Philadelphia Inquirer – February 1, 2012
In January and February, a number of colleges send e-mail to counselors with headings such as “Scholarships still available at – University” and “We’ve extended our deadline.” The schools generating these notices are well-established, often ones our students have attended over the years. It’s not that they can’t fill seats. They’re hoping to attract well-qualified applicants who may have gotten a late start on the application process or been disappointed in the early fall rounds.
There are more than 2,000 four-year colleges in the United States. Most admit the majority of their applicants. And although a few are now charging close to $60,000 a year, competition does exert pressure on prices.
The name recognition and financial resources of the most expensive institutions insulate them, to some degree, from market forces. They were there first and enjoy a monopoly of sorts. Outside this relative handful, however, colleges actively vie with each other for the better students in the pool, independent of their ability to pay.
The hundreds of private colleges scattered across the country have an appealing product to sell. Predominantly and often exclusively undergraduate institutions, their classes are smaller and usually taught by professors rather than graduate students or adjuncts. The absence of advanced-degree programs creates opportunities for undergraduates to work more closely with their professors. Students with a variety of extracurricular interests often find room to pursue them without the expectation that they be standouts in each area.
Many of these colleges offer so-called merit aid to applicants who have taken challenging courses in high school, earned strong grades, and scored well on the SATs or ACTs. These tuition discounts can range from a small fraction of the total to $20,000 a year or more. Their purpose is to increase the likelihood that the recipients will enroll.
Responding to the attractions of the small-college model, public universities have created “honors colleges.” They attempt to provide the best of both worlds – the resources of a big university and the personal touch of a smaller one. Some honors programs consist primarily of a set of courses open only to eligible students. Others come with all the bells and whistles – early class registration privileges, separate dormitories, designated faculty advisers, special academic and social programs, and even funded travel.
Some private colleges use both discounting and special programs to woo students. Since state universities already charge significantly less, at least for in-state attendees, than their private counterparts, they are less likely to discount the prices further, although some, such as Penn State, do.
After the 2008 financial crisis, many larger state universities experienced a spike in applications. In quite a few cases, those universities saw even larger increases in their honors-college pools. Stronger students who had been focusing on private institutions were seeking more affordable options.
Competition is alive and well in higher education. Excellent alternatives to the most expensive colleges and universities are available at about half the cost, sometimes less. They’re still not cheap by any means, but they are at least within range of a larger segment of the middle class.
I saw your piece in this morning’s Inquirer. Thanks.
What you wrote seemed accurate from the prospective a counselor aiming to get his students into college, and I think it will be helpful to many who share that aim for their children. I take it that this was your objective.
Still, what you say appears in another light when read in connection with the editorial on the facing page: “College costs too much.” I suspect you will agree.
College and university tuition costs have climbed at near astronomical rates in recent decades. If I recall correctly, when I started at PSU, I paid $90 a trimester, which afterward went up to $130 a trimester. I believe that many today will not be able to afford the costs as they presently stand.
The college and university administrators and faculty have basically been treating themselves very well indeed –at the expense of the damaged middle class. Last I taught in the area, full-time faculty (at a private school) were regularly making on the order of $100,000/yr, and fighting for more through a tough union. I will not speculate on how much the President was making or the senior administration. I tend to say, at this point, simply that I have never heard of a part-time administrator at any college or university–unless they were teaching the other part time. Though lots of sparks flew between faculty and administration, they basically treated each other like royalty–in comparison to the treatment handed out to adjunct faculty, students and paying parents. I tend to list this phenomenon under the heading of “insider trading.”
Those who might compete for these insider, plum positions, are threatened with life-long persecution–on the mere suspicion of what is politely termed “political incorrectness,” which functions like a latter-day puritanism within academia. It is not merely that colleges and universities cost too much, I’d say they threaten society with their ideological strait-jackets. This is the ultimate source of much of the divisiveness and political rancor within American society and politics.
I wonder what you think.
I can’t disagree with anything you say.
Yes, I was focused on making the point that there are alternatives to paying the astronomical prices charged by the most expensive privates.
Whether the costs at any of them can be justified is another question.
Your comments reminded me of what happened to the former president at Harvard, Larry Summers, when he seemed to suggest that some of the departments were doing “soft” scholarship and perhaps should be cut back or eliminated. He was practically ridden out on the rail. I think he made some entirely valid observations, but as you point out, it’s not always about being right in academe, strangely enough.
This writer above is far more thoughtful and understanding of the strengths and the offerings of the choice of colleges in the US than Obama. Obama will make this matter far worse, as he does with everything he touches. Obama must be voted out of office.
Thanks for the note. I’m not sure whether we would be better off if we voted Obama out but it does seem as though any effort to “fix” the higher education system that comes from Washington is likely to fail.
I read with interest your commentary in the Inky on 1 Feb: “Colleges adapt to marketplace.” You really captured the state of where we are at this point. Nice work!
Stephen
Very helpful to hear from someone on the inside, so to speak, that the situation looks the same to you as it does to me.
Hard to imagine where we’ll be in a decade or two.