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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCollege Enrollment Falls as Economy Recovers
The long enrollment boom that swelled American colleges — and helped drive up their prices — is over, with grim implications for many schools.
College enrollment fell 2 percent in 2012-13, the first significant decline since the 1990s, but nearly all of that drop hit for-profit and community colleges; now, signs point to 2013-14 being the year when traditional four-year, nonprofit colleges begin a contraction that will last for several years. The college-age population is dropping after more than a decade of sharp growth, and many adults who opted out of a forbidding job market and went back to school during the recession have been drawn back to work by the economic recovery.
Hardest hit are likely to be colleges that do not rank among the wealthiest or most prestigious, and are heavily dependent on tuition revenue, raising questions about their financial health — even their survival.
“There are many institutions that are on the margin, economically, and are very concerned about keeping their doors open if they can’t hit their enrollment numbers,” said David A. Hawkins, the director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which has more than 1,000 member colleges.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/education/in-a-recovering-economy-a-decline-in-college-enrollment.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
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KansDem
(28,498 posts)Perhaps students simply can't afford to finance opulent packages for "university leaders" with high-interest student loans...
When University of Missouri Chancellor Brady Deaton retires this fall he’ll direct the Brady and Anne Deaton Institute for University Leadership in International Development on the university’s Columbia campus. He will be paid $200,000.
That kind of exit deal may not compare with multimillion-dollar packages corporate executives can land, but a decade ago such lucrative exits were uncommon for the leaders of of public colleges, The Kansas City Star reported (http://bit.ly/11ND09J ).
Large exit packages are now “common practice,” said Peter Eckel, vice president for programs and research at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. He said the money attached to those deals keep getting bigger and more often the exit deal is worked out when leaders are hired.
Other university presidents in Kansas and Missouri who’ve retired over the last five years with lucrative packages include Kansas State University President Jon Wefald. Before Wefald retired in 2009, he was paid $315,962 a year, which included a base salary of $255,298 in state funds and $60,664 from private sources.
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http://cjonline.com/news/2013-06-28/perks-plentiful-retiring-university-leaders
I know of university chancellors who receive impressive six-digit salaries and are also given houses and cars by the university for the duration of their tenure.
Higher education isn't the bargain it once was. Students are going deep in debt for a degree only to graduate into an almost non-existent job market.
They're essentially buying very expensive toilet paper...
joeglow3
(6,228 posts)I read an article about a for-profit college that was pumping out 800 photography graduates a year in ONE city. There is no market that has anywhere the need for 800 new photographers a year.
Sadly, too many people go to college because it is the thing. Frankly, I would rather see more people go to trade schools, journymen school, etc.
HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)Enrollment is down because the ROI is dwindling. Supply and demand still apply. Can't get blood from a stone, and all that . ...
Yo_Mama
(8,303 posts)The costs keep going up, and incomes are not.
The logic in the article is similar to the early phases of the housing bust, when the talking heads claimed people weren't buying houses because home prices weren't rising enough, and weren't shopping in stores because of weather. People weren't buying houses because prices were too damned high. When a middle-class teach earning 50K has to spend at least 500K on a home in LA, the pool of potential purchasers dries up.
It's not just undergraduate studies either. Law school enrollments are down, but that's because graduates have trouble finding jobs.
Nay
(12,051 posts)payout (in the form of a decent job somewhere) that makes that degree worthwhile. That's what happens when you run a college as a money-grubbing operation instead of an educational institution. We now have lots of kids coming out of college who can't write a coherent paragraph, due to the fact that colleges are graduating bodies just to get their 4 years of tuition money. Over the years, the result has been that a college education, like a high school diploma, has devalued itself to the point that it's not that much help in getting a job (except in fields that still require rigor, like medicine or engineering).
Colleges are finally being hoist by their own petard. Lots of them will be declaring bankruptcy and closing up.
cthulu2016
(10,960 posts)I didn't see anything there supporting the claim that the drop-off is due to an improving economy. The first paragraph simply asserts that.
A drop-off in adult enrollment would seem, to me, to be more likely related to the duration of the downturn than to a recovery
dkf
(37,305 posts)cthulu2016
(10,960 posts)The article states in the opening paragraph that the recovering economy is responsible but never gives any support of the assertion.
I would think that going back to school as response to an economic down-turn would be a phenomenon that trailed off over time even in cases where the economy did not recover.
dembotoz
(16,797 posts)all the uncertainty
