March 18, 2008

A Butler Education Prepares for Life

Last week, I mailed my annual letter to students and their parents announcing that the general increase in tuition for the 2008–2009 school year will be 5.5 percent and the average increase in room and board will be 5 percent. This month's President's Perspective provides insight for the increases.

For the past six years, Butler's increases for tuition and fees have been between 5 and 6 percent a year. Annually, our increases have been below the average of private schools in the Midwest and nationally.

We are not offering the same education as years past. If there were a sense that what was sufficient five or 10 years ago in terms of a Butler education is what people want to pay for today, then the argument could be made that we don't need to raise tuition and fees beyond the increase in the Consumer Price Index.

However, families expect a Butler education to prepare students for life in a changing world. We must constantly upgrade our pedagogy, our lab equipment, our computers, our libraries and our facilities to keep up with advances in academic disciplines and life after college.

Butler must continue to invest in salaries to attract and retain the best-qualified and committed faculty and staff to educate our students. Exceptional staff are needed for experiential education and career counseling services, which have grown significantly over the last few years. With the renovation of the Holcomb Building to create electronic classrooms, with the expectation that we provide wireless Internet access in more areas of the campus, our increases are an appropriate response to improving our students' educational experience.

We strive to be cost-conscious, but even something as basic as writing costs more to teach today than it once did. For many of our courses, writing is a paperless transaction where students are able to send in drafts electronically and corrections come back from professors electronically. It expedites the ability to make substantive changes rather than having students simply copy successive drafts by hand, which is the way it was when I started as a writing and literature teacher. However, both the software and the hardware cost money. That's only a modest example, but it's illustrative of the kind of updates we must make all the time.

Businesses have historically been able to control costs by increasing productivity; that is, making more of a product using fewer resources. The equivalent in education would be to increase the student-faculty ratio — having fewer faculty members teach more students — and having the students' education be more standardized. That is, everyone gets the same thing.

At Butler University, we pride ourselves on personalized education, customizing what we do to the needs of individual students. Our professors know their students by name and face. The very things that make for a more efficient production line are the things that run counter to the individualized education we provide for our students.

As President of Butler University, I am committed to providing every Butler student an exceptional, personal education — one that prepares them for not only their first job, but for their entire career. This is The Butler Way.

Thank you for your continued support of Butler University.