Paying For College For Dummies. Eric Tyson
now and likely to continue in the years ahead.
College enrollment is declining
In fact, college enrollment has now declined for eight straight years and has dropped nearly 10 percent. This has pressured some of less-selective colleges financially and actually led to some closing their doors (see next section).
Beyond the most highly selective colleges, increasingly, colleges are having to compete more for students and that’s a good trend for you. It’s leading to pressure on college pricing and better overall pricing at some colleges.
Of course, enrollment isn’t down at all schools and certainly isn’t at the most selective schools out there. Some of those schools, which have seen greatly increased numbers of applications over the years and decades, especially with increases in U.S. population as well as more overseas applicants, have expanded their enrollment a bit. Yale recently added two new residential colleges, which enabled the college to boost undergraduate enrollment from 5,400 to 6,200. Princeton increased their enrollment from 4,700 to 5,700. In recent years, a number of other leading colleges including Babson College and Johns Hopkins University have similarly expanded their enrollment.
Some colleges are failing and closing
Unless it’s a school near you or that you have some personal connection with, you likely haven’t noticed the significant increase in colleges closing their doors and colleges cutting their prices.
Colleges are competing for a shrinking pool of students. There are more spots available on college campuses than there are students available and willing to pay the high price of attendance. Thus, some schools are struggling financially, and some are going under and closing their operations and campuses. The following table lists private non-profit colleges that have closed just in the past several years.
Private non-profit colleges that have closed just since 2016:
| College Name | Location | Prior Enrollment |
| Atlantic Union College | Lancaster, MA | 500 |
| Burlington College | Burlington, VT | 245 |
| College of New Rochelle | New Rochelle, NY | 2900 |
| Concordia College (Alabama) | Selma, AL | 600 |
| Crossroads College | Rochester, MN | 185 |
| Dowling College | Oakdale, NY | 6750 |
| Grace University | Omaha, NE | 480 |
| Marylhurst University | Marylhurst, OR | 1900 |
| Green Mountain College | Poultney, VT | 775 |
| Marygrove College | Detroit, MI | 1850 |
| Memphis College of Art | Memphis, TN | 380 |
| Morthland College | West Frankfort, IL | 400 |
| Mount Ida College | Newton, MA | 1500 |
| Newbury College | Brookline, MA | 1280 |
| Oregon College of Art and Craft | Portland, OR | 140 |
| St. Catharine College (Kentucky) | Springfield, KY | 750 |
| Saint Joseph's College (Indiana) | Rensselaer, IN | 1100 |
| St. Gregory's University | Shawnee, OK | 690 |
| Southern Vermont College | Bennington, VT | 360 |
| Trinity Lutheran College | Everett, WA | 300 |
Colleges are under pressure to contain their prices
Another trend that has picked up steam in recent years are colleges cutting their advertised prices. This may sound contradictory to the long-term fast rising prices I covered earlier in the chapter. What’s happening here is after so many years of raising prices much faster than the overall rate of inflation and many of their peers, some private colleges found that they weren’t even being considered by some families that were suffering sticker price shock and set limits on the price of schools they would consider.
As I explain in detail in Part 4, what matters is the net price that a school charges your child — that is the list price less any scholarships or grants (discounts) they may offer to your family. Colleges that have decided to do overall one-time reductions in their prices also reduce the amount of grants that they offer so that net, the school is still effectively collecting the same amount of money annually. Doing these resets helps these schools get their pricing back down to a more reasonable level.
Lower cost and faster alternatives to colleges are growing
Trade schools and apprenticeship programs are hardly new. But coding boot camps started in 2012 and will have 29K graduates in 2019. These programs originated because entry level software developer jobs were going unfilled due to the inadequate training that college graduates were receiving. These were the first so-called “last mile training programs” according to industry observer and venture capitalist Ryan Craig. Now these programs encompass a wide range of IT related disciplines and other fields with a technology component.
The early coding boot camps were tuition-based — meaning that the enrolled students paid for the training they got.