Tuition Discounts

Over a year ago, COVID-19 became a pandemic around the world and has majorly affected every culture across the globe. One institution impacted directly was colleges, which had to send students home to keep them safe and resort to online learning.

This school year, college learning was reworked in a lot of ways. Many colleges offered relief to students during this time through certain methods, including discounts on the cost of tuition for this semester.

However, Champlain College was not one of the schools to offer these discounts. They maintained their original rates as they invested a lot in ways to enhance the learning experience while keeping the students safe.

Benjamin Akande, the President of Champlain College said that "Champlain has made significant investments to mitigate the risk of COVID and ensure the health and safety of our campus, as well as investments in classroom and other technology services to support and enhance Flex-Hybrid teaching and learning so that the real-time teaching and face-to-face engagement between faculty and students reflect the traditional classroom experience as much as possible. For this reason, we determined that Champlain tuition would remain at the originally posted rates for the 2020-2021 academic year."

Champlain didn’t offer these discounts because they still spent a lot of money and resources on making sure the students at the college could still engage with other students and staff in an effort to have this year be as close as possible to a regular school year while keeping the population safe and COVID-free. And even if they did offer discounts, they weren’t as common as people think, and had notable problems.

According to Emma Kerr, a few colleges and universities have offered tuition discounts between 10% to 30%. This discount is only for the Spring 2021 semester due to the pandemic. Some of these discounts are also not offered to all students as well. Ken Redd, director of research and policy analysis at NACUBO, said that "when everybody gets the discount it's really more of a price cut or price reduction." So colleges will normally try to find a population to give this discount to. An example is Lafayette College, which would be giving their discount only to those who would be learning off-campus this semester.

Only a small percentage of colleges were able to offer tuition discounts. Even those few colleges that did couldn’t offer it to everyone, so they had to be selective. Most schools—similar to Champlain—had to balance keeping students safe, beefing up online learning tools, and maintaining overhead.

Source: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/these-colleges-are-giving-tuition-discounts-this-fall

By William Chrin and Samuel Sussman

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