STAR-BULLETIN / AUGUST 2003
Construction of Punahou School's new Case Middle School is being covered by fund-raising, not tuition costs, but future faculty additions will have bearing on tuition fees.
Private school
tuitions rise againPunahou and Iolani are among
those with increases of at least 5%
Punahou School will raise its tuition to $12,885 for the next school year, for a 30 percent jump over the past five years and a rate of increase that takes some parents at the school by surprise.
"It's unbelievable," said Rachel Haruno, whose children are in their second year at Punahou after transferring from public school. "We're trying to calculate how much it's going to cost when they graduate from high school."
Lee Haruno, a seventh-grader, and his sister, Lauren, a fifth-grader, switched from Mililani Mauka Elementary School to Punahou when Lee entered middle school. The children are happy and the cost seems worth it, their mother said, but she was startled by the 6.9 percent tuition hike for the coming school year, after a 5.7 percent increase the previous year.
"It does make you wonder," she said as she picked up the kids after school last week. "We need to be saving for college."
Although Punahou's tuition is among the state's highest, annual increases of more than 5 percent are the norm for the coming year at the largest private schools in Hawaii, according to a Star-Bulletin survey of 11 institutions that have already set their rates.
Students at Mid-Pacific will pay $12,185 next school year, while Iolani students will pay $11,500, increases of more than 5 percent over this year.
Parents who send their kids to top neighbor island schools might face even higher bills. Tuition at Hawaii Preparatory Academy, on the Big Island, varies by grade level, from $14,500 for high school down to $11,300 for elementary school next year, increases of more than 6 percent over this year.
Seabury Hall on Maui will charge $13,100 next year, although its annual increase is the smallest among schools contacted, at 1.9 percent, and the price includes lunch.
The schools attribute the increases to their efforts to attract and retain top teachers in a time of national shortage, and the spiraling cost of medical insurance costs in particular.
"Salaries and benefits are such a large component of any school's operating budget, and increases in medical insurance have to be impacting everybody," said Laurie Chang, a spokeswoman for Punahou.
Fund raising, not tuition, is covering the cost of building Punahou's new middle school, she said, but with its opening, "we're going to be reducing class sizes, which means we've added faculty."
Cathy Lee Chong, director of communications at Iolani, said tuition increases are necessary to ensure the school can compete for the best faculty. She noted that tuition covers only 68 percent of the cost of educating each child at the school, with the rest coming from fund raising, investments and endowment.
"Every year, the board tries to make as minimal of an increase as possible," she said. "No one likes to have tuition go up, but people seem to accept it as what it costs to send their children to Iolani."
Paul Kennedy said he values the broad education his children are getting at Iolani -- his alma mater -- including art, music and religion. He and his wife, Joanne, have three children there, with their youngest, Nicholas, now in kindergarten. Asked if they had penciled out what it will cost in the long run, he responded with a laugh. "That's too scary," he said.
"We have a rough idea," he added. "It's still year to year. Knock on wood, things have worked out."
Kennedy said the couple has "no real high-powered jobs." He works at AT&T Wireless in corporate sales, and his wife is an administrative assistant at Montessori Community School.
"We just budget well, I guess, and we're not real extravagant," he said. "We don't go out to dinner a lot, we don't go to the movies a lot. We don't go on vacations to the mainland -- those take up big chunks of money."
For parents whose children have been in private schools for years, annual increases are a fact of life. While Punahou's tuition has gone up 30 percent in the past five years, Mid-Pacific's has climbed 27 percent, and Iolani's 25 percent.
"We expect it every year," said Jan Tucker, who has a 10th-grade son and sixth-grade daughter at Punahou. "But my children are so happy and they're doing so well. It has to be a priority, and other things take a back seat. If you look at tuitions on the East Coast, Punahou seems like a bargain."
As tuition costs have gone up, Punahou has also boosted its financial aid and has met the demonstrated needs of all students accepted in the past three years, according to President Jim Scott.
It is also reaching out to underrepresented groups with a new full-ride scholarship geared toward Pacific islanders and children of recent immigrants, Chang said. Roughly one in 10 students at Punahou get some form of financial aid, the same proportion as at Iolani.
While the 30 percent hike in tuition at Punahou over five years might seem like a lot, one small group of students is facing an increase of that size in just one year. Fifth-graders at Epiphany Episcopal School will see their tuition leap to $12,185 from $9,310 when they move to middle school at Mid-Pacific Institute's Manoa campus this fall with the merger of the two schools.
Kristy Tong, vice president for institutional advancement at Mid-Pacific, said the higher cost reflects the better facilities, arts and sports programs at the Manoa campus, as well as enhanced benefits for faculty. The younger Epiphany students, who will stay at their Kaimuki campus for another year after the merger with Mid-Pacific, will face just a 6.2 percent increase to $9,890.
