Going into the spring semester, Kristy P. Collins had a plan. It was solid, time-tested, and in keeping with the admissions plans used at other colleges across the country: acceptance letters, financial-aid packages, follow-up contacts, on-campus events, deposit day on May 1. Behold, the Class of 2024.
Pepperdine University, where Collins is dean of enrollment management, sits high on a slope above Malibu, Calif., which allows for some unique wrinkles. Admitted students, for example, typically receive a Pepperdine-branded beach towel in the mail. When they visit campus, which is the most sure-fire way to clinch a student’s allegiance, they can take in its commanding view of the Pacific while chowing down on food from In-N-Out Burger trucks brought in specially for the occasion.
Are families going to be gambling more and double depositing, and go with whichever school ends up meeting in person?
Then Covid-19 upended almost everything about college operations, including the highly choreographed charm offensive of the admissions process. Overnight, many of college admissions’s most useful tools and tactics to appeal to potential students were swept off the table. No more campus visits. No more widely shared and commonly observed deadlines. No more predictive models carefully calibrated using years of granular data to predict the size of the entering class in the fall. “We are truly going to be flying blind,” Collins says.
While it’s true that the yawning uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic presents a new and unprecedented challenge for colleges, in many ways the current crisis is just accelerating or steepening challenges that colleges already face. Thanks to declining demographics, stagnant incomes, and escalating costs, the business model of many colleges is coming under increasing pressure. Old certainties, and old rules, apply less and less. The competition for students — and the increasingly critical revenue they represent — grows ever more intense. The value of what a college offers stands in question, and students’ willingness and ability to pay for it wanes.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing colleges trying to predict what students are going to do is that many students aren’t sure themselves. Two surveys of college-bound high-school seniors conducted by the Art & Science Group, a higher-ed consulting ompany, found one in six students doubting that they would attend a four-year institution in the fall, and almost two-thirds uncertain whether they would enroll at their first-choice institution.
Admissions leaders have scrambled to reach students in this volatile new environment. On-campus events for admitted students, for example, have transformed into a galaxy of virtual tours and video chats. Colleges have also adjusted deposit dates, and a few have offered tuition deals, both tactics that may help allow students to attend in the fall, but which will create complications for institutions. Changes in college recruiting rules could lead to a summer some characterize as “the Wild West.” And when something like normalcy returns, admissions will find itself transformed.
Unusual times call for unusual methods.
Perhaps the most obvious change-up involves one of the sacrosanct dates of college admissions. May 1 has been the traditional deposit date, when students are asked to declare if they’re attending. Pepperdine, like many other colleges, pushed back its deadline to June 1.
As at many other colleges, Pepperdine dipped into its wait-listed students for regular admission well before the deposit deadline — it’s the first time in institutional memory — and then did it again. “We don’t know yet if that is going to pay off,” says Collins.
Even before Covid-19 came along, recent changes in the code of ethics that governs college recruiting had already led many admissions professionals to fret about a free-for-all of institutions poaching each others’ students this summer. Administrators at Pepperdine recently discussed reaching out to admitted students from last year who didn’t come, to see if they might be interested in transferring. “We never would have even thought about that normally,” says Collins, “but we did toss around the idea.”
Just as colleges’ established expectations have shifted, so students and their families are grasping that the usual rules don’t apply this year, and are less deferential to colleges about the admissions process than in the past. Historically, when students contact the admissions office, Collins says, “they’re being really nice” when they ask for more information or more aid. Now her inbox is full of emails with more probing requests. Will classes be offered in person in the fall? If they’re not, will tuition be reduced? “Now,” she says, “I feel like they understand that we need them and they are being demanding in terms of answers.”
If and when students do make their deposits, it may entail less of a solid commitment than it has in the past, administrators fear. In part, that may be due to the nature of pandemic uncertainty. About half of the respondents to a survey conducted by the Art & Science Group in April said that a parent or guardian had lost a job or been laid off or furloughed, signaling the kind of widespread economic uncertainty that can poleax even tentative plans. With so many families economically disrupted and so much about the fall semester still up in the air, what makes sense in May or June may not make sense by August.
