Sinclair Community College President Steven Johnson said the college might raise tuition, although nothing has been officially announced.
Johnson said, should the school raise tuition, he’d like to raise it 5-7 percent, if allowed, in order to maintain the current level of quality. However, should the school actually raise tuition, the state government might place a 3.5 percent cap on tuition increases. If that occurs, Johnson said the school might have to turn students away.
Over the last three years, enrollment at the college has risen 30 percent. Johnson said due to the recovering economy, that number should level off, but because the state government is planning on cutting the funding going to colleges, the school will need to replace that lost income.
Right now, the state provides 40 percent of Sinclair’s income, according to Johnson, and Sinclair expects the state to cut 12 percent of that soon.
“When you get a 12 percent reduction, you start working through some options,” Johnson said. “One is cutting students, cutting classes, eliminating services; in other words, lowering the quality, and that’s just not acceptable.”
Johnson said that the 30 percent increase in enrollment signifies a need for Sinclair in the Dayton area, and Sinclair takes that into consideration when making decisions.
“So, right there at that level, there’s a student need,” Johnson said. “And if we cut back and said sorry, we don’t want you, you need to leave because we don’t have room for you, we don’t have the money, we think that’s the wrong thing to do. So we don’t want to affect students by limiting their ability to go to school because we eliminate classes and services.”
Johnson said that Sinclair wants to maintain the current quality.
“One thing we’re trying to make sure we don’t affect is access,” Johnson said. “Another thing is then the quality. And, you know, Sinclair has a reputation—well earned and well deserved—of being high quality. It has the reputation and students have benefited from a quality of services that are a bit different than you would find at an average community college. And so, we don’t want to only just have access to protect, we also want to protect quality.”
“ Well, why do we have quality? Well, we have good professors and we pay for them. We have a good library and we pay for it,” Johnson said. “We have good tutoring and student support services. We have financial aid processing and testing so that students get placement tested into the right levels. All of those things cost money, and we pay that money. We pay to have that quality. And we don’t just do average; we strive to be above-average.”
Sinclair’s third area of concern is the price. Johnson said he knows that is what students are thinking about. But, he said in-county students are only paying about 25 percent of what it costs to go to school (because the other two-thirds is picked up by the state funding and the Montgomery County levy). Johnson said the school prefers it that way because it means accessibility.
Johnson also said that Sinclair’s tuition is 20 percent lower than the national average and 40 percent lower than the average Ohio community college.
“We’d rather not have to raise it at all,” Johnson said. “But it looks like we’re going to be on track to raise it.”
Balancing quality with keeping tuition low
President Johnson said that Sinclair tries to balance the quality and accessibility with maintaining a low tuition, calling it “a very difficult balancing act.”
“If not for the generosity of the Montgomery County taxpayers to provide that tuition support to Montgomery County students, it’d be very difficult to maintain that access and affordability,” Johnson said.
Johnson said that Sinclair puts more funds into “direct instruction and into student services than the average community college in Ohio.” He also said the school spends less on administration and facilities than average.
“You might say, oh my gosh, we have so many facilities, how can you spend less?” Johnson said. “Well, when you look at it on a per-student basis it works out to be pretty favorable.”
“The point is, we’re pretty efficient,” Johnson said. “We’re a pretty efficient college.