Greater sensitivity (and sense) about student debt?

Probably. There are a lot of factors at play, and desire to reduce or eliminate student debt is one of them. Add in the drop in international students (who typically pay full-freigh out of state rates). For publics, add in the decline in state support for higher ed, which requires many institutions to raise tuition. Add in a generally strong job market. All tend to reduce college enrollment. There are more, this is just off the top of my head.

Demographics are a huge part of this - some areas are more stressed than others. Fewer students graduating from high school means too many schools in some areas for the number of students available to go to college. Colleges close to each other competing for a fewer number of students. In northern Maine, this was a huge problem. Two U of Maine colleges an hour and a bit away from each other in a county thats population is aging and dying. They need to merge, but the politics are awful, (I mean AWFUL) it was one of the many problems Mr. Jodi encountered when he was there. There are going to be a lot of small college closures in the future.

There is a book that talks about this - think it’s this one - https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.ed...and-higher-education

Mr. Jodi talks a lot about having to be very strategic when making decisions about so many things (programs, faculty hires, student recruitment etc) with this sort of information in mind but so many places just want to keep doing the things the way they’ve always done them, which is a recipe for total failure.

This quote is from the description of the book Jodi linked to: (Bolding mine)

quote:

Higher education faces a looming demographic storm. Decades-long patterns in fertility, migration, and immigration persistently nudge the country toward the Hispanic Southwest. As a result, the Northeast and Midwest—traditional higher education strongholds—expect to lose 5 percent of their college-aged populations between now and the mid-2020s. Furthermore, and in response to the Great Recession, child-bearing has plummeted. In 2026, when the front edge of this birth dearth reaches college campuses, the number of college-aged students will drop almost 15 percent in just 5 years.

It's good info but I'm not sure what to make of his description of the Southwest as the Hispanic Southwest.

Is this a common usage in academia?

thanks for the book recommendation--just ordered it

Good question, Steve. I've not heard the term, and I'm just guessing that they're referring to southwestern states where the population growth is being driven primarily by an increase in Hispanics. Not at all sure, though.

Meanwhile Beloit College (one year tuition is now over $60k) is spending $38 million on one of "the world’s most forward-looking architectural concepts."

quote:

Beloit College Powerhouse was among ten projects awarded a WAFX prize from the World Architecture Festival. The WAFX Award, supported by GreenCoat©, heralds the world’s most forward-looking architectural concepts and is awarded to future projects that identify key challenges that architects will need to address in the coming years. The WAFX Award was created in 2017. Key challenges spanned diverse topic areas comprising of: climate, energy & carbon; water; aging and health; re-use; smart cities; building technology; cultural identity; ethics; power and justice; and virtual world.

It's going to help eliminate what is the last remaining eyesore (except for the stupid high school) in our downtown area. The fact that complete idiots decided to put a high school on the river, still blows my mind on the lack of future planning involved.

Beloit College also started a new "local scholarship" shortly after my oldest graduated which gives local students a 50% tuition scholarship. My daughter is not happy that they won't see fit to do a retro-active consideration for the few locals that graduated within the last 5 years or so. They could eliminate her student loans.

The fact that there is such an enormous discount rate on tuition at reasonably prestigious private universities blows my mind. Bucknell's average discount rate is 31%, and they're not competitive with peers like Colgate, Lehigh, and Lafayette? Wow. Just wow.

Just as an aside, who decided that Bucknell and Lehigh were competitors? I remember touring Lehigh with Lara, and it was a really nice school, well within the wheelhouse of her credentials. I still have pictures from that tour, the campus was beautiful that day. Bucknell, on the other hand, would have been a distant reach for her. I suspect that may be part of the issue here ... as the average GPA/SAT credentials get higher, a school feels less need to offer discounts (aka merit scholarships), but then they get whipsawed when the environment changes quickly.

It's almost as if private universities have become car dealers ... nobody pays list price.

Except someone does pay list price: foreign students. The American post-secondary private educational system seems to be funded more and more by foreign students.

My own perception, just from reading, is that students these days seem more willing to make value decisions ... in other words, X may be the best school I got into, but I'd have to load up on student debt to go there, so I'll go to Z instead, it's nearly as good and a lot cheaper. I know that both of my kids turned down places that did not offer them merit scholarships, even though I did not push them to do that.

I'll be interested to hear PD's take on all this.

Lehigh is a lot...and I mean a LOT.... more competitive than it used to be even just 4-5 years ago. As admissions rates for the tippy top schools have dropped down to beyond ridiculous, there are and tons of kids with perfect SATs and 4.0s getting rejected. Schools like Lehigh and Lafayette and Drexel have happily picked up the crumbs. LL#1's class valedictorian (who is also drum major for the marching band, was the only kid in our school to ever go to all state jazz band and was named the top trombone player in our state, and has a ton of other equally impressive extracurriculars) is headed to Lehigh after being flat-out rejected (early decision, no less!) from Carnegie Mellon. (Early Decision, for those not in the thick of college admissions madness, means when he applied he committed to go if accepted, paying full price if necessary. They still rejected him. W. T. F.)

