More and more colleges are coming up with plans to go virtual in the fall just in case COVID is unresolved.
They never discuss the cost of tuition in any of these plans.
Has anyone heard anything about cost reduction in tuition?
@Luckyjade2024
Good question. Highly doubtful that the quality of online classes would be as good as in person classes. Colleges should discount the tuition as they are now offering an inferior product. But, they obviously don’t want to do that for financial reasons.
Also, some classes are labs…so we won’t be getting that hands on experience.
As if this entire college process wasn’t stressful enough!
I would just be happy if they freeze tuition to 2019/2020 levels for at least a year but highly unlikely to happen at most colleges as they have lost a ton of money from room and board reimbursements this spring and the same with fall online classes. Not to mention endowment losses in 2020 and less alumni giving as they too have seen a drop in their wealth and/or job losses.
At the end of the day, college is big business and they are going to preserve their revenue streams the best they can and if that means charging full tuition rates for an online student experience, so be it.
Fully online will probably cost the (not-previously-mostly-online) colleges the same or more, even though students usually see less desirability.
Private colleges have endowment losses, while public colleges will see budgets cut due to state government loss of tax revenue. Loss of donations and revenue due to higher student financial need also cause college fiscal problems.
Please don’t assume that online automatically means worse. Yes, the experience is different than in a live classroom, and there are indeed serious challenges for lab courses. However a normal lecture-based or discussion-based course converts quite easily to online format. In fact if the class sessions are recorded, there are distinct advantages in that the student can watch and re-watch a lecture as needed to understand the content.
What about the colleges your kid applied to made you feel those places were a good value? The professors will still be the same, much of the library will still be the same (lots of what they would need to access is online, and what they can’t get online the library staff may be able to ship to them), and once the students know who their classmates are nothing will prevent them from communicating with each other outside of class by phone, through social media, or with a tool like Zoom.
I am online learning for HS…yes, you can learn, but it is not the same. I miss my school, human interactions, faculty, friends, and the social atmosphere just to name a few.
I have always waited for the exciting time of going “away” to college. There is nothing “exciting” about online learning to begin college.
I really hope we find a treatment before then!
I’m sorry but taking college courses from your parents home is not even close to being fully immersed in your residential college. For example, Duke houses all freshman in the east campus with their own dining commons, residence halls, theaters, gyms, library, on campus academic clubs, performing arts, attending athletic events and social life in the Greek system.
You get the opportunity to interact and collaborate with freshman from all over the world. And living on your own is an education in and of itself. College Isn’t just about learning Physics 101. These kids have been already doing online learning this spring either in HS or college, do they really want to be doing it another semester. No ways around it, online learning is subpar for college students.
Exactly…perfectly stated!
For most college students, college is just about learning Physics 101 (or whatever courses they are taking). The residential college experience (as opposed to the commuter or distance college experience) is a luxury for the relatively few who can afford it (usually through parent money, sometimes through scholarships or beating the odds and getting admitted to a residential college with good financial aid).
Of course, parents who are paying more for their kids to have the residential college experience are going to complain when that premium luxury aspect is no longer present.
When my daughter took one online course one semester (her choice, not required) it actually cost MORE, not less. She paid for classes by the credit, so she had to pay for the 3 credit class. She also had to pay a ‘distance learning fee’, and because she had 12+ credits in on campus classes, she had to pay all the on campus student fees for that semester. If she’d been all online, she wouldn’t have had to pay those on campus fees.
If a school is offering the same number of credits and the same degree in the end, why wouldn’t they charge the same tuition? It’s a business and it costs them the same for the professors and all the resources they are providing like library access, advising, administrative support, producing transcripts.
Also you don’t get any of the ECs or other extras. I feel like my kid’s learning is only half from the classroom and the other half from the ECs, advising, TAing, attending random lectures, etc.
@socaldad2002 I couldn’t agree more. S would tell you his new normal is OK but it’s nowhere near as engaging as real classes in a real classroom. The material may be the same but the interaction and discussion just isn’t there. For S, those other details are what make the coursework come to life. Even in accounting classes, he has a professor who used to be a CEO and she would dive deep into the crossroads of managerial accounting and running a business. It just doesn’t happen online.
And the actual being in college vs taking classes online is night and day. It’s just the whole experience.
It’s your choice whether to pay the tuition the school is asking for, but I really doubt they will reduce tuition. They are still paying that professor his full salary, they are still issuing a U of X degree. You might have an argument for the health center fee or the student activity fee, but tuition if for the instruction and you are still getting that.
I also doubt they would lower tuition. If schools are going to lose out on room and board and fees associated with living on campus (health insurance, student activity fees, etc.) they certainly would not want to take a further hit on tuition.
That is my major dilemma right now. Our eldest son is going to be a transfer student from our local cc to a private university this fall. We are paying a little under 19K for him. We have another child, freshman attending a private LAC. With the both of them it’ll cost us a lot this year. The question is…is it worth it to pay that much if all classes this fall is going to be online? Then there’s the uncertainty with our economy. Lots of furloughs happening. 2020 is becoming a really tough year for everybody.
@kpopmomrunner if your 19k is full year, full COA and they don’t reduce your aid, your out of pocket expense would be close to zero if you don’t have to pay for housing.
COA at son’s university is about $67K. The ~$19K will be our out of pocket expenses. We are paying 20% of his tuition with a $14K Room and meals plus miscellaneous. IF school decides to do online for fall, then that will cut our OOP at least for the room and meals, by half since son will be home (just realized this now LOL).
fwiw, pre COVID I was talking with a friend that runs the finance department at a state flagship about online classes and if they were the future. He said the tuition would be about $5k a year if his university was online.
That seems to have the assumption of converting to an online business model, including selling off unused buildings, cutting faculty and staff jobs, etc… Colleges that hope to return to the in-person model are not going to cut much of those costs during an online semester.