John T. Lawlor is a trend watcher in higher education. He’s the founder of the Lawlor Group, a Minneapolis-based market-research firm that specializes in the private-college sector, which turns out a list of higher-education trends around this time of year, as prospective students are mulling their college choices.
The big trend he sees is “buying down"—that is, parents and students who are settling for second best or second choice, if the price is more appealing. And that trend is catching on not just among squeezed middle-class families, but also among the rich, he says in a Chronicle podcast on this page.
“I have a friend who, as they say in the development circles, ‘has capacity,’” Mr. Lawlor says to illustrate his point. “He’s paying $52,000 for a college education for his daughter, and he simply said, ‘I can’t believe I’m paying this. This isn’t an Ivy League school.’ This is a person who has ability to pay, and if he is saying this, I think a lot of other people are saying it.”
Borrowing a catchphrase from another trend-watching company, Mr. Lawlor describes the trend as a search for the “next best.” “What people are doing is [comparing] the net cost and saying, ‘I think this might be a less prestigious school—might be just as good at education—but it’s $10,000 less,’” he says. Because of cost pressures, more students may take gap years or otherwise delay going to college.
Obviously this is bad news for some colleges, Mr. Lawlor says, but perhaps not bad news for the higher-education industry.
“It’s increasing accountability, and that’s good,” he says. “There are schools out there that will probably close, but there are schools out there that will get better because of the pressures.”
For one thing, he sees more college staff members—from the president on down—getting more acquainted with the art of enrollment management. He sees broader attention on not only recruiting students but also retaining them. His surveys of alumni indicate that students wish that they had gotten more advising support while they were in college—not just finding courses and picking majors but also figuring out what to do with what they have studied.
Prospective students are looking for something old-fashioned: telephone calls and personal appeals. “Personal attention has not gone out of style,” he says. “That continues to be something that really creates distinction. People are looking for that right fit.”
