New Students at Chapman Face 15% Tuition Hike

Chapman University will raise tuition 15% next fall for all new students in an effort to improve its academic caliber and keep pace with other institutions, its president announced Thursday.

A key goal in raising tuition is to use some of the money to offer more scholarships for academic achievement and thereby raise the current B-minus average of entering students, President James L. Doti said.

“We need to attract the kind of students that will make this a more exciting intellectual environment as well as build and attract . . . (the) resources that will make it possible for us to become the kind of institution we aspire to,” Doti said.

But Chapman’s increase in annual tuition to $14,936--its largest single hike in the past eight years--is almost double the percentage increase most of the nation’s private colleges and universities are expected to charge their new students this fall, say education experts. Private colleges and universities raised fees an average of 7% for the current 1991-92 academic year, and 8% the previous year.

“My sense is that this year’s tuition increases will not be too dissimilar to last year across the country,” said Arthur Hauptman, author of the 1990 book “The College Tuition Spiral” and a consultant to the American Council on Education in Washington. “That is, double-digit increases for public institutions and in the 6% to 8% range, maybe 9% for” private institutions.

Hauptman also questioned whether the campus could be pricing itself out of its natural market. “It sounds like they’re too close to USC or whoever their competitors are to have that kind of tuition.”

USC, for example, will charge tuition of $16,020 next fall, a 4.7% increase over last fall. The University of Redlands in Redlands, the campus Chapman considers most like itself, will charge $14,880 next fall, a 6.8% increase. Even Stanford University, which is trying to offset a $43-million deficit, is not contemplating a double-digit increase. It will charge new students $16,532, a 9.5% increase.

But Doti said the move is aimed at countering what he termed relatively low tuition increases of recent years, as well as positioning Chapman for the future as a nationally recognized small university offering high quality education.

“I want to be true to our mission . . . and that means we can’t fall behind,” he said. “It’s a very competitive education environment out there.”

But Chapman has hardly been shy about raising costs in the past. Over the past 11 years, tuition will have increased 168% since the 1982-83 academic year. With one exception, Chapman raised tuition at double-digit levels for each year from 1981 through 1987, with the exception of the 1986-87 academic year, when costs went up 8.5%. Two years earlier, tuition jumped 15.75%, compared to an average 9% increase for private four-year colleges around the country.

Doti broke the news to many of the campus’s 1,500 undergraduate students Thursday morning. Reaction was relatively mild, say students who attended the president’s forum. The reason: Returning students will get a special $1,184 grant, reducing their effective tuition increase to 6%.

“No one likes to spend more money on school; however, President Doti did give a presentation on it . . . and from what he said, it does seem pretty well to fit in with the goals of the university,” said Justin Everett, 20, a junior from Villa Park who is majoring in English and pre-law at Chapman.

Still, there will be pain, even with lower costs for continuing students.

“It’s going to hurt,” Everett predicted. “Not me personally. But I know it will be a problem for other students.”

For prospective Chapman students, the 15% tuition increase may mean the difference between choosing the small private school, where the student-teacher ratio is about 15 or 16 to 1, or a larger public university, where classes are often far larger and hard to get in the state’s current financial crisis.

“I was really depending on grants and financial aid to be able to afford it as it was,” said Kelly Hagan, a history major at Orange Coast College who has already been accepted at Chapman for the fall semester.

“If I can’t get financial aid to make up for (the 15% increase), I don’t know how I could afford it,” said the 21-year-old from Santa Ana, who is waiting to hear whether he also will be accepted at Cal Poly Pomona.

Education cost expert Hauptman said raising student fees to provide more scholarship funds may well be a good strategy to increase the overall intellectual climate of a university. But there can come a point of diminishing returns, when fewer and fewer students are able to pay the full cost.

Costs for Chapman’s nearly 800 graduate students also will be going up in the fall in the range of 6% to 10%, depending on the program, Doti said.

Final figures for most programs were not available Thursday. However, costs for the graduate business administration program will go up from $335 per credit hour this year to $355 in the fall, an increase of 6%, Doti said.

Returning undergraduates will also be hit by increases in student fees, including a health center fee of $100 for the first time in the campus’s history. Doti said the fee will allow the university to increase services at the campus health center and hold down increases in health insurance premiums to $250 next fall, up from $240 the previous year.