Whittier’s students face the possibility of a cutback in the Cal Grant award next year. Debate on the proposed cuts will start shortly in Sacramento, and soon I will ask you to join me and members of our Board of Trustees in sending letters and making calls to encourage our elected officials to preserve the Cal Grant program for students attending private, nonprofit colleges like Whittier. In the meantime, I thought I would provide an update on the steps Whittier has been taking to keep our College affordable.
Each year Whittier attracts gifts from generous supporters who want to contribute to our educational mission, and most of these gifts go right into our operating budget and underwrite financial aid, faculty positions, and capital improvements. However, the largest portion of this College’s operating budget comes from tuition and fees. We should be proud that for decades Whittier College has deliberately provided an exceptional education at a price substantially lower than many peer schools in California. But, there is no getting around the fact that our model of high quality education is expensive. Therefore, one strategy that we have adopted to control the costs associated with quality is to seek new sources of revenue to subsidize the education we offer.
Among the alternative revenue sources we are developing are academic programs designed for new audiences. For example, we are partnering with other great colleges and universities and a private company to offer a set of courses online to students who are taking internships abroad or who want to work for a semester and still earn high-quality college credits. Another project involves developing a set of short-term, intensive courses modeled on Whittier’s popular LA Arts program, allowing students and adults from the U.S. and other parts of the world to be taught by our extraordinary faculty and to learn by exploring the culturally rich Southern California region. Still another project will take advantage of Whittier’s wealth of travel study courses, which can be offered to students from other colleges and universities during the summer months.
A second strategy for containing the cost of college is to ensure that our students graduate on time. A four-year degree should be earned in – tada! – four years. This feat is increasing rare in some sectors of higher education today. Whittier’s students graduate in 4.2 years on average and, as our student body increased in size over the last few years, the faculty worked diligently to add courses and instructors to meet students’ needs for classes. We continue to study ways that the curriculum helps or hinders on-time graduation and adjust accordingly. An on-time graduation not only saves on tuition, room, and board fees, but enables graduates to enter the workforce and graduate and professional schools sooner, leading to higher lifetime earnings.
A third strategy involves an ongoing examination of systems and processes to improve efficiency. One avenue for investigation belongs to the faculty, which must look to general and major requirements and course scheduling to ensure that our goals for students’ learning are met in ways that are cost-effective and if not, must search for alternative methods. Another avenue belongs to the staff, which must scour budgets lines and processes for economies that will not only preserve good service to students, but actually improve it. Whittier is already leanly administered, so coming across areas that will yield substantial savings is unlikely. However, one exciting area under current study is the possibility of transforming some portion of Whittier’s beautiful campus to more environmentally and economically sustainable – and even more attractive – landscaping.
While not considered a cost-containment method, there is another strategy we have adopted to keep education more affordable, at least to a subset of our students. Although the majority of Whittier’s students begin as freshmen and continue straight through to graduation, a large proportion of students in the United States attend more than one school. (In higher education lingo, this trend is called “swirling.”) This trend is especially evident in California, where many students begin at community colleges or public universities to lower the overall cost of their educations, but find that the difficulty in getting classes and the size of classes warrant transfer within a year or two. Seeing this trend develop, a few years ago Whittier began to enroll about 100 transfer students annually, often working with partner institutions in the area and asking faculty to help us identify talented students. With funding from the Teagle Foundation, a taskforce led by Professor Deborah Norden is examining our success in ensuring that these students receive the same high quality education and opportunities at Whittier that we provide to their four-year colleagues, that they graduate on time, and that they save on the overall cost of their bachelors degrees.
Affordability is just about the most important topic for discussion on college and universities campuses today, and Whittier is fully engaged in the conversation and determined to find smart solutions. There is one vital “bottom line” to these discussions: we cannot sacrifice quality. Our commitment to active learning rather than passive listening, intense faculty mentorship, personalized services, and a campus environment that supports the “whole student” is costly. This is an indisputable fact. Underlying all of our planning for changes that will help keep Whittier affordable has been a commitment to the kind of school Whittier is. Through a steady focus on quality, we will preserve Whittier’s greatness and continue to serve our students well.
