by 3.5 percent, but we look and we see that everyone else is only increasing it by 2 percent, then we go back to the drawing board … we need to figure something else out. I’ve been doing it at this level for a few years now and we’ve sort of stayed steady-state.”

The process that weighs these factors to produce the yearly tuition rate begins in the fall of the prior year. During this time, Courtney-Smith meets with the President’s cabinet and with the faculty senate to discuss the tuition rate, explaining what the school has done in the past and presenting them with her recommendation.

“I get all kinds of input from people, and everyone has a chance to talk,” Courtney-Smith said. “They basically weigh in before we go any further. Everyone has a chance to be heard.”

While student needs remain a large priority of the tuition budgeting strategy, some students still have concerns about their growing costs, including sophomore Kylie Nevells.

“By raising tuition costs, schools are raising our future debt,” Nevells said. “I don’t believe placing our generation in debt once stepping out of college is healthy. College is supposed to allow us a step forward in our futures and careers, and nowadays it seems as though graduates are choosing careers to get out of debt rather than choosing a career to propel them into their dream jobs.”

Despite the fact that they  are set to benefit from the tuition increase through the increase in financial aid, some students are feeling far more burdened by the annual increases than benefited.