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With its brand new $82,697 sticker price, Connecticut College is among the frontrunners in the race to boast the highest cost of attendance in the country. After this 3.5% increase from the previous academic year, Conn will almost certainly make the top 10-15 on national lists of the most expensive colleges. (In this two-year old article, Conn is number 15.) The College website fails to break this daunting number into categories; rather, it broadly claims, “This covers tuition, room and board, lab fees, studio fees, special programs, some course-related travel, study away and even music lessons.” Tuition alone may not be extremely unreasonable, but when extra fees and room/board are taken into account, the total cost to attend NESCAC colleges skyrockets well into the $80,000s. Trinity and Wesleyan, the other two NESCACs in Connecticut, cost even more than Conn at over $85K and $86K, respectively.
In December of 2022, The New York Times published an article highlighting the “tuition reset,” a movement for American colleges to lower their tuition and make merit scholarships more competitive rather than having high tuition and awarding merit scholarships to practically every student. Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire, a very small private school, lowered its 2023-2024 tuition by 62% in response to this “recognition that few pay the list price.” Susan D. Stuebner, the president of Colby-Sawyer, acknowledged that “this phenomenon in higher education of a high sticker price, high discount is so confusing to families.” According to Conn’s Academic Fact Sheet (a resource for employees of admissions), “97% of the incoming Fall 2022 class received institutional grant funding in the form of need-based and/or merit grants.” In other words, only 3% of that class paid the full cost of attendance. If hardly anyone actually pays Conn’s sticker price, why not decrease it to reflect what students really pay?
We tend to believe there is a positive correlation between price and quality (the Chivas Regal effect), but no education or experience is worth $82K; this ridiculously high number deters people from even considering applying to Conn. As a tour guide, I would rather say “The cost of attendance is $50K” than “The cost is $82,697…but almost everyone gets financial aid and/or scholarships, so don’t worry” when asked about tuition. Cost is one of the – if not the – major factors for many families in making college decisions. If Conn truly wishes to become a more diverse school in terms of race and class, removing the application fee is not nearly enough. Additionally, the recent affirmative action ban certainly does not help this cause. Anyone who is conscious of finances would be taken aback, if not repelled, by the $82,697 label.
The College website lists the seven levels of merit scholarships, ranging from $15K to $34K but it does not state the reality that almost all students receive one. How are prospective students supposed to know that the cost of attendance is deceiving? Conn should lower the cost of attendance and increase the competitiveness of its merit scholarships. What are the criteria for these scholarships if so many students receive them? A little known fact: their amounts are even negotiable.
As Conn is 98% residential and nearly everyone lives in a College-owned building, it is next to impossible to escape the room/board fee. Larger universities allow (and often require) upperclass students to live on their own, but this is not the case at most small residential colleges. The statement that Conn’s cost includes study away is also deceiving. The College does cover the cost of the study away programs into which students are accepted, but that cost is almost always significantly less than the cost to attend Conn (as foreign education is cheaper). It does not make sense that students must continue paying Conn’s hefty cost, including room and board, when they are not even living on campus. The cost of their study away program may include housing, but it still amounts to nowhere near the cost of housing at Conn. The College must profit inordinately from this unjust system.
According to the aforementioned N.Y.T. article, U.S. colleges have competed over the past twenty years, gradually increasing their prices in an attempt to grow prestige and draw in applicants. While private colleges attract a disproportionate number of privileged high-income students, they simultaneously deter a large and diverse portion of the U.S. population…and then wonder why they struggle to match the diversity of public state schools. We Conn students continue to ask: Where is all of this money going? Certainly not toward facility maintenance or DIEI initiatives. The small number of marginalized students Conn does attract often find that there is no strong support system for them once they arrive on campus. Performative action and tokenization will never make Conn a diverse, inclusive institution. Senior administration must acknowledge this by lowering the cost of attendance and increasing financial transparency/input from students.
