What if, instead of making taxpayers foot the bill for continuously rising college costs through student loan amnesties, we instead froze tuition so students could graduate without going into debt?
Impossible, you say? Not at all. Just ask Indiana’s former Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels, who is finishing up a decadelong tenure as the president of Purdue University.
When Daniels became president of the university, in-state tuition was $9,992. Now, 10 years later, in-state tuition is $9,992. While other schools have seen their tuition rise by over 50%, Purdue hasn’t raised the price tag by a single dime.
“If an institution prioritizes affordability, you’d be surprised — we’ve been surprised — by how much progress can be made,” Daniels recently told the Christian Science Monitor.
Daniels didn’t start out with a plan to freeze tuition for an entire decade. It started with a promise to do it for a single year. But as Daniels was able to cut costs without cutting quality, he announced a second freeze. Then, as applications soared and enrollment grew, Daniels just kept going.
After a decade of no tuition increases, enrollment has grown from 39,256 in 2012 to 49,639 this year. And over that same time, 60% of Purdue’s undergraduates have graduated with no student debt.
Some of Daniels’s cost-cutting measures could easily be adopted by other universities. He moved faculty and staff from traditional health insurance to health savings accounts with high deductibles and moved from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement plans. He also contracted out the university’s food service to a corporation and ended the university’s transportation system, instead contracting with West Lafayette’s public transportation system. These moves allowed Purdue to cut staff and add students while not changing the faculty-to-student ratio.
One final key to Purdue’s affordability success is avoiding the rest of academia’s new obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy. Whereas Big Ten rival University of Michigan now employs 163 DEI staff and has a ratio of six DEI staff for every 100 faculty, Purdue employs just 43 DEI staff and has less than three DEI staff for every 100 faculty positions.
Michigan’s in-state tuition is more than 50% higher than Purdue’s, and just 40% of undergraduates graduate without debt. To slightly modify a popular saying, “Go woke, make your students go broke.”