Concerned about students’ plights and their ability to come up with a deposit, Radford University, in Virginia, announced that it would accept no-cost commitments, says Craig W. Cornell, vice president for enrollment management. He acknowledges, however, that it remains to be seen if “that will change the dynamic slightly in how solid are those commitments. Are they softer or not?”
Deposits with money behind them may not be any more firm. “Are families going to be gambling more and double depositing, and go with whichever school ends up meeting in person and forgoing any school that goes online?” Collins asks. “That’s definitely a fear of mine.”
Instead of depositing, admitted students may want to defer their admission for a semester, or a year – another variable that makes fall numbers difficult to predict. The University of Arizona has gotten only a few requests to defer from incoming freshmen, says Kasandra K. Urquidez, vice president for enrollment management and dean of undergraduate admissions, but she expects that number to grow before its delayed June 1 deposit date.
Admissions offices are also receiving requests for extensions – more time to decide past the deposit deadline. M. Brian Blake, provost at George Washington University, says his institution has been flexible about extensions, especially since it stuck with the May 1 deposit deadline.
The increased flexibility has seemed to pay off — so far. Many of the colleges contacted for this story say that their numbers for fall look promising, comparable with numbers for last year.
But how long that will remain the case is unclear, and greater flexibility can increase unpredictability. Every extension, for example, means another lingering question mark for fall as the days tick by, says Collins. “Do you go to the wait list,” she asks, “or do you just wait on these extension requests and see how they’ll perform?”
Making the admissions process more flexible and forgiving is one way colleges are trying to shore up fall enrollment. Tuition deals are another.
The current wave of tuition deals takes many forms. They include:
- In-state tuition, offered by a flagship and a private college, to students from out of state
- Steep discounts
- Deferring payment for fall tuition until the spring
- Free tuition
The University of Maine system decided in 2015 to respond to declining demographics in the state by offering out-of-state students who were admitted to its flagship campus in Orono tuition equal to the in-state rate at their home state’s flagship — and it advertised the offer on highway billboards around the Northeast. “The world of higher ed looked down its nose at this idea,” says David Strauss, a principal of the Art & Science Group. “You just don’t do that.”
But what seemed controversial at the time is now starting to seem prescient, and other institutions in the system have adopted new twists on this approach. The University of Southern Maine earlier this year began offering a tuition discount for the fall to Maine students who had gone elsewhere for college but might want to study closer to home this fall. “We’re not trying to poach other people’s students,” says Dannel P. Malloy, the system chancellor. “We’re trying to be responsive to changing circumstances.”
I feel like they understand that we need them and they are being demanding in terms of answers.
Beloit College, a private institution in Wisconsin, will match the in-state tuition of the flagship public universities in Wisconsin and five nearby states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Minnesota. Leaders at Beloit decided to make the match to help out students dealing with uncertainty or financial hardship because of Covid-19, and who may want to stay closer to home. But it’s also a competitive tool — and reflects the institution’s recognition of the effects of tuition discounting. “A lot of our students pay an amount that’s very similar to in-state tuition anyway,” says Leslie Davidson, vice president for enrollment management. “We wanted to make that transparent and to give them a clear point of comparison.”
Discounts may reap disproportionate results and goodwill. Ithaca College, a small, private institution in New York, plans to offer three introductory online courses to incoming freshmen over the summer, at a total cost of $300 for three credit hours. The courses are meant to enhance student success and allow students to get to know each other a little, and to reduce summer melt, says Laurie Koehler, vice president for marketing and enrollment strategy.
Details of the program are still being firmed up, but response to the initial announcement, Koehler says, “was tremendous.” Parents were grateful that the college was doing something to help ease their childrens’ transitions. Students are excited to meet one another. Ithaca is also discounting its existing online summer offerings for returning students, from about $1,000 per credit hour to $300.
Colleges offering big discounts or deferrals on tuition — on top of the ordinary amount of tuition discounting it takes to build a class — are making a big bet against uncertain odds. At Davidson College, a private institution in North Carolina, deferring tuition arose from a discussion about how to make it possible for all students admitted this spring to attend in the fall, says Carol Quillen, the president. But how to do that fairly, across the board, when many families’ household economies may have been very recently disrupted and everything is uncertain? The Board of Trustees and college leaders made a decision, says Quillen: “We can assume this risk better than our families.”
