Our Tuition Model & Philosophy
In determining our tuition process, we’ve focused on a few important ideas — trust, access, and responsibility. By trusting families to be generous and reasonable, we can increase our accessibility. By offering tiered tuition and undertaking initiatives to expand access, such as pursuing external funding, we can cultivate a more socioeconomically diverse community and welcome more amazing kids. By being responsible in setting tuition rates that will allow us to keep our space open and our staff able to focus on the kids, we are ensuring sustainability so that our commitment to our mission — doing the work well rather than expanding our reach quickly — is visible as a budgetary priority.
Like many other Agile Learning Centers, we tried a more open sliding scale approach to tuition for years, but we found our fundraising and grant-writing efforts couldn’t keep up with the need for them. We are just too small, and our facilitators were trying to do too much. We’ve shifted to a tiered tuition approach, and we’re grateful for the work of Alexis J. Cunningfolk which you can read here.
$16,000 is the full price of tuition. If you offer an amount less than this, you are requesting tuition assistance.
$12,500 is the middle tuition tier for families who have some financial stability but would find paying the full tuition amount to be a hardship.
$8,700 is currently the lowest tuition tier, for those who would find paying the middle tier amount to be a hardship. In order to retain staff and maintain our space, we currently cannot accept tuition proposals lower than this amount. That said, support securing additional funding that would allow us to expand tuition assistance is always welcome.
$18,000 is the Pay-It-Forward tier. It’s an opportunity to contribute both tuition for your student and additional resources that can be used to support additional scholarships, guest speakers, tool upgrades, and community events.