RIDER UNIVERSITY
2020 was a year of unprecedented challenges for higher learning institutions around New Jersey. While the hurdles and priorities were similar at all schools, Rutgers University, New Jersey’s largest public university, faced the crisis on an almost unthinkable scale. Rider University and Fairleigh Dickinson University, two of the state’s largest private institutions were in the midst of several reforms, including tuition cuts, when the pandemic began to rage.
Capuano
Facing these challenges, adapting and installing processes allowed these schools to make it through 2020 in relatively good shape and lay the groundwork for 2021. In balancing the safety and well-being of the campus community, the first priorities for the schools were to institute testing protocols and reduce campus density.
FDU President Christopher Capuano said testing became his immediate focus, estimating that the school spent even more on testing supplies and systems than the millions spent on technology upgrades and retrofits.
“That was my biggest concern. If we had infection on campus, could we detect it quickly? Could we isolate and quarantine those individuals and keep the rest of the community safe? And could we keep up with maintaining a lower infection rate on campus? We were able to do that. We passed that test with flying colors in the fall.”
Testing and tracing were also an immediate priority at Rider. The school spent a considerable amount of time and money to develop an effective and comprehensive testing protocol, which included working with local and state health departments, as well as NCAA officials for its Division 1 athletes.
Kristine Brown, Associate Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Rider, credits the protocols for allowing their other plans to get off the ground. But she points out that it has not been easy, especially early in the pandemic as testing responsibilities fell squarely on higher education institutions.
“All of a sudden, we were learning about testing in a pandemic,” Brown explained. “All things considered, we were very lucky. We had low levels of cases and ended the semester very strong. A lot of creativity, a lot of hard work, a lot of ingenuity went into the semester to make it work on all fronts.”
Dory Devlin, Rutgers University Media Relations Senior Director, touted the school’s testing protocols as a success, especially dealing with an enrollment that held steady at 51,000.
“With most courses being delivered remotely, on-campus housing across Rutgers extremely limited and a targeted COVID-19 testing strategy in place this year, the coronavirus positivity rate has remained low at the university,” Devlin said.
To reduce on-campus density, FDU installed a hybrid learning model with just 700 students on campus between Florham Park and Teaneck, a dramatic reduction from the usual 2,500 or so during “normal times.”
“The key thing is you don’t want more people on campus than you can manage and keep safe,” Capuano explained. “So, if you can’t test people and you don’t have good and reliable data, you’re really asking for problems.”
Rider also operated under a hybrid model with nearly one thousand students remaining on campus during the fall semester, and an overall enrollment just south of five thousand students.
Another piece of Rider and FDU’s strategic long-term planning was underway before the pandemic began and centered on the question of college affordability.
Like many private institutions, Rider was already facing the ongoing issue of scaring many would-be students off with its high sticker price. While 99% of Rider students receive university-funded scholarships and financial aid, totaling $78 million annually, the $45,120 cost simply drives many prospective students away, much like an expensive new car on the lot.
The Lifting Barriers Initiative has been in the works since 2019 and not merely a gimmick cooked up to address COVID-19. But the school immediately realized that the program could be applied to the existing challenges that COVID-19 only exacerbated. “I think if COVID-19 brought one thing to light at a university more than anything else, it is this idea of affordability,” Brown explained. It just became that much more important to have this conversation about value, about price, about affordability.”
Lifting Barriers is designed to address these issues in two ways. The first takes aim at the “sticker shock.” eginning in the fall of 2021, Rider’s total undergraduate tuition for new students is $35,000, which represents a 22% reduction from the 2020-2021 tuition. The reduction does not include room and board costs.
“At the end of the day, people are paying the same amount of money at Rider, but that shock of a sticker price of $45,000 and change has now been reduced so that people will, at least, give an institution like Rider a first look,” Brown said.
The other major component of Lifting Barriers is a dedicated and organized effort to prepare students for the workforce after college by ensuring access to career-building experiences, through internships, fieldwork, and co-ops across all disciplines.
“In addition to reducing the sticker price, we put a huge effort into kind of doubling down on that career preparation and outcome, so that every student who comes to Rider is going to have this kind of like enriched experience outside the classroom before they graduate that’s going to give them a step up,” Brown explained.
FDU also started exploring this issue in 2019 and instead of delaying it because of COVID-19, they actually moved more quickly and more substantially than originally planned. “After much study and consternation, we decided actually to lower it even more than we were initially thinking, Capuano acknowledged. “That probably was the impact of COVID.”
The conclusion for FDU officials was that their sweet spot would be reducing the price to $32,000 a year for all incoming students this fall, including freshman and transfer students. While the new rate does not apply to continuing students, they were grandfathered in at their current rate with no increases.
“That means that our current students will, in effect, pay the same tuition rate for three consecutive years,” Capuano explained. The school also reduced summer tuition rates, which many students took advantage of last summer.
FDU went through with the tuition cut, while also investing in technology and testing upgrades, which added complexity. “We made huge investments in not only testing, but in classroom technology. We did it at the time we were also not realizing as much revenue as we ordinarily would by giving back more to students and families,” Capuano said. “So, it was a challenge to say the least.”
Devlin said Rutgers took an unprecedented step to freeze tuition for the 2020-2021 academic year in recognition of the economic stresses confronting the community despite cost increases in virtually every area of operation. The undergraduate 2020-2021 estimated tuition & fees for Rutgers is $15,853 for New Jersey residents and $33,122 for out-of-state students.In addition, the University reduced by 15% many of the fees normally charged to students.
Pre-COVID-19 investments in online education infrastructure have helped the schools adapt on the fly to the hybrid learning environment that is now essential. Call it good timing or good luck, but they had begun bolstering their online offerings over the last few years. So as the pandemic began raging and more students moved to online only, officials were quickly able to scale up their operation and have it hold up despite the unplanned doomsday stress test.
To accommodate both in-person and online students, FDU has invested significantly in retrofitting zoom rooms, which allows half the class to come in-person while the other half observes remotely.
It all sets the stage for what is sure to be a continuing challenge in 2021. For at least the first third or half of the year, school officials expect college life to look very much like 2020 with remote learning, social distancing, testing, and mask-wearing. But, they remain hopeful about the fall semester.
“I think the spring is still going to be more about testing and expanding testing until a vaccine is more widely available for the populations that are at Rider. I think our hope is that next academic year, starting in late August/September, we hope that looks like whatever the new normal is going to look like, Brown said.
“As COVID-19 vaccines become more widely available to university community members and we continue to follow state Department of Health and federal Centers for Disease Control guidance, we are planning for a return in fall 2021 to on-campus instruction, fuller residential occupancy and campus activities as allowable by the evolving guidelines,” Devlin said.
“Most of the spring term is going to be like the fall term for many of us. We are all hoping that by next fall, when we start again, that things will be more like normal,” Capuano predicted.
