St. John's College slashes tuition by $17,000, launches $300M capital campaign

St. John’s College, a private liberal arts college with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe, New Mexico, plans to cut its undergraduate tuition rates by nearly a third next year.

Tuition for undergraduate students will be reduced from $52,000 to $35,000 beginning in the 2019-2020 academic year. The move was announced Wednesday, as part of the school's effort to move away from "prestige pricing" and become "one of the most affordable private liberal arts colleges in the country."

Mark Roosevelt, president of St. John’s College, said over the last 20 years tuition at private colleges has risen three times the rate of inflation. To try and combat that trend, he said his school is making an effort to be more affordable and accessible to a wider range of students.

A total of 700 undergraduates students are currently enrolled at the 322-year-old college, including 475 at the Annapolis campus.

“For too long, most private colleges have been driven by the idea that families believe high price equals high quality, and with this belief private colleges have embraced an escalating tuition model known as prestige pricing,” Roosevelt said in a statement. “These astronomical advertised tuition prices say one thing to many American families: ‘you cannot afford to come here.'”

St. John's is not the only liberal arts college in Maryland to recognize and try to address the ever-increasing unaffordability of private tuition. For the first time in the school's history, Goucher College in Towson opted to not raise tuition rates for the 2017-2018 school year. Goucher President Jose Antonio Bowen said college pricing trends far outpace any other market goods, but they don't necessarily need to.

To cover the cost of the tuition decrease, St. John's also announced it is launching a $300 million "Freeing Minds" capital campaign.

The actual cost to educate each student is about $60,000 per year, which the school attributes to the price of maintaining certain features like a 7-to-1 student-faculty ratio, employing full-time instead of adjunct faculty and providing quality educational programming at two cross-country campuses.

The school seeks to double its endowment by 2023 through the campaign. It has received $183 million in commitments toward its goal to date.

The campaign received early support from several St. John's alumni. Ron Fielding, chairman of the St. John’s Board of Visitors and Governors; and Warren Spector, the campaign's chairman, each gifted $25 million.

And alumni Warren Winiarski, founder of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley, California, and his wife Barbara have created a challenge grant through their family's foundation that will match dollar for dollar every gift to the college up to $50 million as a part of the Freeing Minds campaign.

“The Winiarski Family Foundation hopes this gift will continue to give students the opportunity to learn as we did,” the Winiarskis said in a statement. “Our time at St. John’s both influenced and sustained our paths throughout our lives."