How colleges can make tuition resets successful

Tuition resets can help colleges boost enrollment and improve their bottom line, but a new study highlights several potential pitfalls, mostly related to planning for the change, marketing it and adjusting recruitment accordingly.Economist and former college president Lucie Lapovsky examined tuition resets at 24 private colleges between 2010 and 2016, looking at tuition the year before and for two years after the change. She also evaluated changes in enrollment.While half of the institutions had year-over-year increases in freshman enrollment the year of the reset, slightly fewer (43%) had increases the year after the reset as compared to the year before the reset. Meanwhile, 67% recorded a gain the second year over the pre-reset year. Lapovsky, formerly president of Mercy College who is now a consultant for colleges and universities, takes on a trend that has been debated broadly in higher education as small private colleges in particular struggle to find a solution to the bundle of problems they are tackling to survive — in this case, market resistance to annual tuition increases.