How Rhode Island students can reduce their tuition bill by $44,000

September 16, 2023

Are you a Rhode Island high school senior looking to go to the University of Rhode Island (URI) for a bachelor’s degree? Would you like to get $33,000 knocked off your tuition bill regardless of your family’s income? Would you also like to know how to increase that to almost $44,000? If so, keep reading.

Background

Every year, a new batch of high school seniors dreams about college campuses, moving away from home, making new friends, and gaining their freedom. Unfortunately, for many of them, those dreams end up as nightmares when they graduate college and realize they are tens of thousands of dollars in debt and it is going to take them ten or more years to pay it off.

There’s a simple reason why many people end up in this situation – they went to a college that they couldn’t afford.

What should you do?

You have thousands of options when it comes to deciding which college to attend for a four-year bachelor’s degree. In general, public colleges in your home state are going to offer the best value when looking at tuition costs, and for Rhode Island students, that means either URI or RIC (Rhode Island College).

In this post I will focus on URI as there is a new program available for RIC which makes the decision to go there a little more complicated. However, I will cover the RIC options in a future post.

So what do you have to do to get an almost $33,000 tuition discount? You just have to take part in the Rhode Island Promise program, which is available to all students graduating from a Rhode Island high school.

In order to be eligible for this program, you don’t need to be a star athlete, you don’t have to be your school’s valedictorian, you don’t have to be the president of your student council. You just have to be open to the idea of spending the first 2 years getting your general education credits at the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) rather than at URI.

I know there are many prejudices against community college, so before you dismiss this idea, I just want you to do a few things:

Read this article to the end
Read our article on community college myths (5 community college myths every student should ignore)

Remember that attending CCRI first is like getting a guaranteed scholarship of over $33,000 from the State of Rhode Island. Is anybody else offering you a scholarship like that?

General Education Credits

No matter which college you attend, you are going to spend the first 2 years taking mostly General Education (Gen Ed) courses. If you are an in-state student attending URI, you are going to pay around $33,300 in tuition to get those credits.

However, the Rhode Island Promise program allows any Rhode Island based graduating high school student to get those Gen Ed credits with no tuition costs at CCRI. This means that rather than spending $33,300 on tuition to complete your Gen Ed courses at URI, you could complete them tuition free at CCRI.

Will the credits transfer?

Yes, URI has something called a Joint Admissions Agreements (JAA) that ensures that all of your credits will transfer and that you will enter URI as a Junior. The JAAs differ depending on which degree you want to achieve, and not every degree is part of the program, so make sure you check the link below to ensure your degree is eligible.

How do I get the larger $44,000 tuition discount?

Well, first of all, the Rhode Island Promise program ensures you will not have any tuition costs at CCRI for the first 2 years of your degree; so that will immediately save you $33,000 on tuition. Secondly, as part of the JAA program, URI has agreed to give tuition discounts of up to 30% to transferring students, with the discount depending on your grades. The discounts are:

30% for a GPA of 3.5 or higher
20% for 3.25 – 3.49
10% for 3.0 – 3.24

So let’s compare the cost of the three ways that a Rhode Island high school graduate could get a degree from URI.

The table below shows the cost of tuition for a 4-year degree at URI as well as the cost if you attend CCRI first. The year 1 tuition is based on the 2023 – 2024 academic year and subsequent values assume a 3% increase per year.

Cost comparison table

If you follow the CCRI + URI path and maintain a GPA of 3.5 or higher, your total cost for tuition to get your bachelor’s degree will be $24,736 vs. $68,645 if you went straight to URI. That is almost $44,000 that you won’t have to spend.

Another way to look at this is that you will graduate with a degree from URI and will have paid almost 64% less for tuition than students that went straight to URI from high school.

Conclusion

As a Rhode Island student, you should consider the “CCRI First” option as part of your college planning. It makes no sense for you to take out loans or have your family take out loans when this option is available to all Rhode Island students. Ultimately, the decision will be yours, but make sure your final decision makes financial sense for you and your family.

Your thoughts

Are you a Rhode Island High school student that is considering URI for your degree? Is community college something you have thought about, or is it something you would never consider doing? Let us know in the comments below no matter how you feel.