That's interesting, Lisa. I know a kid who will be a senior this fall at Lehigh. Her credentials were good, but not spectacular. And I remember looking at the Naviance chart when Lara was applying, and she was squarely within the range of students from our high school that were accepted. It looked like an easy acceptance for her. (Of course, the Naviance chart is based on five years of backward-looking data, so a rapidly changing environment can make it inaccurate.)

Lara loved Carnegie Mellon, and I'm sure would have gone if she had gotten in. But it was a massive reach, and she didn't get in.

quote:

It's almost as if private universities have become car dealers ... nobody pays list price.

Except someone does pay list price: foreign students. The American post-secondary private educational system seems to be funded more and more by foreign students.

Yep. And it also highlights the unexpected (?) consequence of this administration's war on China and Muslims, the two largest groups of international students in the USA.

I don't have access to the Chronicle on my laptop our here in Nevada, so I can't read Eric's article. But here is data from 2015 to 2018 on enrollment.

Clearing House data

The "massive" enrollment decline is in the for-profit and 2-year sectors. This is likely driven by the economy pulling fewer students into community colleges and fewer older students into for-profits. Non-profit enrollment is largely static, and forecasts through the end of the 2020s are for slight rises in enrollment (though that may change if the falloff in foreign enrollment is permanent).

As to the discount rate, I think I have posted about this before. First step on the path to wisdom is to stop thinking about it as a single monolithic process driven by your favorite hobby horse explanation.

For Princeton and Stanford (and Williams and Kenyon for smaller liberal arts colleges), a large fraction of the student body DOES pay the list price. That list price is driven substantially by the willingness to pay of the people in the top 1% of the income distribution. As income inequality grows, so does the list price and the discount rate. The discount rate is also driven by the fraction of poor kids attending these schools. As they succeed in enrolling more poor kids, other things equal, that too pushes up the discount rate.

At lower tier schools, almost NO ONE pays list price. There, the discount rate is driven by very different forces.

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:

I don't have access to the Chronicle on my laptop our here in Nevada, so I can't read Eric's article.

* * * *

For Princeton and Stanford (and Williams and Kenyon for smaller liberal arts colleges), a large fraction of the student body DOES pay the list price. That list price is driven substantially by the willingness to pay of the people in the top 1% of the income distribution. As income inequality grows, so does the list price and the discount rate. The discount rate is also driven by the fraction of poor kids attending these schools. As they succeed in enrolling more poor kids, other things equal, that too pushes up the discount rate.

At lower tier schools, almost NO ONE pays list price. There, the discount rate is driven by very different forces.

Thanks. I'm not sure how, but someone on Facebook linked it, and I was able to read the article. But now, with my link, I can't get to it.

I wonder what you would make of the following stats?

quote:

A study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) found that in 2017–18, the average discount rate for all undergraduates reached 44.8 percent; in comparison, Kenyon’s discount rate for its current student body lands around 36 percent.

https://bulletin.kenyon.edu/fe.../the-cost-of-kenyon/

That would make Kenyon's numbers somewhere between Bucknell's and Colgate's (which, if I recall correctly, were something like 31% for Bucknell, 41% for Colgate, Lehigh, and Lafayette).

And, according to this, Williams' discount rate is 59%. (And Harvard is 67%, and Stanford is 61%, and Princeton is 57%.)

https://www.niche.com/blog/col...he-biggest-discount/

The only way I can square what you've said with that data is if I hypothesize a bimodal distribution in the Princeton and Stanford and Williams and Kenyon group, where a large group of kids attend tuition-free, and another large group pays full price, and there's relatively fewer people in the middle. And yeah, I probably should lump "kids of the top 1%" with "foreign students" when considering full payers. And then there'd be a more normal distribution at the lower-tier schools.

You would be quite correct about the non-normal distribution at the elites. I don't know if it's actually bi-modal, but at Princeton something like 40% pay full list price. Places like Kenyon have a lower discount rate than the Ivies because Kenyon can't afford to have Princeton's % of the class that comes from a low income background. Kenyon is much more tuition-driven than Princeton or Williams. Same for Bucknell and Colgate.

Princeton's endowment per student permits them to offer more slots to the intellectual elite from poorer families. They are need blind. Kenyon is not need blind and cannot afford to take every poor kid whose SATs and GPA might qualify for admission. Kenyon would love to enroll more poor kids. They're currently trying to raise $100 million in extra endowment to support scholarships. At present, however, Kenyon's quality comes from tuition, not endowment.