How Colleges Are Tackling the Enrollment Crunch

Hey what's news listeners, it's Sunday, October 4th. I'm Alex O'Soleff for the Wall Street Journal. This is what's new Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news. On the show this week, the enrollment crisis affecting higher red and what three institutions are doing about it. For years, colleges and universities in the US have had a good thing going, steady demand as a growing number of Americans enrolled and more international students were drawn to the promise of an American degree. Now that's coming to an end. There are fewer American 18-year-olds in general, which means fewer potential enrollees. Plus, higher education has been under intense scrutiny over the past few years. The Trump administration has pulled federal funding and accused schools of violating Jewish students' civil rights. Schools received criticism from both the left and the right over how they treated protests over the war in Gaza. And now Cornell is receiving criticism and legal action because of how it handled a student's allegation of rape back in 2024. That's reviving a debate over how the safety of students, particularly women, is handled on campuses. Together, these factors have many students and parents questioning the value of a college degree and leading to this moment of reckoning for higher education. Many schools are struggling to figure out how to navigate it and stay afloat. To better understand the enrollment crisis and look at how three colleges are approaching it, I'm joined now by WSJ Education Reporters Doug Belkin and Roshan Fernandez. Doug, you've been covering this enrollment crisis going on in higher education for a while. Why has enrollment become such a dire issue now? It's really demography at the heart of it when the financial crisis hit in 7 and 8. A lot of people determined they just couldn't afford to have kids and so we had fewer babies being born. I think 2007 was the largest number of Americans born in this country and then it's fallen pretty much every year since then and those kids are turning 18, 19, 20 years old and so there's just fewer of them graduating high school and enrolled in college. On top of the demographic issues we're seeing there, people are just kind of questioning the value of a college degree. There's roughly two million fewer students enrolled in colleges today than a decade ago. It looks differently in different places. I think in Illinois, there's a decline expected of about 30% in graduating high school students through 2041 and I don't think nationally it's about 13%. Do the symptoms of this problem look the same for every school, this sort of dipping enrollment numbers which equates to lower revenue? The first thing is that there's not enough kids, most schools are tuition dependent so if it's not enough money then you can't take care of the grounds, maintain the buildings, hire new professors, a lot of schools borrowed money 10, 15 years ago to keep up with the luxury buildings arms race and as those bills are coming due and fewer kids are coming on board to pay the bills, schools are finding themselves in a tight spot financially. Does it become a bit of a cycle like you're not able to keep the grounds up to date and so students don't apply there and then it feeds on itself? Yeah, there's a term for it, it's called the death spiral. When one thing begins to go off a school loses momentum, people talk about the school in a negative light, fewer people apply, they have to accept more students who are applying which diminishes the prestige of the school which makes it less attractive for the next year so fewer people apply, they're all integrated and they can fuel each other. Russian, I want to talk about where this is happening, are we seeing it in bigger schools and smaller schools, who's feeling it and who isn't? We're seeing it first and foremost at small private schools but that problem is starting to trickle up the food chain and spread to schools where you might be surprised to hear that they're having some financial issues. The small private schools with very high sticker prices and also this kind of high sticker price high discount model are at risk just because people still see the value in a public school or at least more so than some private schools. I remember when I was applying to college in 2000 and it felt really expensive and I look at the sticker prices now and I'm like how has it gone up this much? At the base of this is the notion that you can borrow a lot of money from the federal government to go to school and as a result of that tuition costs rose about 3x over inflation for a couple of generations and that's just a crude. The student debt in this country is around $1.8 trillion but as the doubt of the ROI of schools has cracked into the conversation and this demographic cliff has sort of landed on school's laps, universities in a lot of cases have lost pricing power and what we're seeing now are the net price of schools declining. So schools may say it costs 90K to go but hey we like you so much we're going to give you a quote unquote scholarship for 20, 30, 40,000 dollars to make it more affordable for you and because schools are competing for students those scholarships are getting larger which means the net price is getting smaller. Recently we actually have seen some schools kind of moving away from that and saying hey instead of offering this scholarship why don't we just reduce our sticker price because some schools were afraid that that initial sticker price even though maybe nobody's paying it they're losing potential applicants because they think oh there's no way I can afford that. I'm not even going to see what my financial package would look like. The challenge that schools have with dropping sticker price low is that if they're in a position where they're able to attract a slice of kids who can pay the full price and there is essentially pantycapping themself and what we see in the past is schools will do this and then the price school creep back up over time because they know they're leaving money on the table. If they can't generate enough revenue then they have to start making cuts in the schools become less competitive and so students don't want to come in and they have to cut the prices lower. Coming up how three colleges in three different states have handled the enrollment crisis and what prospective students need to watch out for. We've been talking already a little bit about how schools are handling this enrollment crisis and we've covered it on what's news recently including how more schools are doing things like direct admission where they're accepting students who didn't even apply. But I won a hone in on three schools in particular and talk about how they're approaching it. Russian let's start with Syracuse. It's a national name brand institution with a $2.5 billion endowment but this school year enrollment fell short which has sent the school into a 1.5% budget shortfall. How has the administration talked about addressing this? The way to Syracuse Chancellor put it we had enough applicants to fill our class. We could have met our enrollment goal but it's really about maintaining this level of prestige. The Chancellor was telling us that he felt like the school wasn't aggressive enough. They accept students into Syracuse and then let the students decide you come tell us if you're going to show up or not. One thing I would add was that the prestige that's linked to Syracuse is they don't want to admit kids off the wait list who they feel can't do the work academically and he said we didn't think we did and so we didn't let them in. This also faces a number of challenges which the broader higher ed spaces facing right now particularly in terms of international students. I think that was a big component of why their enrollment is falling short. Doug I want to move over