Tuition is going up again. Typical increases are in the 3-4% per credit range for in-county students. This year students will see a 4.52% increase which follows a 7.8% increase two years ago and a 4% increase last year with each compounding upon the last.
Students say they are feeling the pinch.
Second-year Physical Therapy major Maya Gordon says, “I feel as though it’s going to make the process a little more difficult because I already pay out of pocket, so it’s already a $99 increase. Ninety-nine dollars is not cheap. As a student who is currently already paying out of pocket, it’s just making my life a little more difficult.”
The tuition increases at Mercer in the past two years are above what comparable New Jersey community colleges have faced. Middlesex County College, for example, increases its in-county tuition by two dollars each year, according to VOICE research into tuition prices dating back to 2014.
In practical terms, that means that an in-county resident attending Mercer will pay $190.75 per credit starting next fall, while a similar student would be paying $150.50 at Middlesex assuming they both paid in-county rates.
Sophia Sexton, a second semester Liberal Arts student says of the increase, “It seems like eight dollars is a small increase. But if you think of it depending on how many classes you take, that’s going to fuck up me and my parent’s financial stuff, if they have to keep putting up more money for me to go to class.”
In a VOICE poll of 30 students, 46.7% of students surveyed said that the tuition increase would make it harder for them to pay for their education.
When asked for comment about the proposed tuition increase, the Financial Aid Office said, “The Financial Aid Office does not do anything with tuition. Free tuition offered by the state of New Jersey will be decided when the Governor does his budget in the summer of 2020.”
Many students do qualify for financial aid through federal and state programs including Governor Murphey’s new free college initiative that he originally announced at MCCC in spring 2018.
Free tuition is not available to all students, however, including international students, and is only available to the students in the lowest socioeconomic brackets. Additionally, the amount of federal financial aid that undergraduate students can receive is capped at $57,500 overall, meaning whatever they spend at MCCC is money they will not have left to pay for tuition at a transfer school.
Dean of Student Affairs Dr. Diane Campbell gave her opinion on how the tuition increase will affect students.
“I think for the most part I haven’t heard any complaints, I don’t think the tuition increase is something that will hurt. If you can pay the tuition now, the increase is not going to cause a lot of pain. The people who are paying out of their pocket, they will feel it some. But I don’t think it is going to be the thing where they are not going to be able to handle it,” she said.
Another tuition issue that students say they are facing is the new registration policy that was implemented starting this semester, requiring an upfront payment of $182.50 per credit.
When asked about this policy and why it was put into place, College President Dr. Jianping Wang said, “We have in the past, students who register but don’t pay. As a result, it becomes a bad debt for the college. When the college has high bad debt, you have to put good money to guarantee to pay for that… If you accumulate seven hundred, eight hundred thousand dollars of bad debt every semester, before you know it the college is going to run to the ground.”
She also provided her perspective on the tuition increase saying, “Our goal is not to increase if we can, at all. But if we have to increase, we want to increase in a way that doesn’t really pose a significant burden on students. The college is, fortunately, doing well because we have been very responsible and prudent in increasing every year a little bit so that we don’t ever have to get to a point where we do a big jump.”
Yet there are still students that feel like this increase may be too much.
As said by second-semester Liberal Arts student Sophia Sexton, “I feel like community college is supposed to make it easier for people to go to school, not make it harder.”
