|
|
 |
Independent Thinking: Private Colleges Can Pay Off
By Gene Meyer, Kansas
City Star, April 15, 2007
Excerpt:
Baker University, a small independent liberal arts school and the oldest
university in Kansas, offered nearly everything LaTasha Roberts hoped
for when she was choosing a college four years ago.
It had a strong curriculum, small-enough classes in which a small-town
student from Louisburg could thrive, an idyllic campus setting less than
50 miles from home, and a good track team on which the high school sprinter
could continue to compete.
“I just fell in love with the place,” said Roberts, a senior
biology major with a strong background in speech communications.
She almost didn’t go. The Baldwin City campus’s then $22,000-a-year
price for tuition, fees, room and board seemed far beyond her family’s
reach, and a competing public university was offering a not-too-shabby
financial aid package.
“Frankly, I saw the price and kind of moved on,” Roberts said.
Before crossing Baker off her list, however, and after visiting potential
choices in Nebraska, Texas, Oklahoma and elsewhere in Kansas, Roberts
had one last conversation with Baker track coach Rob Mallinder.
“He told me look around, and that if I really wanted to come to
Baker, something could be worked out,” she said.
She did, and the financial pieces were worked out. Now, as Roberts prepares
for graduation this spring, she even sees a touch of irony in how things
came together.
Her fiance, who has been attending a seemingly more affordable public
university, also is graduating this spring.
“And his student loans are bigger than mine,” Roberts said.
That isn’t surprising, say education experts who contend that what
are perceived to be pricey private colleges actually are competitively
priced with taxpayer-supported public universities where published fees,
tuition and other costs may be only one-third to one-half as high.
Baker’s tuition, fees, room and board, for example, will hit $25,000
next year, but financial aid packages that average about $18,000 cut bottom
line costs significantly, to about $7,000, said Daniel McKinney, the college’s
admissions director.
A roughly comparable bare-bones budget on the University of Kansas campus
starts around $10,400 before an average $7,025 financial aid package cuts
the final costs to about $3,375, according to budgeting information on
the university’s Web site.
Many parents and students automatically assume the nation’s more
than 2,400 independent four- and two-year private colleges are too expensive
— outrageously so in some cases.
|
|
