Dec 23, 2014 11:30 AM EST By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

Friends University will launch an initiative that will allow student to lock in their tuition for four years in an effort to make college more affordable, school officials announced.

The Kansas institution said the tuition reset strategy will be available for traditional undergraduate students who enroll fall 2015, Wichita Business Journal reported.

"A tuition lock is our way of investing in students and showing them, tangibly, that we are committed to making college affordable for them, not just for that first year to get them hooked on Friends, but for all four years," Interim President Dr. Darcy Zabel said in a statement.

The tuition lock is also designed to motivate students to complete their degrees within the four-year time span. Under the reset strategy, students entering Friends University in Fall 2015 will have their tuition rate locked in for four years as long as they continue their status as a full-time student.

School officials said continuing students at the University will feel some relief from the tuition reset strategy as well, as the Board of Trustees further announced that tuition for those students will be frozen at the Fall 2014 rate for the 2015-2016 academic year.

Friends University is committed to the national agenda regarding the containment of college costs. Typically, private schools in Kansas and the surrounding states raise tuition approximately 4 percent a year, leading to a cost uncertainty which eventually can price many students out of the market before their studies are completed.

"As financial aid loans are capped and student grant money is cut from the federal budget, the gap between what college costs and what students can afford to pay has grown too wide," Zabel said. "We're doing everything we can think of to keep Friends University affordable so that students who want the person-to-person attention that a small college offers but with the excellence one expects from a university in a great city, like Wichita, with all of its internship and career exploration opportunities, can choose just that."

Integral to the plan is the University's commitment to recruit and enroll the most talented and the brightest of students.

 As such Friends will continue to offer more than $8 million dollars in scholarships as well as to engage students with on-campus employment opportunities, a cost which in fiscal year 2015 alone totaled more than $700,000 in wages and includes the University's federal work study allowance.

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