By Lauryn Longacre, Staff Writer
The price to attend Susquehanna university has increased by four percent for students attending the 2019-2020 school-year. This means that students will now be charged $62,320 for the comprehensive fee versus the 2018-2019 charge of $59,920, but what is the comprehensive fee and why is it increasing?
The comprehensive fee is the collective payment amount a student is charged for room and board, tuition, and other fees including the health and activity fees.
The fee covers a full year at Susquehanna. However, it is good to keep in mind that although the price seems high, it is only the charged price for students.
Susquehanna’s Vice President and Co-Chief Operating Officer Mike Coyne said, “I’d be shocked if it were 25 [students]” who pay the full charged price to attend Susquehanna. “We put out many financial aid offers.”
According to the Susquehanna University Fact Book for the 2017-2018 school year the institution gave nearly $60 million in aid to full-time students, and from the past five years it’s increased by about $20 million.
“They took quite a bit off,” said Susquehanna alumna Laura Bastian, “I think I was paying maybe $30,000 a year.” Bastian started her first year at Susquehanna in 2014.
The comprehensive fee for the 2014-2015 school year was $51,150 and has since increased by nearly 16 percent.
This is a normal characteristic of the comprehensive fee increase for Susquehanna. The fee is expected to rise four percent annually.
This increase is due to a lot of factors including employee benefits, operating expenses, and contract services.
The total cost for employee benefits, salaries and wages, in the past five years, has increased by 5.9 percent, going from $28,805 for the 2012-2013 school-year to $30,510 for the 2016-2017 school year, according to the 2017-2018 factbook.
The expenses for salaries and employee benefits took up nearly 38 percent of the expenses. However, if Susquehanna cut some of their expenses to benefit the comprehensive fee of the students it would mean that many of the faculty and staff would have to suffer the consequences.
According to Coyne, similar colleges ran into financial trouble with price cutting, “remember seven or eight years ago, when we had our issues here, we cut the pension, made employees pay health care, we did some early retirement, we did some outsourcing,” said Coyne.
Other than salaries and benefits of the employees, the rising comprehensive fee at Susquehanna is due to the cost of maintenance and the addition of new buildings on campus.
According to Coyne, the Degenstein Campus Center as well as Aikens Hall are two of the biggest investments, as well as the campus pool.
“A good portion of it [the money] needs to go into especially residence halls,” according to Bastian, “I know when I was a […] sophomore or junior here they brought in one of the biggest classes ever and they required everyone to live on campus, but the freshmen were being jammed into triples.”
When Bastian started in 2014 there were 575 first-year students enrolled at Susquehanna. In the 2017 school year there was an enrollment of 634 first-year students, and there were 638 enrolled in the fall of 2019.
Another hit to the budget was the newly renovated Global Opportunities and Student Financial Services offices, which were connected to better accommodate the students.
“I do feel like my bills got higher by thousands each year,” Bastian said. “[It was] hard to tell, just because the school gives a lot of money in financial aid.”