The Board of Trustees approved for out-of-state tuition rates to be lowered to 1.5 times the in-state tuition for new, non-resident domestic students, effective in fall 2018.

Chancellor Thomas L. Keon said that if 500 non-resident domestic students come to PNW next fall, he will ask the Board of Trustees to consider reducing current domestic student tuition to 1.5 times the in-state tuition.

“We’re collecting less revenue by reducing tuition and hoping to double the number of out-of-state students, or perhaps triple. To really get to that picture, it’s going to be a three- to four-year period,” Keon said.

Keon said that PNW needs 170 non-resident domestic students to recover the cost of new students. The decrease in tuition is to help stabilize the declining enrollment. Keon hopes that the new tuition rate will lead to more students attending PNW.

Keon also said that this will be an opportunity for PNW to get connections with the Chicago market.

“Frankly, one of my great motivations was also to specifically attract more Chicagoland students knowing that they’re more likely to search for jobs in that area after graduation,” Keon said. “In 25 years then, we’re more likely to have a large cadre of former students to come back and hire our students.”

Keon said that reducing tuition has become popular for many other universities in the area.

“Almost all of our competitors in-state have reduced the tuition, particularly for Illinois students, but others are reducing for Kentucky and Ohio, too,” Keon said.