Community Tuition

The cost of an independent school education in and around Washington, D.C., is high and rising. That’s challenging for parents looking for a personalized, nurturing education for their children. It’s also challenging for a school like Grace, which has a longstanding mission of socioeconomic diversity. How can we achieve that goal when the cost of tuition is prohibitive except to the most well-off households?

In 2017, Grace began to research alternatives to financial aid with an eye toward affordability and accessibility. In 2018, Grace became the first school in the area to offer Variable Tuition, which we now call Community Tuition. (Similar models at other schools go by names such as Flexible Tuition, Indexed Tuition, and Transparent Tuition.)

Instead of offering “aid” to try to fill a family’s “need,” we take those words out of the conversation. Just as we see strengths rather than deficits in our students, Grace sees families at every income level as assets to our community.

While we budget for a certain percentage of families to pay full tuition, which is key to helping us meet our net tuition goals, we also seek to enroll families who can budget for Community Tuition. All of these families, no matter what level of tuition they contribute, round out that bell curve of household incomes that signifies healthy socioeconomic diversity. We call it Community Tuition because this model helps us build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive school. It’s how we have chosen to become a community of equals, in which all our families feel like they belong.

Community Tuition is personalized to your family’s financial picture when you first apply. If you wish to continue in the Community Tuition program, you will reapply each year. This process gives Grace the opportunity to make adjustments in light of significant changes.

The cost of an independent school education is high. Both Community Tuition
and financial aid aim to make this type of education more affordable, thereby making it more accessible to students from across the income spectrum.

Schools that offer financial aid publish one tuition rate each year. Knowing that not all families will have the means to pay in full, schools offer financial aid. This model necessitates thinking about prospective families in terms of “need.”

Community Tuition comes from a different place, with a different intention. We see socioeconomic diversity as an asset. So rather than offering one set tuition rate, and then dividing families into those “with need” and those who are “full pay,” we offer tuition tiers. Each tier represents the full price a family can reasonably be expected to pay. When we enroll families who can contribute at each tier, we know we can call ourselves a socioeconomically diverse school. And doing that is our founding commitment.

When it comes to access and affordability at Grace, “financial need” is not in our vocabulary. We have a founding commitment to build a socioeconomically diverse student body. Community Tuition is the program that helps us build a school that reflects the class differences of Greater Washington.

It’s like financial aid, but its goal is to shape the school that our families want for their children, rather than to help meet the needs of a lucky few.

Based on our analysis of a family’s finances, we offer a set tuition tier. It is the required family contribution. While not every family pays the same amount, no one is left feeling like they have fallen short of a full-tuition number that is impossible for most to reach. The Community Tuition model means all families are equal partners in their children’s education at Grace.

Under the Community Tuition program, Grace sets tuition for each student based on what TADS, our current third-party financial assessment provider, calculates as a family’s ability to pay. This number is based on a “Household Adjusted Income” (HAI) calculation that takes into account many of the factors that make up a family’s overall financial picture, including but not limited to assets, debt, household size, and tuition commitments for all children.

Our goal is for the student body at Grace to be representative of the broadest income spectrum in our area. With Community Tuition, we are able to avoid the “barbell effect,” where distribution of families who are paying the full tuition rate and those who are receiving significant financial aid packages are heavily weighted at either end. Community  Tuition enables us to portion our tuition commitments per family more evenly. Since its inception, we have seen a small increase in the number of families contributing a relatively low Community Tuition and a corresponding increase in families who receive a higher (but not full) Community Tuition rate.

Unfortunately, we do not yet have the resources to offer Community Tuition to every applicant or enrolled student who qualifies. Because Grace considers a student’s application for admission separately from his or her family’s ability to afford Grace, we may make admission offers to families who cannot afford the level of Community Tuition that we are able to offer. In the past, Grace has offered support to approximately 60% of enrolled families.

Not every family will be eligible for Community Tuition, and Grace does not require all applicants for admission to submit financial information in TADS. However, even families who might not expect to qualify for financial aid under a traditional system may still be eligible for our Community Tuition program. In the past, families with an annual household income between approximately $13,500 and $325,000 have qualified.

All costs related to education, such as books, materials, and the overnight trip to Echo Hill Outdoor School that Grade 5 takes each year, are included in the cost of tuition and the supply and activity fee. Families will need to provide lunches and uniforms for their students. The Grace PTO runs a “Gracewear” program offering gently-used uniforms at a very reasonable price.

While we are the first in the DC Metro area to introduce a Community Tuition program, we are not the first independent school in the country to do so. We stand on the shoulders of St. Elizabeth’s in Denver, Colo.; Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, Calif.; Stanley Clark in South Bend, Ind.; Duke School in Durham, NC, and others. All of these schools have experienced an increase in the socioeconomic diversity of their student populations.