Higher Ed, Inc. looks at the business of higher education:
Counting everything but its huge endowment holdings, Higher Ed, Inc., is a $250 to $270 billion business — bigger than religion, much bigger than art. And though no one in the business will openly admit it, getting into college is a cinch. The problem, of course, is that too many students want to get into the same handful of nameplate colleges, making it seem that the entire market is tight. It most certainly is not. Here?s the crucial statistic: There are about 2,500 four-year colleges in this country, and only about 100 of them refuse more applicants than they accept. Most schools accept 80 percent or more of those who apply. It?s the rare student who can?t get in somewhere.
An amusing analogy:
Another growth market? Foreign students. No one talks about it much, but this market has been profoundly affected by 9/11. Foreign students have stopped coming. There are enough rabbits still in the python that universities haven?t been affected yet. But they will be.
University funding in a nutshell:
Development is both PR and fundraising, the intersection of getting the brand out and the contributions in, and daily it becomes more crucial. That?s because schools like mine have four basic revenue streams: student tuition, research funding, public (state) support, and private giving. The least important is tuition; the most prestigious is external research dollars; the most fickle is state support; and the most remunerative is what passes through the development office.
Competition at the top of the pyramid has become intense:
Until 1991, the Ivy League schools and the Massachusetts Institute of Tecnology met around a conference table each April to fix financial aid packages for students who had been admitted to more than one school. That year, after the Justice Department sued the schools, accusing them of antitrust violations, the universities agreed to stop the practice. As happened with Major League Baseball after television contracts made the teams rich, bidding pandemonium broke out. Finite number of players + almost infinite cash = market bubble. Here?s the staggering result. Over the past three decades, tuition at the most select schools has increased fivefold, nearly double the rate of inflation. Yet precious few students pay the full fare. The war is fought over who gets in and how much they?re going to have to be paid to attend.
The top schools are largely indistinguishable:
?Diversity is the hallmark of the Harvard/Radcliffe experience,? the first sentence in the Harvard University register declares. ?Diversity is the virtual core of University life,? the University of Michigan bulletin announces. ?Diversity is rooted deeply in the liberal arts tradition and is key to our educational philosophy,? Connecticut College insists. ?Duke?s 5,800 undergraduates come from regions which are truly diverse,? the Duke University bulletin declares. ?Stanford values a class that is both ethnically and economically diverse,? the Stanford University bulletin notes. Brown University says, ?When asked to describe the undergraduate life at The College — and particularly their first strongest impression of Brown as freshmen — students consistently bring up the same topic: the diversity of the student body.?
Read the whole article.