Amidst a nationwide trend of rising business school tuitions, the School of Management will increase its tuition for next year.
For the 2014–15 academic year, tuition at the SOM was $58,975, not including mandatory fees. For the 2015–16 school year, this number will increase to $61,500, a 4.28 percent rise that SOM Associate Dean Anjani Jain labeled “modest.” Tuition at the SOM his risen by $9,075 since the 2010–11 academic year.
Last week, Bloomberg Business reported that half of the MBA programs in the Bloomberg Businessweek Top 20 — a ranking in which the SOM placed sixth this November — have announced tuition increases for next year. Within this group, the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business will be leading the pack with a tuition hike of nearly 10 percent for out-of-state residents.
“The drivers of this [tuition increase] frankly are to stay within our peer set in terms of where our tuition is, and most of our focus is on increased scholarship support for our students,” SOM Dean Edward Snyder said.
Snyder added that the school is raising its tuition because last year it did not raise its price tag as much as peer institutions did. He explained that peer MBA programs try to set their tuitions within the same range because lower tuition rates do not significantly impact the application numbers to the cheaper schools. Instead, with the increased revenues from higher tuition, Snyder said, the SOM aims to dispense more scholarship money to those students who need it most.
Rob Wu SOM ’15 said that although business school tuition does pose a significant cost to students, many students come to terms with this fact before coming to business school. In turn, he said he thinks that unless business school tuition makes a huge jump, students have already decided business school is worth the cost.
“I think ultimately tuition rising doesn’t affect current students or incoming students that much,” Wu said.
Similarly, D’Andre Carr SOM ’16 said that unlike most other graduate studies, students are mostly comfortable with the cost of business school because they often have prior savings to cushion their lack of wages and high projected earnings after graduation.
But Tyler Godoff SOM ’16 said that the sizeable cost of business school is on students’ minds, especially because many students take out loans that they will have to repay over many years after their graduation. He said that the cost of business school has become so high that he thinks some people are turning business school acceptances down because of its price tag.
“[Business school] is very much an investment, and that is very much in the minds of students at [the] SOM,” Godoff said.
The most expensive school in the top 20, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, will increase tuition for its next class of students by 3.1 percent, raising the total to $65,750.