No News Is Bad News for Struggling Colleges

 One of my Google Alerts searches for the term: 'freshman enrollment'.

As the new college year begins, I have seen many college PR machines crank out headlines like: "largest enrollment ever".  While some have clearly grown their numbers, reading between the lines suggests that there is some obfuscation taking place for some.

Knowing the intense pressure on tuition discounting in higher education today, I also wonder if these colleges with enrollment growth had to 'give away the store' with high tuition discounts to grow their enrollment.  Interestingly, none report on the discounts they had to offer to entice students to enroll.  I sincerely doubt that 'new marketing strategies' were a substantial factor - unless those new strategies were associated with high discounts.

What is even more important are the large number of colleges not reporting anything about their Fall 2020 enrollment.  This has to be bad news - especially for those small to medium-sized private colleges.  It is reasonable to assume that these colleges engaged in substantial tuition price discounting - and STILL did not grow their enrollment.

Sadly, there are no timely reporting mechanisms that provide this information to students and many other stakeholders.

As the process starts to enroll the freshman class of 2021, interested students and their parents should make sure to ask about the size of the class of 2020 and what the average tuition discount was.  While good for the students, tuition discounts that are too high put these colleges and universities at risk of not being financially viable.