School tuition has been rising over the years, causing students to worry about whether there is a guarantee that they can stay at UPrep.

The middle school tuition for the 2019-2020 school year is $35,670. However, just five years ago, tuition was at $29,300, and 10 years ago, it was at $24,025, according to Patrick McAuliffe, UPrep controller. That means that in just 10 years, the tuition has gone up by over $12,000.

“[If this continued] my family wouldn’t be able to go on as many vacations as we usually would be able to” seventh-grader Johann Eberhardt said. “So for me, I wouldn’t be happy with it. I think that this should be as high as it should go.”

Eberhardt compared the cost of this school to that of the University of Washington. UPrep’s tuition is $36,750, while the University of Washington’s in-state tuition cost is $11,465 according to the University of Washington website, which means it is triple the amount of UW’s tuition.

High tuition rates actually affect more people than you might think. 

“Probably all of our families in the school would be impacted by a higher tuition. And that’s going to have, whether someone’s on financial aid, or they’re in that category [where] they can kind of make it work to afford the tuition, [it’s] going to have a real impact,” Associate Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Alexis Ortega said. 

Ortega believes that higher school tuition could affect everyone in this school, in small or large ways. 

If you are concerned about the rising school tuition, Ortega recommends applying for financial aid, even if you aren’t sure you are the target demographic. 

“It’s always worth applying because you don’t really know what would qualify [you] and what that would look like in terms of your family’s choices and budgeting [without having] the actual data,” Ortega said

The reason behind the significant increase in our school’s tuition may lie not in the cost of running the building, or even the recent renovations we had, but in the teachers.

 “We want to hire and keep the very best faculty & staff and to do that we have to pay them as well as we possibly can,” Interim Head of School Lila Lohr said. “This is a particularly difficult situation because the cost of living [in Seattle] has escalated so rapidly.”

Essentially, because the primary costs to live in Seattle have been going up over the years, employers must increase salaries so that their employees are able to continue working there. 

This poses a dilemma for UPrep. Somehow, they must be able to pay their teachers a reasonable living salary, while attempting to keep the tuition low enough that it doesn’t drive away families with potential new students.

Not all problems have simple solutions, and this is no exception.