Eastern Michigan University has recently announced that it is raising the cost of tuition by 7.8 percent. I find that while this raise itself is appropriate in order to make EMU more and more independent from government aid, the marketing tactics used before raising the cost of tuition are not.
In my first year going to EMU—2011—the university had made a wonderful promise that it honorably kept—it was going to freeze tuition costs for that year. This is commonly referred to amongst university staff as the “0-0-0” initiative. The 0-0-0 initiative was published and announced by Eastern Michigan University as one of the few schools trying to make college easier for lower income students, being discussed and published in publications such as the Detroit Free Press and multiple school listings.
For the years post-2011, EMU raised tuition costs at just under 4 percent per year, which also got it noticed across the country as one of those colleges fighting tuition costs and being a hero for lower income students. Once again these initiatives got EMU recognized in local and national papers— something I could also see in my own freshman year with students from all over the county. EMU announced that the students they brought in from the 0-0-0 initiative was the largest hike in students attending the university they had seen in years, and, possibly, ever.
Fast forward to today, where the tuition cost is hiked 7.8 percent, essentially double what Eastern Michigan University had previously been raising tuition just one year prior—and four years prior, it had not raised at all. What is the problem with this? Obviously after a certain amount of time if a school goes out of its way to reduce its income for the sake of the students they will have to hike up the tuition considerably, or increase its aid.
The problem is that most of the students they gained from the 0-0-0 initiative and those they gained from having one of the lowest tuition increase rates of the state, if not the country, will still be here until the end of the 7.8 percent raise and then some. According to Tom Kertscher from PolitiFact—an independent journalistic website that prides itself on fact-checking— the above average amount of years it takes to graduate from college is six years. This fits perfectly with me (since I’m not graduating until 2017) and many other of my fellow students.
Now—if this were a market option—say I loved apples and one week I buy a dozen apples, because the farmer at the farmer’s market only charges a dollar per apple if you buy a dozen, but say the next week he fell on hard times and now it is two dollars an apple if you buy a dozen. Well, I have more than enough freedom to take my business elsewhere, if it pleases me, and I do not have a personal attachment to the farmer. I can go to Wal-Mart, Meijer, Kroger, Target even, and buy their apples at a lower price instead.
Eastern Michigan University is not a product, though—it is an investment. So, the university suddenly hiking up the tuition cost by essentially doubling what it used to be is much more akin to what an investment scenario would be (such as investing in a CD account). A CD investment is typically a five-year or longer contract with a specific bank in which you are loaning them $10,000 or more that you will not touch. As a reward, at the end of your contract, the CD account pays you back your investment with cumulative interest. Now, what Eastern Michigan University has done is the equivalent of a bank offering a 20 percent reward if you open a CD investment with them today, and then, four years into your contract, the bank says that they are only going to give you a 10 percent cumulative interest reward instead.
Yes, you can still go elsewhere, but there is nothing you can do about your lost investment in that CD account. The most you can hope for is that it can transfer to another bank that may, hopefully, be a more rewarding account than the one you are currently a part of. The process of transferring credits from Eastern Michigan University to a cheaper, less hiked up tuition college is equally challenging, complicated and frustrating.
For this reason, I believe the sudden hike of tuition cost—which was almost entirely unannounced to the students—to be an inappropriate method of covering the tuition cost they may have supposedly saved students in the past. They gathered many more investors than they have ever had before from the 0-0-0 initiative, kept them at the University with some of the lowest tuition costs in the state if not the country and then, when there was a decision between government funding or increasing cost, the university decided to suddenly double the tuition cost on a majority of students who were ironically brought in via the 0-0-0 initiative.