(Reuters) – Even before President Barack Obama announced plans last month to push colleges to improve affordability, a number of schools beat him to the punch by lowering tuition and helping students graduate in fewer semesters.
These schools — typically small private colleges like University of Charleston, Cabrini College and Midland University that lack the cachet of top-tier colleges and compete with less expensive state schools — are bucking the widespread trend of increasing costs. In the last year, a few have cut tuition by as much as 20 percent. Others promise that students will earn their degree in four years or the college will pick up the cost of additional coursework.
While there’s no hard data, dozens of schools already have cut costs or implemented graduation guarantees. More such initiatives are expected to be announced this spring.
Such programs have clearly intrigued students and parents, but skeptics fear they may have a negative impact on the quality of education.
Promising a cheaper, quicker education will “invite institutions to take shortcuts,” says Richard Arum, a sociology and education professor at New York University. The temptation, he said, would be to make courses less rigorous, hire fewer top-notch faculty and pack more students into each
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