Dive Brief:
- St. Michael’s College in Vermont and Staten Island’s Wagner College are among schools that have decreased their class sizes rather than tempt additional students with higher discounts.
- Inside Higher Ed reports Wagner has held its discount rate at 43%, watching its class size shrink to 1,752 this year from 1,826 in 2011 while welcoming gains in academic quality, retention, and overall revenue.
- Like Wagner, one of the reasons St. Michael’s is letting its enrollment dip is to maintain selectivity, quality, and diversity in the face of demographic declines that offer it a smaller pool of students to vie for.
Dive Insight:
The high concentration of schools in the northeast are all fighting over a dwindling number of high school graduates, especially small schools with less of a national or international reach. In response to the challenges of filling their classes, many colleges have increased their discounts to admitted students.
According to a recent study by NACUBO, the average discount rate for first-time, full-time freshmen was 48% at private colleges this year, up from 46.5% last year. But as schools continue to give away their services for less of the cost of providing them, more will inevitably have to come to terms with how unsustainable it is.