KENOSHA - Bucking national trends and its own historical hikes in tuition, Carthage College announced Tuesday it will slash its "sticker price" by $13,600 for the 2020-21 academic year.

The new cost for one year of a Carthage education will be $31,500.

The move is one the college's administrators say will help make the pricing more transparent because the cost is closer to what students actually pay to attend. Another hope is that the new price tag will attract students who may be deterred from even applying when they see the current $45,100 price tag (that's before room and board).

"When new students were brought to campus with their parents, we had a reception and I was talking with some of them and I heard directly how hard a process it had been for them to understand that they could afford Carthage," President John Swallow said. "I mean, it shouldn't take a Ph.D. in math to figure out what your college bill would be. We've made this a very hard word problem."

What the move won't do is change what students have actually been paying all along: the "net" cost after financial aid.

That number — on average $15,800 after scholarships and grants at Carthage — is a fraction of the face-value amount.

Essentially, the amount of financial aid offered by the school to get the overall cost down will change, not the end result.

It's a cosmetic change, but a bold one in an industry that has for decades equated cost with prestige and one in which the size of a financial aid package can make a prospective student chose one school over another.

But Carthage's leaders say disrupting the paradigm and being honest about cost are the right way forward for their school — especially when some analyses find almost two-thirds of prospective students rule out schools because of their sticker price.

They will join a handful of other small liberal arts schools around the nation that have made the decision to cut their price to attract students and adapt to the needs of today's students.

It's just "the right thing to do," Nick Mulvey, Carthage's vice president of enrollment, said.

"I've been saying for years that the 'high price, high discount' model will run its course because the tuition just cannot get any higher" at the same time incomes haven't been rising and families are struggling to make ends meet, he said. "It just was coming to a point where it just didn't make any more sense."

The 'Chivas Regal effect'

It's now an annual tick for students at private college and their families: the tuition increase.

Year after year, the "sticker price" of private universities has risen: from $30,000 two decades ago to just under $50,000 a year today.

Carthage has been no exception.

In 2004, the college's tuition was $21,250. In the decade following, tuition rose by about 5% to 6% annually. Without this year's cut, tuition for 2020-21 would have been $46,500.

Of course, it is rare that a student actually pays that full price. Universities use their own scholarships, and federal scholarships and grants, to lower that cost by tens of thousands of dollars — an oft-used selling point private colleges make to students who compare the cost of attendance to public universities.

This model in higher education pricing that pairs high sticker prices with high discounts is driven by what some have dubbed the "Chivas Regal effect" (after the Scotch whisky by that name). Simply put, the idea is the more something costs, the better it seems in buyers' eyes.

"I think there are a lot of colleges that are thinking about (cutting sticker price)," Dan Madzelan, assistant vice president for government relations at the D.C.-based American Council on Education, said. "But then how do you do it? ... How do you make potential students and their families feel that you, the college, are not cheapening yourself?"

At the council, Madzelan lobbies with the federal government on behalf of its 1,700 public, private and some for-profit member colleges and universities. Before that, he spent a career at the U.S. Department of Education, where he worked on higher education issues, up to serving as the acting assistant secretary for post-secondary education in 2009.

And he's seen the way colleges and families finance college change. As prices rose, so have discounts through financial aid.

"Probably 25 years ago or so, the average discount of tuition was somewhere around 18%," Madzelan said. "Now, if it's not over 50%, it's very close to 50%."

But that leads to a lot of questions and confusion from families, as they try to reconcile the high cost on a school's website with the real, individualized cost of tuition, Swallow said.

"Decades ago, people would say, 'Certainly, the comprehensive fee isn't going to go over $30,000. Certainly, it's not going to go over $40,000. Certainly, it's not going to go over $50,000,' " Swallow said. "But I think we've reached a point where families need to know that it's affordable more than they need to look at an extremely high price that virtually no one is paying."

Easier said than done

Only time will tell how Carthage's tuition reduction will work at a time of fierce competition.

Smack in the middle of Chicago and Milwaukee, on the shore of Lake Michigan, the 2,800-student Lutheran school has a history of disrupting its status quo to move into the future.

Since its establishment in 1847, the college has changed its name and moved twice.

In the wake of WWII and the Great Depression, Carthage had all of 131 students by 1943. That's when its Board of Trustees decided to physically move the college from Illinois to Kenosha, to leverage its geographic proximity to two major Midwestern cities.

Enrollment grew fivefold in the coming decades. Last year, the school just enrolled its largest freshman class ever.

But the world of higher education has also seen dramatic changes, with more to come.

Enrollment officials and administrators are working to protect their institutions from declines in enrollment projected in the coming decade. With a small pool of potential students, they'll need to work harder and harder.

"It's a very competitive environment in higher education right now, especially in the Midwest," Mulvey said. "That said, Carthage's enrollment has been relatively stable ... and stable, in a difficult market like this, is good."

Earlier this month, Marquette University — Wisconsin's largest private university — took a different approach to prepare for that future: layoffs and cuts that shrank the school by more than 70 staff positions.

"The goal was to determine proactive solutions to remain financially strong, realizing we cannot continue to increase tuition at our recent pace because the burden is too great for our students and their families," Marquette President Michael Lovell wrote in a letter announcing the cuts.

Carthage's approach is not unheard of, but cutting by such a high percentage is significant. Marian College in Fond du Lac lowered its tuition by $910 to $26,950 at the start of the 2017-18 school year.

But most other universities are far from clamoring to slash their sticker prices.

"It's also this notion of 'change is good, you go first,' " Madzelan said. "This is not any kind of a gold rush, because it's hard to figure out."

There are no goals for how many more students Carthage hopes to attract with its lower tuition price. Administrators say the cuts won't impact revenue, either.

"Since nearly 100% of our students are on financial aid, at significant amounts, there is very little revenue that we would otherwise have had by keeping tuition high," Swallow said. "This amount of revenue is so marginal that by lowering sticker price and adjusting aid by the same amount, we expect to have the same total revenue, if the number of students remains the same."

But, business aside, Carthage's leaders hope the move will take the focus off the school's needs and put them back on students and families.

"This is the latest in a wave of ways in which higher education, and particularly Carthage, is more responsive to families," Swallow said. "If you look back a couple decades, it's kind of hard to believe but, (there was) this idea where a family wants to come to Carthage and we'd say 'Well, send us a transcript and a tax form and we'll get back to you.' Those days are over."

Contact Devi Shastri at 414-224-2193 or DAShastri@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @DeviShastri.