Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning entitled, “The Haves and Have Nots – Colleges Enrollments Are Becoming Increasingly Unequal.”   It is a good review of the current state of the enrollment issues in our colleges and universities.  Essentially, well-endowed private colleges and flagship public universities are doing fine while tuition-driven private colleges, public colleges that are not flagships, for-profit colleges, and community colleges are hurting for students. Here is an excerpt from The Chronicle article.

“Higher education’s enrollment challenges are by now well known. The demographic cliff — a sharp decline in the number of high-school graduates nationwide — has been forecast for years and is already underway in the Northeast and Midwest.

..

But while nearly every sector of higher education has seen declines in enrollment, some colleges are doing quite well. As Brian Rosenberg described before the pandemic, higher education is in a Gilded Age, with a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. There are two groups of colleges in the haves category right now. One is made up of the few dozen highly rejective private colleges with enormous endowments. Unsurprisingly, they are in a stronger position than ever.

The other group is made up of flagship public universities, many of which are vacuuming up students while their regional-university and community-college counterparts struggle for enrollment.

It’s not just regional publics that are struggling. Many private colleges without billion-dollar endowments are also significantly down in enrollment. DePaul University, in Chicago, is facing a $56.5-million budget deficit as enrollment has fallen by 6.8 percent since 2018. And plenty has been written about the challenges facing very small private colleges, even though the resiliency of these colleges leads me to expect only a modest uptick in closures.

This is a difficult period for many of our colleges and universities.  It will likely only get worse!

Tony

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.