Drexel to offer 50% tuition break to community college transfers, as higher ed struggles with enrollment drop

Drexel University, like many schools, has offered financial aid to students, including those who transfer in from community colleges, for many years.

But too many students didn’t know how much — or how to get it. Now the private university has sweetened the pot by announcing a guarantee that those who meet admission requirements and have an associate’s degree from a Pennsylvania or New Jersey community college will get 50% off tuition, which currently stands at $56,595.

“If a student is attending a community college and has aspirations to further their education at a four-year university, they have a better understanding of what the cost would be for Drexel ahead of time because we have this out there in the open for them,” said Evelyn Thimba, senior vice president of enrollment management. “It’s providing that transparency of the net price.”

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The move comes as colleges across the nation are struggling with a drop in enrollment, partially driven by the pandemic but also by fewer numbers of high school graduates. Many increasingly are eying transfer students as an important pool to tap, and some others, including Rosemont College, Pennsylvania State University’s branch or Commonwealth campuses, Temple, La Salle, Bucknell, and Pennsylvania state universities also offer scholarships to community college transfers.

Rosemont, where tuition runs about $20,000, last year began offering a 50% discount to community college graduates from Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware County community colleges, as well as Community College of Philadelphia. This year, the program is expanding to all community colleges, said Mika Nash, provost and senior vice president for academic and student affairs. The move brought in a dozen extra transfer students last year, Nash said, a significant bump for a college of 750.

Drexel’s sticker price — nearly $76,000 annually for tuition, fees, and room and board — remains one of the highest in the region, though the school points out that a majority of students receive financial aid.

In the past, Drexel’s transfer students on average have received $23,000 in institutional aid, or nearly 40% of tuition. The aid is based on academic merit and family income. The average aid for transfer students solely from community colleges — who often are from lower-income families — is a bit higher, she said. So the new tuition break, dubbed Drexel’s Promise, won’t be hugely different for many of them, but it will have greater benefit for students who may not have qualified for this much aid in the past, she said.

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The new program takes effect for students who enter in 2023, which means that even with the tuition break, transfers will still have a tuition bill of $28,297. Some of that could be offset by federal or state aid or by participation in Drexel’s co-op program, in which students get paying, six-month work experiences as part of their education. The median salary for full-time co-op jobs is about $19,000.

Drexel gets about 650 transfer students each year. Less than half come from community colleges in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Thimba said.

“We really wanted to focus on our backyard first and foremost,” Thimba said.

Drexel’s new initiative was welcomed by the Pennsylvania Commission for Community Colleges and its council of presidents.

“Drexel is a model for making higher education more affordable in Pennsylvania and represents just one of the many partnerships community colleges have with private institutions here in the Commonwealth,” Elizabeth A. Bolden, president and CEO of the commission, said in a statement. “We are delighted to see Drexel working to support these well-prepared community college graduates.”

Community College of Philadelphia also praised the effort, noting that Drexel is one of its main partnership schools.

“As a minority-serving institution that values making education accessible and affordable, and as one that already offers many transfer opportunities to four-year schools, including Drexel, we’re pleasantly surprised to see this arrangement move forward,” said Shannon McLaughlin Rooney, vice president for enrollment management and strategic communications. “This tuition break will assist many of our transfer students in various programs, providing a direct pathway to a bachelor’s degree at a reduced cost.”

Penn State’s Commonwealth campuses in 2020 began offering annual scholarships of $6,500 a year to transfer students from neighboring states including Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia, and also Virginia and Washington, D.C. Out-of-state tuition for those campuses runs between about $22,000 and $26,000, so the scholarship represents about one-quarter of the cost.

The university’s Commonwealth campuses also plan to roll out a new scholarship program for community colleges in Pennsylvania next week, offering up to $7,000 over two years, spokesperson Lisa Powers said. Annual in-state tuition at those campuses runs between about $13,500 and nearly $15,400.

Temple offered over 1,200 additional scholarships, between $1,000 to $3,000, to incoming transfer students this year. They went to community college transfer students with at least a 3.0 GPA, said Shawn Abbott, vice provost for Admissions, Financial Aid & Enrollment Management. Annual tuition and fees at Temple for an in-state student ranges from about $17,000 to $24,000, depending on a student’s academic program.

Pennsylvania’s state universities, which have frozen annual tuition at $7,716 for four years, also offer financial support to transfers, said Kevin Hensil, spokesperson for the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.

“Many of our universities have expanded or created scholarship funds or discounts for transfer students using some of the additional $75 million in state funding and the $125 million in one-time funding in the new state budget,” he said.

At Drexel, the new effort should help the school retain students who transfer in, Thimba said.

“We know that financing has always been a barrier for students, especially students coming from community colleges,” she said.

That’s also why Drexel is requiring students to have completed community college to be eligible, Thimba said. That means they will have a higher likelihood of finishing at Drexel, where they must maintain a 2.0 GPA to keep the tuition break, she said.

The program also is an opportunity for Drexel to increase its enrollment from those schools, she said, although enrollment at Pennsylvania community colleges has also fallen, about 20% since the pandemic, from 111,616 in fall 2019 to 89,375 in fall 2021, according to the commission. Drexel is expecting a freshman class of about 2,900 this year, up about 5% over last year, she said. Thimba did not have overall enrollment projections for the fall.

“We see this as a potential way to attract students for sure,” she said. “We also are really looking at this as a way to improve access to students who would not otherwise think about Drexel.”