Welcome back to Powering Your Retirement Radio. Today, we’re going to talk about college planning, and I’ve been looking forward to this show because I get to interview my lifelong friend and college roommate, Dr. Bryon L Grigsby. Bryon happens to be the President of Moravian University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Bryon is one of the few university presidents that is the President of his Alma Mater. Moravian was founded in 1742. It’s the sixth-oldest school in the country. It was the first to educate women, and it has been thriving since Bryon became President in 2013. So with that, I want to welcome President Bryon Grigsby. Bryon, why don’t you take a second to tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and Moravian?
President Bryon L. Grigsby:
Hey, Dan, it’s great to be here. Moravian is a unique university. It has about 2,600 students. As Dan said, it’s the sixth oldest in the nation. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, College of William and Mary, St. John’s Annapolis, and the University of Pennsylvania are the ones that precede us. We were the first school founded to educate women. I’ve been the President at my Alma Mater for nine years now. I’m in my ninth year. We built a lot of healthcare programs over these past few years. We have multiple doctoral programs, including a doctorate in physical therapy and a doctorate in nursing practice. We have occupational therapy, athletic training, a very vibrant nursing program, and an incredibly vibrant undergraduate liberal arts college.
Average tuition of $54,000, average student pays $26,000.
Apple MacBooks & iPads for every student, small class sizes, full-time faculty, not grad student teachers.
Ignore the glamour numbers and look at Freshman retention rates and four-year graduation rates.
See the details on the website Blog page or listen to the show today.
Interview Transcript:
Dan:
Fantastic. Thank you, Bryon. So, as I think we’ve talked about, but just so you know, a bit of the listener, primarily most of the people listening to the show today, will be in one of two areas. They either work for PG&E, our power company ranging from the guys out in the field to people in the office, doing everything it takes to run a company. The other is Kaiser Permanente, which you’re probably familiar with them as a healthcare provider. But, again, most of those people here in Northern California do have some clients in other parts of the country. And what I find is when I’m talking to parents and grandparents, there are similar themes that come up in almost every conversation. So, I want to address a few of those and get your take on what you tell a parent that’s about to send their child to Moravian as far as you’re concerned about X, and this is what we can do. The first one I think goes without saying for many people is how do I afford college today? You look at the predictions of a newborn baby today, and it’s, you might as well take the ride on Elon Musk’s rocket and call it a day. And it would be the same as an education, but I know from our own experience at Moravian that it was affordable, and we could get through it. So how do you ease parents’ concerns there?
President Bryon L. Grigsby:
Well, one thing that is a challenge for private schools is that independent schools like Moravian, which are not controlled by the federal government or controlled by state governments, have sticker shock. If you look at Moravian, our sticker shock is $54,000 a year for tuition. The average student pays around $26,000 a year. So that gives you some idea. We have a $150 million endowment that spins off scholarship money. We raise about $6 million a year from alumni like you and me that pay it forward. And that offsets the next generation. You’ll find that many students who apply to these independent colleges will pay less than tuition at a public university. And they’re getting a lot more for that. They’re getting a lot more in smaller classes, not being taught by graduate assistants but by full-time faculty. So, I would encourage everybody to apply to the institutions that they want to apply to and see what their tuition will be. Please don’t assume that the sticker price they see is what they’re going to pay because they’re going to pay less than that sticker price at almost every independent college and university in the nation.
Dan:
Fantastic. That’s, uh, it’s good advice. And most people do know how to ask for a bargain.
President Bryon L. Grigsby:
And the public universities do not do discounting in any significant way. So, their sticker price is most likely their sticker price, unless you’re in an honors college or something else because they operate by state government regulations. The independents are just that independent, so they can raise money from their alums and redirect it as the alumni dictated to offset costs.
Dan:
Okay, I don’t have kids in schools in California, but I know Berkeley and Chico, and a lot of the schools that are state schools here are impacted where, you know, if you don’t have over a four-point O, you don’t have a shot at getting in. So talk to me a bit about when you’re looking at a school and use a term earlier value proposition. When you’re looking at a school other than obviously the name, the mascot, the sports teams, all the things that people think about for college, what should a parent, even a student, be thinking about?
President Bryon L. Grigsby:
I think you want to think about what value add any institution is giving you. For example, at Moravian University, we pride ourselves on leveling the playing field and ensuring everybody has technology skills by the time they graduate. We provide every student with a Mac book and an iPad. That’s a value proposition that you don’t see at many institutions. There are only 16 apple distinguished college campuses. Moravian happens to be one of them in the nation, small classrooms. I talked about this in the last set of comments. You are paying for a faculty member to be at your child’s side, working on the skills that will make them successful in life. That’s what your dollars are paying for. Do you want to have that in a classroom of 450 students? Or do you want to have that in a classroom of 10? Which one will give you the most significant value add of small colleges and universities like Moravian? They don’t have a lot of dollars for marketing. They don’t get on national football channels and get to get their brand out there. But from a value-add standpoint, you’re getting more time with a professor with a Ph.D. in that area working on your child’s skills than any state university with a Division One football program.
Dan:
Now, I know we’ve talked about this in the past, not on this show, but just in general, I had come across a podcast that was talking about the US News and World Report. You know, where some of the schools ranked some of the historically black colleges ranked lower, but the studies said, if we gave them a new dorm and a football team and few other advantages, they’d be in the top 10. As lovely as that sounds, one university president of a university will go unnamed because it might be in the same region as Moravian. Still, that school’s President was giving out hot sauce to everybody to help increase name recognition. So what kind of metrics should somebody be looking at other than the ones that all the high school seniors look at the top party schools and all of that? What should we be looking at?
President Bryon L. Grigsby:
Yeah, I would stay away from the US news and world report rankings. We call the beauty school rankings college presidents have to say whether they like all the other colleges are not like them or recognize them. And they weigh that pretty heavily in the US news world report. Here are the measures. And you can find these measures out on any website colleges publish them all the time. I would look for a retention rate of first-year students. Moravian’s retention rate is 83%. That means that 83% of our students choose to stay with us into their sophomore year. Uh, we have a 70% four-year graduation rate. Most public universities don’t get up to 70% until six years. So that’s two more years of tuition and two fewer years of your child working in the workforce. So, there’s an advantage to how quickly does the school graduate? The students once they enter the doors? The last thing I would look at is the statistic on how six months after graduation, how many employed students are in graduate school. A Moravian is 98% of our students are employed or in graduate school six months after graduation. You want something as high as that because you’re getting the greatest value for your money.
Dan:
Fantastic. Every parent’s dream is to have a kid with a job six months after graduating from college and maybe not living in the basement. It depends on where they are in the country. Quite a few people moved back with mom and dad during the pandemic. So, I think that’s an excellent place to wrap up for today. We’re going to continue this interview in our next show as well. So, we’re going to break it up into two.
As you know, on the website, you can go to PoweringYourRetirementRadio.com and use the ask a question button. What I’ll do is if you have questions from either listening to this show or the next one, if you drop comments in there, if we’re overwhelmed, maybe we can convince Bryon to come back for a third episode, but I can also work with him to get some answers. Suppose people have specific questions about that. So that’s going to do it for this week’s show until our next episode. Stay safe. And we’ll talk to you soon.
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