Chasing Tuition Coupons is Changing College Choices

?? Testing a theory on “skip-over colleges” in the chase for merit over prestige; and the latest enrollment report finally shows an increase for colleges, but isn’t all good news for everyone. Here are excerpts from Next. Sign up here.

EVENTS

?? ?? TONIGHT at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m., join me for a free webcast “Navigating the Path to College Acceptances” held in conjunction with the Huntington Learning Center .

• In the hour-long webcast, we’ll discuss how to start the college search and compile your list, as well as talk about rankings, financial aid, test-optional, and how applicants are evaluated.
• I’ll be joined during part of the audio-only webinar by Georgia Tech’s Rick Clark , who is co-author of The Truth About College Admission: A Family Guide to Getting In and Staying Together.

??? Register for free. (and to get a recording afterwards)

THE LEAD

Thank you to everyone who replied to my request for stories about your family’s college choices as part of the research for my new book. I received an overwhelming number of responses—sort of like applications to selective colleges—and have been reaching out over the past few weeks to some of you to learn more.?

While many of the stories were from parents whose kids are on Plan B and in college, I didn’t hear as many from parents whose children have graduated from a college that wasn’t among their top choices. I’d love to hear from those who have had successful outcomes in order to help show that where you go is not who you’ll be (to quote one of my favorite authors, Frank Bruni).

In the meantime, I plan to use this space in the newsletter from time to time to test out theories and report what I’m finding in my research for the next book.

Today, let me start with the idea of “skip-over schools.”

This is a trend I’m finding among those families who start the college search with an “Ivy Plus or bust” mentality. When that acceptance doesn’t come in as expected, then they skip over what most of us would consider the “next ring” of selective colleges—especially if they care more about money than prestige.

I’m reluctant to name names yet of these skip-over schools without fully absorbing the quantitative data, but think of privates just outside of the top 40 or 50 in the national rankings, outside the top 20 or 25 among liberal arts colleges, and publics in those tiers that don’t give out boatloads of merit aid, which makes their net price too high for some families.

Many of the schools in what I’ll call the “second ring” have been able to maintain a healthy proportion of full-pay or close to full-pay families after they are rejected from Ivy Plus institutions. That is, until now.

“Only about thirty private?colleges?in this country can feel assured that the vastly disrupted ‘college choice’ paradigm does not spell trouble for them,” a former vice president of enrollment at one of these second ring schools told me. “For everyone?else on the survival spectrum, the next ten years will not be pretty.”

You might recall this graphic below from an issue of Next last July that shows the rapid deterioration of full payers at institutions in the middle—those ranked 51-100. Even the Top 50 group has seen some decline, which likely is only going to get worse for those campuses that are just inside that group.

What I’m finding in my book research is that some families are increasingly skipping over this next ring of institutions from the very top because they don’t get good offers of merit aid. So, instead, the families chase dollars from a set of institutions deeper in the rankings or the kid heads off to an honors college at a flagship public with a low net price (sometimes zero) and lots of perks, like early access to course registration and sponsored research projects with faculty.

This idea of let’s try for Ivy U., and then if not, State U. has been common in some places like Georgia and Florida for decades, ever since they put in place their lottery scholarships in the late 1990s. I remember reporting a story in Athens, Ga. for The Chronicle of Higher Education where faculty members noted to me all the new cars students were driving. When those students didn’t get into Harvard or Penn, then a top-ranked Georgia student would stay in-state, take the Hope scholarship, and head off to UGA or Georgia Tech with a new car and their family savings intact.

This trend of skip over-schools might accelerate in the coming years, especially among families in the top 5-10% of income ($158,200 to $222,400 a year).

Why?

As Gail Cornwell recently reported in New York magazine, data released last year that compared parents’ tax filings and applicants’ test scores with admission and enrollment records showed “that chances of admission are lowest for children of the top 5 to 10 percent” at Ivy-Plus colleges. So instead of applying to the next ring of institutions, will they simply skip over them and say “show me the money”??

Bottom line: As families put together their college lists, it seems they have “reaches” and “safeties,” but they’re almost skipping over target schools in their quest for merit.?

There is another reason they might be skipping over target schools: they don’t even know what the term means these days. The rising number of deferrals and outright rejections we’re seeing right now at campuses that would have been a target school two or three years ago—places like Florida State, Clemson, Furman, U. of South Carolina, for instance—illustrates “there’s no such thing as a target school anymore,” Allison Slater Tate, a college counselor in Florida told me.

Enrollment Reverses From Covid Fall

Undergraduate enrollment rose 1.2%, or about 176,000 students last fall compared to the previous one, according to the latest figures released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center this week.

Why it matters: This is the first increase in fall enrollment since the pandemic, the Clearinghouse noted.

What’s happening: The growth was mostly driven by community colleges, which suffered big declines during the pandemic.

• Enrollment at two-year colleges grew by 2.6%, or 118,000 students.
• Meanwhile, enrollment at four-year colleges grew at a slower rate (38,000 students overall at public colleges and just 16,000 at private colleges).
• Overall graduate enrollment also grew a bit 0.6%, but not enough to make up for last fall’s drop of 0.9%.

Inside the numbers: Freshmen enrollment didn't increase as much as overall undergraduate enrollment.

• Freshman enrollment jumped among those age 21 and older, but not younger freshmen.
• Maybe young adults who took a gap year (or years) during the pandemic are now coming back to college.
• But the lack of growth in traditional-age freshmen seems to signal the start of the demographic cliff that’s coming, in addition to the falling college-going rate among new high-school graduates in general.

Driving the news: There’s a lot of “looking elsewhere” for students by colleges as they enter a lengthy period where the number of high-school graduates in the U.S. will first decline later this decade, and then not grow very much in the following decade.

• Nearly every public flagship enrolled a smaller share of freshmen from within their states in 2022 than they did two decades earlier, according an?analysis by The Chronicle of Higher Education of new data from the U.S. Department of Education.
• The University of Alabama, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Oregon were among the top three public flagships that grew their out-of-state enrollments over the last twenty years. In 2022, only 35% of Alabama’s freshman class were state residents; in 2002, they made up 77%.

The big picture: Despite Alabama’s popularity—and the South in general when it comes to higher education—the biggest importers of students among states remain in the epicenter of higher ed: the Northeast.

• A new blog post with a terrific data visualization by Oregon State’s Jon Boeckenstedt shows that in raw numbers, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania imported the most college students in 2022.
• Those were the same top states in 1988, although Massachusetts was in the lead back then and every state imported fewer students.

Bottom line: As the demographic cliff of high-school graduates arrives, expect institutions in no-growth and low-growth states to become more aggressive in recruiting students from elsewhere. But as the data from Jon Boeckenstedt above show, really moving the needle on historical student migration trends is difficult.

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff

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