Quillen says the college’s relatively low debt and a combination of “cash reserves and other options” will allow the institution to forgo fall tuition until next August (or next April, for graduating seniors). Davidson’s tuition deferral may not have prompted students to choose the college, but for apprehensive students leaning that way, says Quillen, “it might have been the thing that pushed people over the finish line.”
Southern New Hampshire University is in a better situation than many other colleges to absorb the costs of its bet: that steep discounts will bring in more students. Its hugely successful online arm, which enrolls more than 100,000 students, gives it enough of a financial buffer to charge its 3,000 or so on-campus students $10,000 tuition across the board for the fall, and lose money in the short term without too much worry. (Southern New Hampshire’s on-campus tuition and fees currently total about $30,000 a year.) Other colleges have enough financial reserves to cover a steep discount or deferred payment for fall, but they risk weakening their financial stability in the face of an economic crisis that might drag on, or even worsen.
As deals go, it’s hard to beat “free.” The University of St. Thomas, a private, nonprofit college in Houston with about 2,000 undergraduates, had been projecting that enrollment levels would be comparable with years past. “We knew that the possibility of that not holding was a reality,” says Richard L. Ludwick, the president.
The university had also been planning to roll out three new associate-of-science degree programs — cybersecurity, networking technology, and electronics technology — this fall, as part of a controversial restructuring effort that included losing 30 faculty positions, many of them tenured.
The university announced that the first 100 students enrolled in the new associate-degree programs could attend for free this fall. The next morning it had 140 applications. The university’s Board of Directors recently approved more tuition discounts for students, including discounts for current students, discounts for students returning home to Houston from elsewhere, and for graduating students who want to enter graduate school at St. Thomas.
Franciscan University of Steubenville, a Roman Catholic institution in Ohio, is making “a huge investment” in its new students by offering free tuition for all of them for the fall, says Joel S. Recznik, vice president of enrollment management. The money to cover operating costs in lieu of tuition revenue is coming from investments the university has made over the past couple of decades and designated as a rainy-day fund.
Franciscan, which has rolling admissions, has received hundreds of new applications. Beyond that, the payoff from its financial gamble gets fuzzier, but Recznik has no trepidation. “We do not know what the future holds,” he says. “It really came down to believing that this is what God wanted us to do.”
Given the economic disruptions of the pandemic, which are likely to be significant and could last years, there may be advantages for colleges that are willing to be flexible about price. “If it’s something that a family sees as responsive in the short term to the impact of Covid-19, I think that that can be received well,” says Nanci Tessier, a senior vice president at Art & Science Group and a former chief enrollment officer at several colleges. But colleges must communicate clearly and carefully about what they’re offering, she adds, to avoid being seen as opportunistic.
Offering deferred or discounted tuition can also help cement the relationship between student and institution, says Peter Toran, lead strategist at Idfive, a marketing company that works with colleges. “There’s an implicit kind of a hook there,” he says. If your tuition was deferred for fall, then you’re likely to be back for spring, for example. If a college supports a student during a difficult period, he says, it fosters a sense of a “place that supported you through that and will continue to support you.”
While a handful of colleges offer deals, others face a growing rumble of questions about their pricing for the fall. Students have put up with the remote learning put together quickly in days during the spring because they understood that it was an ad hoc response to an emergency situation. But that forbearance may not extend to a fall semester taught partially or entirely online. A recent Carnegie-Dartlet survey of collegebound high-school seniors found that a third of respondents might defer or cancel their plans if classes are held fully online.
Jayne C. Fonash, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, says that, among the families she’s spoken to recently, it’s not a question of whether students should go to college this fall, but where and when. But many students are paying what they pay for the full college experience, not just online classes. The more financial impact there has been on a family, Fonash says, the more question there is about reconciling an online experience at an out-of-state school vs. an online experience through a local community college or another online provider.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Conventional wisdom holds that this should be community colleges’ time to shine. When the economy is bad, enrollment at community colleges tends to boom with displaced workers looking to earn a degree or pick up a new trade. Anecdotes abound about students possibly forgoing their expensive four-year college this fall in favor of a semester or two at the inexpensive local two-year institution.
The reality on the ground is more complicated. Chesapeake College, a two-year public institution on Maryland’s rural Eastern Shore, only recently regained its prerecession levels of enrollment, says Clifford P. Coppersmith, its president, and the fall may not continue the trend. Chesapeake has already made plans to begin fall instruction online, he adds, and “we know anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of our students have varying levels of comfort with online education.”
