Like most mature institutions, significant change in higher education is usually forced rather than undertaken willingly.
On more than one occasion, this has made me apoplectic.
Trends currently impacting higher education have been on the radar screen for a least a decade, yet colleges and universities are now scrambling to deal with what was predictable.
On top of that, of course, was the pandemic—which wasn’t predictable. But assuming there will never be a Black Swan event is never a good business strategy.
Winter is always coming—we just don’t know when.
Now it is here, with gale-force winds.
The shrinking number of traditional-aged college students, generally flat or declining state support for higher education, increased quality online offerings, increased competition from other credential and micro-credential providers (e.g., coding boot camp, Google, etc.), and students opting out because of price, are all putting the squeeze on colleges and universities.
Throw in the lingering effects of COVID, inflation, and a possible recession, and you couldn’t blame higher ed leaders for shoveling Klonopin like movie popcorn.
You Know What, Maybe We ARE Too Expensive
One of the areas where colleges loathe to budge is price.
Lately, we’ve seen some shifts.
Not because people were screaming about prices or student debt for years. Not because administrators were committed to making college more affordable and accessable, but rather, they realized they might not survive if they didn’t.
Take a few private non-profit colleges that are dropping the pretense of high tuition rates.
For example, Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire is cutting its undergraduate tuition from $46,364 to $17,500, a 62 percent drop.
This is called a tuition reset. That’s where schools lower their tuition to reflect what students typically pay, rather than having a huge sticker price and then giving massive discounts and “scholarships” to all but students from the wealthiest families.
They didn’t want to do this before because of the psychology of pricing. A college must be good if it is expensive. And a student must be talented if the school is willing to give them such a huge discount and/or scholarship. Merit-based scholarships at less expensive schools play into the same psychology.
Now they realize they are scaring too many possible students away with their absurd listed tuition. Time to change business strategy.
But privates are not the only ones challenging old claims about tuition needing to go in one direction.
Schools of the Pennsylvania State University system are enacting a tuition drop, cutting tuition up to 20 percent.
The State University of New York now offers an in-state tuition price match at 22 of its 64 colleges to students from eight states. Students from California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Vermont will pay at SUNY what they would pay at their state’s “flagship” campus.
While a number of colleges and universities have participated in similar tuition match programs or reduced prices for students from specific states—those were driven more by policy rather than a desperation to fill dorm rooms. And, like SUNY, these deals rarely apply to the “flagship” or most popular campuses.
Why state taxpayers are subsiding tuition for out-of-state students is beyond me, but hey, I don’t have a Ph.D. The math has to work out somewhere.
In addition to hard price cuts, many schools didn’t increase tuition during COIVD. For some, they are continuing that trend. For public colleges and universities, some are doing that with additional money from state legislatures, others without.
When you don’t raise tuition, that is a tuition cut in real dollars.
What do you know, there has been a lot more flexibility in tuition all along.
What I Meant—We Don’t Want To
“We had no choice but to raise tuition.”
That is just a bald-faced lie. There is always a choice.
The truth is, “We like the status quo and don’t want to change. We think our tuition is affordable, and butts in seats prove we are.”
A great argument for increasing tuition—not doing so would hurt “quality.”
Oh, of course, you don’t want to compromise quality. That’s terrible. That would hurt everyone.
Can you explain to me how you define quality in a college or university, exactly?
What are your quality measurements? Are they quality of teaching, research grants, research outputs, class size, percent of tenured faculty, diversity, student services, net promoter scores, graduation rates, persistence rates, graduate school placement, job placement, alumni donations, overall donor dollars, ACT/SAT scores of applicants, early admissions, exclusivity, social mobility scores, first-generation students, adult learners, Pell Grant recipients, student satisfaction, alumni satisfaction, culture survey scores, opinion of lawmakers and business leaders, Nobel Prize winners, exclusive scholarly society memberships, books published, US News and World Report rankings, sports championships, or something else?
What is it? Some of the above, all of the above? What????
How do you compare quality from one school to the next if they have vastly different missions and student populations? What is the yardstick?
Quality must be one of those mysterious things we know when we see it but can’t define it.
Too bad colleges and universities don’t have people on the payroll that could figure these things out.
It’s Not the Dollars; It’s the Mindset
To be fair, colleges and universities can often justify some price increases because their costs are rising. Inflation, even when it is low, impacts all institutions. And certain expenses like health insurance, maintenance, energy costs, payroll, etc., can increase at a higher rate for employers than the consumer price index.
As I have said before, you can’t give an athlete a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet and expect them to run a four-minute mile. Won’t happen.
Budgets do matter. Colleges and universities cannot continually do more with less.
Fair enough.
The question for us then is this, should they always continue to do what they are doing?
Are there ways colleges and universities could dramatically cut costs without impacting “quality?”
Yes.
But, it would require new thinking and dramatic approaches that no one is incentivized to do.
Allow me to be a heretic.
I’ll use the University of Colorado system, with which I am most familiar, as an example. However, these questions could be applied to nearly all systems and campuses across the higher education landscape.
With distance learning (classes taught at a distance, real-time); hybrid courses (some work online, some in person); fully online learning (classes designed specifically to be taken online); competency-based education (where people pass a class at their own pace, rather than in a set semester system); why do we have so much competition between campuses of the same system?
Just because a business school is “revenue positive” on all three general campuses in the CU system, does that mean that each campus should have its own college of business, with all the associated administrative costs for three entities?
Each campus having its own thing made sense when geography was destiny but does it now?
Even more ridiculous, why does each general campus have competing online programs? This is a fantastic waste of time and money, only justified by individual campuses’ need for control and revenue.
Who suffers and is stuck with the bill? Students.
But, hey, we do “everything we can” to keep tuition low. Honest.
Let us take the question broader.
Why do colleges and universities within a given state that only exist because of taxpayer support (state and federal) each have an online offering that is likely not significantly better or worse than others across the state? (“Excuse me, Steve. Clearly, you don’t understand how our ‘quality’ is better than theirs.”)
It’s insane.
It’s like encouraging a business you own to waste money by having divisions compete against each other.
Conversely, when there is a low enrollment program—say for Classics or Russian Literature— why don’t they share faculty across intuitions via wire so more students would have access to that offering and the program wouldn’t have to be cut? This would give students more options and save small but important programs.
As I said—heretic.
If colleges and universities were focused on affordability and accessibility, they would have to start thinking more creatively about structure and costs.
However, without intense outside pressure and rewards provided by lawmakers, policymakers, think tanks, philanthropies, donors, alumni, professional organizations, and others, it will not happen.
Like nearly all institutions, colleges and universities care about self-preservation and keeping the status quo first. They have become convinced that the value is the institution itself, not the mission and the people it was created to serve.
It’s no one’s fault; it just happens.
While this self-focus worked for decades, it won’t last forever.
Cracks are starting to appear.
It won’t be long before people stop believing, “we had no choice; we had to raise tuition.”
When that happens, if a college or university hasn’t already adapted, it won’t be pretty.