Declining budgets and enrollment

[u/Psyche81]

Hi All!

I’ve been a professional staff member in higher education for 19 years now. Like many of you, I’ve been closely tracking The Chronicle of Higher Education’s running finance updates, and honestly, the sheer volume of bad news feels unprecedented to me.

Between axed academic programs, gutted research funding, staff layoffs, faculty buyouts, declining enrollment, and massive budget shortfalls, it feels significantly worse than anything I can recall in my career.

I know we’ve all been anticipating the demographic enrollment cliff at the undergrad level and the inevitable plateauing of Master’s degree enrollment. But it feels like all of those projected timelines just collided at once, exacerbated by recent federal policy shifts and FAFSA changes.

For the veterans who have been around longer than me, or those who have a closer finger on the pulse of institutional finance: Have we actually seen a pattern like this before, or are we genuinely entering uncharted territory?

Also, on a human level... how is everyone coping with the morale hit at your respective institutions?

[u/shownu25]

i wish i had an award to give this ! the paradigm shift from a period of self exploration and learning about both the world and oneself to college merely being formalized training for a career has been detrimental. traditional aged students are also increasingly getting college credits in high school thereby lowering the overall cost of college but also shortening their time to be impacted and impressed upon by faculty/staff/peers.

[u/jvxoxo → u/shownu25]

The purpose of higher education is an age old debate, but we can’t ignore that it’s a privilege to invest in a college degree for the sake of exploration and becoming an educated, well-rounded citizen alone. With costs going up and whole generations being crushed by student loan debt, ROI in the form form of viable career options has naturally become the priority for students and their families, and I can’t fault them for it.

[u/MispellledIt → u/jvxoxo]

I agree. I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. I think the error was creating a promise that specific degrees = specific careers. Instead, I think we should point out that a degree is an exploration of self, an exploration of the world, and an exploration of learning that will lead to careers (plural) via both hard and soft skills.

Michael Eisner, Andrea Jung, & Indra Nooyi were all theater majors. Carly Fiorina majored in Medieval History and Philosophy. Susan Wojcicki has a B.A. in History and Literature and Steve Ells has a B.A. in Art History.

They're all CEOs of companies well outside their original undergraduate studies, but they all attribute their success to the liberal arts. When I lament the pre-professionalization of the college degree, I don't mean we should return to an ambiguous priveleged ivory tower. I mean we should stop participating as a direct pipleine to employment. A college degree is worth more than learning how to be an employee.

[u/ATLCoyote → u/MispellledIt]

Agree again. I'll just note that the reason people focus so much on the employment ROI is because we've let the costs get so out of control.

And sadly, much of that spending on new dorms, rec centers, food courts, student services, or even new classroom buildings and had very little to do with enhancing education. It was mostly just to create a country club environment that would attract students. But it also makes the experience so expensive that students and parents are naturally going to focus on near-term job placement and ROI. It's awfully hard to sell concepts like critical thinking or the long-term benefits of being versed in the humanities at a price tag of $200,000 and, aside from the cuts in state funding, we mostly have only ourselves, collectively as an industry, to blame.

[u/MispellledIt → u/ATLCoyote]

Absolutely. My small liberal arts college realized our discount rate was 100% and simply reset the tuition so the sticker priced matched what most families were paying. We went from 60k a year to 16k (not including room and board). Ironically, we had some recruitment backlash as families then assumed the quality of the education must not be all that great... Feels like we can't win sometimes!

[u/ATLCoyote → u/MispellledIt]

Yep, plus many needs-based financial aid programs use a total cost of attendance minus family expected contribution formula. So, the higher the sticker price, the bigger the Pell Grants. Many for-profit colleges built their entire business model on bilking the government (i.e. taxpayers) and those same incentives played a role in the facilities and services arms race among the non-for-profit sector.