For some institutions, especially inexpensive public universities, worrying about charging full price for less than the full experience isn’t an issue. At Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, a Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education institution, for example, the prices for face-to-face courses and online courses are already fairly similar, says Charles E. Patterson, the president.
Mansfield, located in the rural center of the state, has also had a tough time since the recession, and faces an uncertain fall. In 2019, it arrested a nine-year enrollment skid, in part, by lowering its tuition price by about 14 percent for in-state students and 40 percent for out-of-state students. Its entering class that fall was 38 percent larger than the previous year, jumping to about 450 freshmen from the year before. Covid-19 has led to fewer applications and fewer deposits compared with this time last year. Housing deposits are up over last year, Patterson says, possibly a sign that students might feel safer on campus than at home. But Mansfield can’t do much more, he adds, to compete against the many private institutions in the state that might be prepared to discount deeply to fill their fall classes.
Most of the colleges contacted for this story have made no plans so far to change their pricing in the event they’re not back on campus this fall. “We’ve discussed the need to have that discussion,” says Cornell, of Radford.
Leaders at Davidson have not had the discussion about pricing either, but Quillen, the president, says she “certainly understands the question that students and families are asking. ‘Well, wait a minute. This is not what I signed up for.’” She says it’s incumbent on colleges to make clear what it is that students are getting from their institution beyond a possible semester of classes from their couches.
While Davidson is deferring tuition payments for the fall, it is re-examining its financial aid awards, a strategy many other colleges are using to help students be able to attend in the fall, and possibly mitigate concern about what unknown mode or shape fall might take. Pepperdine, for example, has urged its admitted and returning students to appeal for financial assistance if they need it. “The number of appeals we’ve received has at least quadrupled,” says Collins, “and we are being more generous, very much so more generous, in terms of how we are responding to those requests for more aid.”
As college leaders struggle to solve unprecedented challenges that are mere weeks, or months, away, bigger worries may loom in the distance. Once the loss of life from Covid-19 has been curtailed, the virus controlled, and something like normal life resumed, the fallout from the worst economic crash since the Great Depression could hang over the country, and academe, for years.
Paul J. LeBlanc was president of Southern New Hampshire in 2009, in the depths of the Great Recession, and says it was the worst year in his 24 years as a college president, with students pleading every day for help to continue their studies. The 2008 recession put about eight million Americans out of work and hobbled colleges’ finances for years. “That’s a dress rehearsal for 30 million” out of work “and counting,” LeBlanc says. “I think we have a multiple-year challenge ahead of us of the severity we’ve never experienced in our lifetime.”
The strain on enrollments and finances that Covid-19 has brought arrives on top of several years of increased competition for students and more institutions missing their tuition-revenue goals. The pressures and challenges many colleges faced before the pandemic aren’t going anywhere. “At absolute best, we will emerge from this a year more deeply into the intensifying problem we’re having already” with enrollment and finances, says Strauss, the consultant. “And at absolute worst, the challenges will be accelerated by a significant degree.” Most colleges will probably emerge from the pandemic financially weaker, and even more dependent on a pool of students who may be less able to afford tuition.
If there’s good news in this moment, it may lie in the fact that some colleges already had one eye on an uncertain future and were making plans to try to adapt. Those plans have come in handy as Covid-19 swept across the country. Southern New Hampshire, for example, had already been working on how it could lower its tuition for brick-and-mortar instruction to $10,000 for a few years.
Beloit plans to transform its typical 10-week fall semester, during which a student might take four courses, into two eight-week modules where students take two courses in each one. Breaking up the semester into discrete halves should make it easier to respond to possible changes in plan brought on by Covid-19 — say, if the college has to start the semester online but can continue classes on campus later in the fall. It should also better enable students to finish classes without too much interruption.
The idea for the modules isn’t new — it came out of faculty planning several years before. But its time may have finally arrived. Davidson, the vice president, says she’s been thinking a lot about “Covid as catalyst,” she says, and hopes that her institution, and others, can make the short-term changes necessary to adapt. But, she says, colleges should do so “with an eye to what will serve us well — even beyond this particular moment.”
