Tuition breaks the bank

Forbes: Kenyon second most expensive college in U.S.

By: Sarah Friedman

Posted: 2/7/08

In late January, Forbes Online named Kenyon the second-most-expensive college in the United States, surpassed only by George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

"That list is meaningless," said President S. Georgia Nugent. According to Nugent, the Forbes list compares the tuitions of residential colleges, which does not include room and board. "The fact is once you include room and board we're actually not that expensive," she said.

"Our tuition is higher and our room and board is lower, but our comprehensive fee is nowhere near the second most expensive in the country," said Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jennifer Delahunty.

Forbes cited a $36,050 tuition for Kenyon's 2006-07 academic year. According to Delahunty, tuition for the 2008-09 academic year will be $40,240, and room and board will be $6,600, pending approval from the Board of Trustees.

This comprehensive cost of $46,840 does not place Kenyon among the nation's most-expensive colleges. By comparison, Sarah Lawrence College, Forbes' second most expensive college on its revised list, charges $38,090 for tuition and $12,720 for room and board-about $4,500 more than Kenyon's prediction for next year.

Why so expensive?

"The most expensive thing at Kenyon is people," said Delahunty. "The only way to really economize at Kenyon is to try to reduce labor costs, and to reduce labor costs is going to reduce quality of experience."

The College's second-largest cost, she said, is financial aid, which consumes about 23 percent of its budget.

Another reason Kenyon's tuition-though not its total cost-is one of the highest in the nation is that the College allocates costs differently than other colleges do when assessing tuition and room and board fees.

"We've been allocating costs with an older formula that we haven't looked at in a while," said Nugent. Costs that should be covered by the room and board fee are therefore currently allotted to tuition's coverage.

For example, according to Nugent, the current formula was developed "before the ubiquity of computers," so tuition pays for the "major expense" of IT when it is in fact largely a room and board-related cost. Tuition also covers AVI's expensive local foods effort; at other colleges, most of which have specific meal plans, food costs would clearly fall under the category of room and board.

How can students pay?

"Every Kenyon student is coming at a discount," said Delahunty. Even students paying full tuition and fees only pay about 76 percent of their total cost each academic year, she said. The other 24 percent of the College's annual operating budget comes from 4.5 percent interest on its endowment, gifts from alumni and revenues from conference fees.

According to Delahunty, at $200 million, the College's endowment is about the 49th largest in the nation. "It's like we're [a] different species" from schools with larger endowments, she said. Harvard University's endowment, for example, is $34.6 billion. An endowment is "the greatest guarantee of cost control and accessibility, and it's our biggest vulnerability," she said. The "We Are Kenyon" campaign is intended to increase the College's endowment.

There is no way of knowing, however, how underprivileged potential applicants will react to Kenyon's ranking.

"You potentially have people making a decision in advance that is based on false information," said Dean of Students Tammy Gocial.

For the College's tuition "to be that high and to be sort of notable is challenging because people have to look at that number in comparison with their personal circumstances," said Gocial. "If you never apply because you think it's too expensive, then we miss out on students we would love to have."

"We still get students from every possible socioeconomic background applying to Kenyon," even though it appears on the Forbes list every year, said Delahunty. "It's daunting and discouraging information, but our job as educators is to let people know it's still affordable" because of financial aid.

Nobody at the College, especially the "independent, kind of quirky student" that Kenyon attracts, wants to feel that it is only affordable for millionaires, said Gocial. "I think we want to be the kind of place where people fit, where people feel comfortable, and we don't want that to be based on money," she said.

No changes to decrease cost

Costs to the College will remain the same, according to Nugent. The issue at hand is "cost allocation," how the College breaks up its costs into tuition and room and board fees, not the costs themselves.

Overhead costs like electricity and heating complicate the cost allocation process, said Nugent, because they are "part of the overall budget of the College." In order to determine tuition and room and board fees, the College must evaluate the percentages of each resource used in student residences and in other College buildings.

"We sit around the senior-staff table and talk about allocations for carpeting," said Delahunty. "Every single dime here is used incredibly well."