MLC working to keep student costs down
Filed Under: Ad Hoc Commission, Ministerial Education, MLC
Martin Luther College (MLC), New Ulm, Minn., announced its intent Nov. 17 to limit increases in overall student fees for the 2009-10 school year to three percent. In previous years, tuition increases at MLC were at five percent or higher; so this increase, according to Steven Thiesfeldt, vice president for administration, would actually help keep student costs down.
"It is obviously our ultimate goal to keep costs as low as we can for students," says Thiesfeldt. As a result, he says, the MLC Governing Board even considered implementing a tuition freeze. "We had a proposal to increase the five percent that we've been maintaining the last four years. But that was tempered to some degree by the desire to freeze tuition. After looking at that closely our board decided that we would try a reduction, and three percent was the number we settled on."
This decision was driven by MLC's strategic plan to keep tuition increases at or below five percent. It also resonates with the recommendations from the Ad Hoc Commission, established by the 2007 synod convention to analyze the synod's problems and potential.
"The Ad Hoc Commission talked to a lot of people at the grassroots level throughout the synod, and I'm sure that they were hearing the same message that we were hearing: concern about increasing student costs and the debt that graduates are carrying forward into the ministry," says Thiesfeldt. "We're trying to do everything we can to keep tuition costs down."
Although this is good news for students, Thiesfeldt says that with the current economy those figures are not set in stone. He says a downturn in the stock market has affected the value of MLC's reserve funds, which the college has relied on more heavily in recent years. It is also not yet known what impact the synod's recent financial news will have on subsidy for MLC. Finalized budget information won't be available until February.
"The Lord has always been good to us, and he's pulled us through some pretty bleak times in the past," says Thiesfeldt. "And we're confident that he'll do that again as we move to the future."
