Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
March 29, 2024

Hopkins raises tuition, increases financial aid

By JACOB TOOK | September 14, 2017

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FILE PHOTO A breakdown from fiscal year 2015 of Krieger and Whiting’s budget of $570 million.

This year the University increased tuition by 3.5 percent for undergraduates enrolled full-time at Homewood, and financial aid for those students rose by nine percent. Undergraduate tuition this year will amount to just over $52,000, an increase of over $3,000 from three years ago.

In an email to The News-Letter, Director of Media Relations Tracey Reeves stated that the University’s tuition increases are approved annually by the Board of Trustees, and that while there is no formal cap on the undergraduate tuition increase, Hopkins has recently slowed the rate of its growth.

“The Krieger and Whiting schools have limited undergraduate tuition hikes to 3.5 percent for five years in a row and kept them below 4 percent for nine straight years,” Reeves wrote. “Those nine years represent the nine smallest tuition increases in percentage terms since the 1974-1975 academic year.”

Some students disapprove of the tuition increase because they don’t know how the University spends that money.

Junior Caroline Lupetini said that spending is not equally distributed among students in different departments, identifying a particular disparity between STEM and humanities programs.

“STEM undergraduates — they need labs, they need the top notch, like the UTL,” she said. “How much was that investment? That’s huge. Those returns are not coming back to political science or Writing Seminars.”

The University has a decentralized financial structure, with little transfer of funding between University divisions. The greatest amount of sharing of financial resources occurs between the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences (KSAS) and the Whiting School of Engineering (WSE) because these two divisions share a student body, as well as the Homewood campus.

Lupetini said that greater funding for humanities departments would ultimately have long-term benefits for the University.

“If Ronald Daniels wants to increase our U.S. News rankings, you need a more well-rounded student body,” she said. “You need a thriving Humanities Center, a brilliant political science program, which we do have, but no one really knows about it.”

However, Lupetini said that she does support increasing the cost of tuition for some students so that others can be better helped by financial aid. Lupetini, who is a Hodson Trust Scholar, said that the financial aid she received through the program took strain off her family. The Hodson Trust Scholarship is merit-based and is awarded to fewer than 20 freshmen every year.

Increasing financial aid has been a priority for University President Ronald J. Daniels. Earlier this year, he and his wife established the Daniels-Rosen First Generation Scholars Fund, a $1 million endowment to assist first generation college students.

Junior Séamus Ryan-Johnson questioned whether the increased financial aid would adequately help students afford their tuition.

“I’m sure the University has some very rational ways to explain this increase, but unless they have raised their Hopkins grants accordingly so that this does not negatively impact students, this one piece of data portrays a very poor image,” Ryan-Johnson wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “For international students who do not receive financial aid from Hopkins, this will most obviously negatively affect them.”

Reeves wrote that donations are a critical form of support for financial aid at many universities. She also explained that there has been a 95 percent increase in financial aid since 2009, and that 51 percent of the incoming freshman class will receive aid from Hopkins.

“The University has consistently increased its undergraduate financial aid budget in recent years,” she wrote. “This has allowed JHU to provide grant aid to more of its students.

Reeves wrote that the University matches new endowment donations of $100,000 or more toward undergraduates to encourage philanthropy.

But Ryan-Johnson questioned whether it would be better to lower tuition so that fewer students need financial aid, allowing the University to redistribute donations as needed.

Junior Emily Tatum wrote in an email to The News-Letter that while increased tuition helps provide more financial aid, she didn’t want to see the burden of that increase placed on families of students.

“While an increase in tuition does help students receive additional financial aid, it doesn’t necessarily offset the cost,” she wrote. “It does not make sense to ask students, or families, to wholly fund financial aid, because this would result in a large increase in tuition, more than we’re seeing this year.”

Many students criticized the tuition increases, saying that it’s a common trend among elite universities. Tuition at Hopkins exceeds many of its peer institutions, with Harvard University and Stanford University costing just under $45,000. The University often compares its policies and standards to peer institutions included on an official list known as the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE).

Ryan-Johnson wrote that until consumers stop valuing the idea of ‘elitism,’ there wouldn’t be a market for higher education with lower prices.

“This is the nature of elite higher education institutions,” he wrote. “Hopkins’ price increases will not cause it to lose attractiveness, as it seems that there will always be more students willing to apply and attend and bite that bullet of $275 thousand over four years.”


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