to talk about St. Michael's College. This is a small college in Vermont. The kind I based on what you all have said would really expect to see facing these issues. How has the enrollment crisis played out there and what is the school trying to do about it? It's not happenstance that Syracuse and St. Michael's are in cold northern places. There is a trend of kids who want to go to school in warm climates and the South especially the public flagships in the South are right now offering pretty good deals and there's just a lot more schools in the Northeast. So the competition is thicker so seven colleges have closed and Vermont over the past decade or so and they're trying to draw kids from different states. One of their big recruiting strategies is to say we'll match the price of your in-state public flagship because they have to compete on price. They offer a much different experience to go to a school like St. Michael's then if you're going to UMass or UNH so they do what they can to sell that they're really good at some things. The percent of kids who get into medical school from St. Michael's is very high so if you know you want to become a doctor they want you to know that we're a good place to consider and they're really recruiting heavily among athletes because student athletes don't drop out they graduate at higher rates so they're putting some money into facilities and trying to let people know that we have a world class ski team and different sports and then they're just trying to recruit more they put billboards up in Boston which is probably more for parents community into the city they have programs on social media and they're in a race because they have a relatively small endowl in around $80 million and they have to make things work before that gets to the point where they can't really draw for much more. And then finally just turning to our third school that we're talking about Russian Hampshire College in the spring the school announced that it would close after this current fall semester what brought it to that point how did it get here. I know that they had a kind of fundraising effort to try to save the school in 2019 which helped keep it afloat and that was from the documentarian Ken Burns and alum and they looked at all their options they were looking at land sales they were refinancing debt. The students I talked to in the spring when they announced the closure they were telling me that this moment of reckoning was well they always knew. it was coming. They were surprised that it had arrived when it did, but the students had heard all of these struggles, falling enrollment, rising costs. And so it was only a matter of time before the school sent me this email saying that we were going to close. I spoke to one ex Hampshire student named Hamish Curry. He transferred from Hampshire this semester to start his senior year with a major in economics at Bennington College. He said he wasn't shocked that Hampshire was closing. He and other students knew about its enrollment crunch, but he didn't think it would happen while he was there. Here's what he told me. I mean the day before the announcement we had admitted students day and the school had been very vocal about the fact that we were going to be continuing and that everything was fine. So it's right up until the announcement, the dining hall got like this huge kind of ridiculous makeover. So it seemed like okay like this is probably going to continue and then they dropped the announcement. Like I was walking to class when one of my fans texted me like I'm so sorry. And I thought I'd had some like horrible like family news and then I checked my email and there's this announcement and then I had to go to class. I then the next day I had like a midterm and it was just like this complete bombshell. He said he's a bit worried that his current school Bennington College could also close in the next few years. He's concerned that he'll end up with a degree from a school that doesn't exist anymore, but he doesn't think it'll be a big deal for his career. Perhaps it's a bit naive, but I figure that the industry that I'll be getting in like the experience and everything that I'll be doing will be able to reflect a lot more on my capabilities than like the school that I went to. We also spoke to Ava Aka, a senior who decided to stay at Hampshire for its final semester. She says she considered transferring to another school, but she couldn't afford the cost and time commitment to make up credits she would have needed to graduate. Not only was I pretty sure that most of these other institutions weren't going to be able to match my aid and match the scholarships that I were given, but also like I'm gonna have to spend more money and time in college. It just wasn't feasible. Ava says she's starting to look at graduate schools and jobs earlier than she'd planned and she's worried about the conversations that could come up about Hampshire's closure. I'm gonna have to talk about that in every admissions meeting that I go to in the near future and I'm gonna have to talk about that in every job interview. It's disheartening. So Hampshire isn't the only school that's been essentially forced to close because of this enrollment crisis, but Doug, is this a moment of reckoning for the entire higher education system? So we're starting to see what we haven't seen in a long time, which is a lot of green shoots popping up with folks trying to figure out new ways to innovate. How do you use AI? What can attract students? How can you connect apprenticeships with universities? How can you earn while you learn? These are the models that are popping up around the country. What works? What is popular? What will end up in place remains to be seen, but it's a really creative moment for higher education, born out of necessity. I think this moment is a lot like the Industrial Revolution or we've got all of these technological forces transforming the economy. Schools did not do a good job keeping up and schools didn't innovate. They didn't keep up with the changing job market. They didn't keep up with the technology and now they're scrambling. So we're seeing a lot happen very quickly. Let's say I am a prospective student applying to college in this very changing moment. What should I be keeping in mind as I am considering which schools are going to best prepare me for a future in this workforce? This is the $64,000 question. All of these schools around the country, they're asking faculty to reevaluate the model of how they teach and how kids learn because they don't know. They haven't figured it out yet. AI has scrambled everything. Schools are going back to blue books and oral examinations to try to maintain the academic integrity of what they're teaching. There are a few things that you can bet on though. When you go to school, you're there to learn to think critically and independently and to synthesize information. That critical thinking should be at the core of an education. So if you're looking to go to school, now one thing that you should really think about is how rigorous is the education? How much intellectual work will you be forced to do? Skills are going to come and go but the ability to think clearly and sharply and articulate what you're trying to come across is going to be with us for a long time. Something we hear from students a lot is this value ad. What is the benefit of going to college? You know college is still very attainable and achievable for pretty much anybody who wants to pursue it. But in terms of the financial aspect, what is the benefit to your career? Russian Fernandez, Doug Belkin, thank you for the so much. Thank you. Thank you. And that's it for what's new Sunday for October 4th. Today's show is produced by Danny Lewis with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Alex Osola and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.