The word on Point Loma Nazarene University’s campus is that tuition is on the rise, spiking a possible 2–3% each year. The current cost for a full-time PLNU student is $35,100 for the entire year, broken down to $17,550 for each semester. As many college students can attest, it is not an easy price to pay. School scholarships only pay so much which leaves students with an incredible amount of debt to pay off, not to mention stress.
Every day, the world is evolving into a faster, more complicated place. Millions of ideas are forming, comparison is thriving and people are stressing more than they ever have. It seems that the last thing any person needs is one more aspect of life causing more stress. Elise Wilson, a nursing major at PLNU said, “Why? There should definitely be some sort of reasoning behind why it is going up so much [like a renovation or something]. If word is already going around among the students, there should have definitely been some informing going on before this with the parents.”
Most of Wilson’s classes are at Liberty Station where there is said to be a wide variety meal plan for students who are “on the run,” about equal to the amount at the main campus. This expectation was not met, and yet the students are still required to pay over $5,000 a semester for the meal plan that is said to be “unaccommodating.”
Not to mention, the cost of tuition does not include a meal plan, housing, textbooks, dorm fees and of course all of the other unexpected fees that add up throughout the years. Another student, Jonathan Nunez, a junior international development major at PLNU said, “It’s just funny because I just watched a video of the school’s president paragliding, and I’m asking myself if it really takes that much money to run a profitable school.”
Although tuition might be rising, “PLNU’s academic scholarships are also becoming more competitive,” said Daniel Reed, a staff member at the Office of Financial Aid at PLNU. Students are pushed to work harder than ever before to receive any sort of financial aid or academic scholarship.
If tuition does rise to that extent every year, the school may be putting itself out on a limb. There is always the risk of students dropping out due to the lack of financial resources and the overall cost of college being too much to handle.
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