Less Tuition, More Profit

Students of MSU, welcome to a college life that feels more like taking an online driving test than a journey of higher education. If you’re anything like me, you checked MyInfo incessantly over the summer, holding your breath and crossing your fingers in the hopes that all of your classes didn’t develop the ominous words “ONLINE WEB” underneath the class time. Then you showed up to your remaining lecture classes to learn that the majority of them are actually a blend of online material and in-person discussion seminars. Now, you are probably trying to learn from filmed lectures that closely resemble Khan Academy videos, an online set of educational tools. However, Khan Academy is free, and MSU students are still paying up to $25,855 a year. Students shouldn’t have to pay in-person tuition for difficult online and blended classes that lack essential parts of college life. 

The college experience is not just attending classes, and universities know it. When students pay expensive tuition rates, they are investing in both an education and an environment. In this environment, students are immersed in learning and have direct access to in-person resources while also gaining social experiences that help develop them as people. MSU embraces the social aspect of college by continually referring to anyone in the community as Bobcats, therefore creating a bond between everyone in the school. However, this community has been drastically changed by online and blended classes. It is difficult to interact with peers, the resources that once were easy to use are now harder to navigate online, and the social part of college is now discouraged for health reasons. Everything has changed... except tuition. MSU should not charge students for an in-person college experience that no longer exists. 

Students may drop out of school because the experience is not the same, but they also may drop out because online and blended classes are historically harder to succeed in than in-person classes. A research article titled “Comparing student success between developmental math courses offered online, blended, and face-to-face,” published in the Journal of Interactive Online Learning, shows that in “distance-based and blended classes students performed worse than the traditional face-to-face”. Brigham Young University published “Dropout Rates, Student Momentum, and Course Walls: A New Tool for Distance Education Designers,” an article that reported dropout rates to be “six or seven times higher in online courses when compared to face-to-face courses.” These are significant factors that MSU cannot ignore.

Lowering tuition would benefit students attending MSU but might seem to pose a threat to the financial security of the university. Colleges are businesses and rely on tuition money. MSU also profits each year through money-makers such as football, which generated $1,704,942 in 2018-2109 after expenditures to help fund the athletics department, but that source of income is now gone. MSU stands to take even more financial hits as COVID-19 continues. Therefore, it might seem logical for MSU to keep tuition the same price as other sources of income vanish. However, MSU must consider that it has a great deal to lose in the long run if tuition isn’t lowered. 

The university could lose many students this year, which means losing their tuition dollars for this year and possibly future years if students decide not to return to college or to go to another one instead. The university relies on a steady stream of students attending every year.  If prospective students decide that the limited experience offered by MSU isn’t worth the price, fewer people are going to attend, potentially even after the pandemic. 

The impact of MSU’s tuition rate goes even further than the university and its community. If students drop out of college because of the expense, the future economy will be impacted. Jobs will go unfilled because people lack the proper education to qualify for them. Our economy has already suffered due to COVID-19. In a revised analysis from May called “The Economic Impacts of Covid-19 in Montana,” the Bureau of Business and Economic Research from University of Montana reported that there’d be a “loss of 75,000 jobs, on average, over the year 2020” for Montana and that the recovery would extend past the year 2022. If new college graduates are not entering the workforce to help the economy recover, the reality of our economic recovery might be even worse than the projections. 

Rather than focusing only on near-sighted financial worries, MSU needs to look at the long-term impacts of making students pay in-person tuition for online and blended classes. MSU also needs to incorporate the long-term detriment to students and the community caused by the discrepancy between tuition payments and the actual value of that tuition into its decision-making process. Make the right choice now to fund student success for the future.