Special Campus Memo: Comprehensive Fee Increase for 2020-21

Dear Grinnellians:

The Grinnell College Board of Trustees has approved a 4.3% increase in Grinnell's comprehensive fee, to $70,544 for academic year 2020-21. Over the course of the past ten fiscal years (FY12- FY21) comprehensive fee increases have ranged from 3.0 to 6.0% and averaged 4.3%. Historically Grinnell's comprehensive fees have been and are anticipated to remain below the mean of the fees charged by our peers among leading liberal arts colleges.

In making its decision, the Board recognized the importance of preserving the very high quality of a Grinnell education by focusing on strategic priorities that support the College's mission in relation to enrollment, teaching and learning, the Grinnell learning place, post-graduate success, alumni engagement, and human and financial resource management.

Going forward, our financial resources will help us maintain and enhance the Grinnell student experience, as we work to:

• Attract, enrich, and graduate a diverse and talented student community. Create a student body that individually and collectively reaches a remarkable record of achievement and that maximizes the interactive learning opportunities for all Grinnell students.
• Re-envision Grinnell's commitment to a liberal education and its value in the 21st century. Create an innovative and evolving student-centered, liberal arts curriculum (academic experience) that enables students to be successful in an ever-changing world and informs and enriches the lives of Grinnell graduates.
• Build learning spaces that encourage collaboration, creativity, and inquiry. Design, operate, and support all spaces on the campus to enhance the academic, social, and environmental success of the Grinnell College community.
• Instill an orientation to the future and intentionally connect the Grinnell educational experience to post-graduate endeavors. Create a curriculum and learning environment that enables and encourages students to pursue and succeed along multiple life paths and careers.
• Foster life-long learning and contributions of alumni in the College's intellectual life, service, and mentorship and advising. Design the Grinnell alumni community, the alumni-to-alumni relations, and the College-to-alumni relations by purposefully including alumni in all of the strategies.
• Transform administrative practices to maintain continuous, collaborative, and adaptive planning for the College. Create a fiscally sustainable business model that supports the College's continuing enhancements and maintains stability through variations in revenue sources and expenditure patterns.

We are committed to maintaining the overall excellence of the educational experience at Grinnell and are limiting increases to those that are necessary. It is also important to note that through the careful stewardship of our resources, including our endowment, and the generosity of our donors, we are able to keep our comprehensive fee significantly lower than our actual operating costs.

The upcoming fiscal year budget also allocates significant additional financial resources to increase financial aid student grants, which helps the College:

• Maintain our commitment to meeting 100% of our students' demonstrated financial need.
• Continue our practice of being a national leader in creating access and providing aid for low-income students, and to use a higher proportion of our operating budget than any other need-blind school to fund financial aid.
• Provide more than $53 million in institutional grant assistance to students, equaling 93% of the total grant aid offered overall. Such grants never need to be re-paid by students.
• Ensure that need-based students do not have to work more student employment hours to cover any increases in tuition or fees. Instead, their other financial aid increases - most notably, their grant from the College - to close the gap.

The following table shows how the overall 4.3% increase affects various elements of the comprehensive fee.

*As recommended by the SGA/SPARC treasurers

Through these financial actions, we remain committed to our core mission: to provide a diverse, accessible, and outstanding education for our current and future students.

Sincerely,

Raynard S. Kington

President