Small US institutions: stop saying you are affordable

A consultant friend of mine recently visited our campus and met with the admissions team. They asked him how to best get across the idea to families that we are affordable. He surprised the group by replying: “You’re not. And neither are your competitors.”

My institution, the University of Lynchburg, has worked really hard to keep costs down for students. We provide many scholarships and aid packages, and our net cost is lower than that of most of our private peers and even some of the public institutions in Virginia. But affordable? If that term means “I can buy it out of my disposable income”, then we are not affordable for most families.

If small universities are to be successful in student recruitment, we need to put just as much emphasis on the value side of the equation as on the price side. A colleague of mine, for instance, counselled his college to advertise “a great education at a fair price”. At first, that seems like a subtle departure from claiming affordability, but it is an important one. When we claim that our price is fair, we indicate that what students get is worth the investment, and that we can prove it.

Providing that proof is where we should focus. Small colleges and universities have sometimes been a bit lazy, pointing to a few aggregate statistics about lifetime income or well-massaged student placement rates to avoid telling families what they really need to know – what will they get out of higher education?

Many institutions have this proof but have not made the effort to pull it together in a compelling way. We intuitively know that much of the value students receive comes not from the transfer of knowledge, which they could get on their own from the right textbooks, but from the relationships they form, the experiences they have and the mentoring they receive as they learn together in a community. Who can offer a better learning community than small institutions, whose small classes are taught by actual faculty, not graduate students?

Let’s collect examples from every student cohort of what they learn through early research, conference presentations, public humanities, service and leadership. We should be able to demonstrate that letters of recommendation from faculty with whom they have real working relationships afford our students greater success when applying for graduate school entry or competitive internships. We should be constantly polling our employers for quotes and feedback about how our graduates compare to those of big-name universities.

One way to approach this shift in perspective would be to reimagine the role of career services. If we linked them less closely with student affairs and more closely with institutional research and the advancement office, they could become the brand champions for institutional return on investment. Staffed correctly, they could link engaged learning experiences from the classroom with the exploration and further development of identifiable skills. They could be a driver of data that tell the story of why smaller institutions that are intentional in creating a learning environment are worth the investment.

As we work on fully developing the quality side of our value proposition, we can also adjust the way we speak about price. When I am working with families, I remind them that a college education is an investment partnership in which there are multiple players, all committed to helping the student. The federal government provides low-cost loans and some grant funding. State governments often contribute grants. The university provides scholarships and needs-based aid. The student contributes summer earnings and work-study, and parents usually fill the gap with a combination of payments or their own borrowing. The goal is a superior educational experience that should pay dividends for the rest of the student’s life.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that universities should not try to control their costs and offer more scholarships to broaden access. But a four-year college education, especially at a good private university, is always going to involve some sacrifice. No one wants to hear that. But if we can show that the sacrifice will be worth it, then hopefully people will start listening.

Aaron Basko is associate vice-president for enrolment management at the University of Lynchburg.