Pierce County university announces tuition won’t increase for incoming students
First-year students attending Pacific Lutheran University for the 2022-23 school year will catch a financial break.
University leaders announced Thursday they were implementing a “Fixed Tuition Guarantee” for the 2022-23 incoming class, including transfer students. That means that throughout their undergraduate years at PLU, their tuition will not increase.
PLU is located in Parkland and serves about 3,100 undergraduate and graduate students.
PLU’s tuition is currently about $48,000 per year, with next year’s incoming class set at around $49,000. Typically, tuition increases every year by about 3 percent in order to account for cost of doing business at the university, including paying staff and operations of facilities, according to PLU president Allan Belton. But it causes a burden on students.
Belton said that on average, students at private universities in the Puget Sound region are paying more than $5,000 more their senior year of college than they did in their first year.
“One of the problems with this model is that when tuition creeps up by 3 or 4 percent each year, a student’s annual scholarship funds and financial aid generally remains the same,” Belton said. “These gradual tuition increases often throw off the careful financial calculations that students and their families made to enroll.”
“Some students and families can end up cumulatively paying upwards of $10,000 to $12,000 more for education due to these incremental tuition hikes, and these are real costs that don’t have additional scholarship aid,” Belton continued. “This can push families into financial hardship or force students to leave their university with debt but without a degree. We need to stop that cycle.”
For students who are already enrolled at PLU, their tuition will not increase above that of the 2022-23 incoming class.
PLU leaders recognize that the move is a risky one.
The university identified a $4 million budget hole last December, leading to cuts to faculty positions and majors.
PLU leaders hope the benefits to enrollment and student health will offset those risks.
“This guarantee has the potential to widen our pool of prospective students, but most importantly, we think it has the potential to substantially improve graduation rates by removing the unnecessary financial burdens caused by tuition increases,” said Mike Frechette, PLU’s dean of enrollment management and student financial services in a press release.
PLU’s six-year graduation rate is currently 69.1 percent, just slightly above the average for private nonprofit institutions at 67 percent.
Belton said he was not aware of any other institution in the Northwest with a fixed tuition guarantee, but he hopes PLU will start a trend.
“We hope other institutions will make similar moves,” he said.
NOTE: This story has been updated to clarify that annual tuition at PLU increases every year by about 3 percent in order to account for the cost of doing business at the university, which includes not just paying staff but operations of facilities.
This story was originally published October 14, 2021 at 10:00 AM.
