Reply to The students who get into top SLACs and top universities don't seem to be picking the former

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP is right. It’s a trend. Many[b] SLACS [/b]were hurting financially before Covid, and weren’t in a good place to take the financial hit. Part of the issue is regional demographics. The college age population is not equally distributed across the US. Add an emphasis on STEM, and increasing cost-consciousness by students, and it’s a bit of a perfect storm. Even higher ranked SLACS are having a problem attracting men.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/03/the-other-college-debt-crisis-schools-are-going-broke.html

https://chroniclet.com/news/203017/oberlin-college-finances-part-of-national-trend-for-liberal-arts-colleges/

Oberlin College is not the only four-year liberal arts college to take measures to improve its finances. Across the country, the number of college-age youths is shrinking as the population ages. That also means undergraduate enrollment is down, which in turn shrinks the amount colleges receive in tuition payments.

Fewer students are expected to graduate high school in the coming years, with a story at EducationNext.com from fall 2018 saying the decline already has taken place in the Midwest and Northeast, where there are more small, private colleges than in other regions of the U.S.[/quote]

SLAC = selective liberal arts college. You are correct that many LACs are hurting financially.

Some SLACs and LACs have no business rejecting some of the people that they are currently rejecting if they would like to stay open.[/quote]

They care too much about their “prestige.” Sure there are a handful who can keep tuition high, and have sufficient prestige to not have to offer merit aid to attract top students, but they are few. Most have gotten themselves in a nasty spiral. You need prestige to lure people into paying full tuition. So most run s deficit, raise tuition to cover costs, offer merit aid to attract top students (spending all the additional tuition $$), run a deficit,…They’ve priced themselves out of the market. The schools that have rich and generous alumni will survive, but absent that many are on borrowed time.

I’m not a SLAC hater. I steered my DC toward them for the emphasis on undergraduate teaching, among other things. However, DC wanted to be in a city, and ended up at a medium sized private university as a compromise. I think that’s why you see the increasing interest in schools like Vanderbilt and Tulane. If I was preparing to spend private school tuition on a very small LAC in a rural location I would be looking at their financials very carefully. [/quote]

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