BOSTON – Consumers are negotiating the price of expensive items like homes and cars. So should they also negotiate the cost of tuition?
Yes, parents, you “absolutely should,” says Jon Marcus, higher education editor for the nonprofit website The Hechinger Report.
“It’s a buyer’s market. People are a bit obsessed with the very low selection rates of elite private universities. However, 87% of universities and colleges accept more than half of the applications they receive. On average, 78% of university applications are accepted. This number has increased because we will be running out of 18 year olds from 2026,” Marcus said. “This is the last large class of high school students. After this year, the numbers start to drop. When you have fewer clients, you take on more and charge them less. So colleges and universities give more discounts in Financial Aid. And I think consumers often don’t realize that they can negotiate for more. They don’t have to take the first offer of financial help, they can go back and say, ‘Can you do something better?’ ”
“Financial crisis” for colleges
What is good for consumers is not necessarily good for the higher education sector.
The recent closures of smaller colleges indicate a looming financial crisis.
“It’s a perfect storm,” Marcus said. “They’re running out of students… because we’re running out of 18-year-olds. During the 2008 recession, people stopped having children. year olds are starting to decline. It will fall 15% between 2026 and 2039, and has already fallen 10% since 2011, on top of the numbers. That, and you’ll likely see a decline in the number of international students under the Trump administration. Empirically, that happened during the first Trump administration: the number of international students coming here dropped by 12%. We rely heavily on international students here in the Boston area, we’ll probably see that number drop. You have political attacks on colleges and universities that they haven’t responded to very well, and there’s a lot of other issues that come up. the way of lectures [and their] financial sustainability.”
Is a college degree worth the cost?
Whatever the cost, is a college degree still worth it in the long run?
“The value proposition is one of the reasons fewer high school graduates go straight to college,” says Marcus. “The share of high school students going straight to college nationally has fallen from a peak of 70% in 2016, but is now down to 62%. That’s a lot. That’s a dramatic drop. So the public isn’t convinced that it’s worth it I think they’ve done a very poor job of selling themselves. They’re not very good at explaining the value of a liberal arts major. There are a lot of majors that aren’t worth it.”
Marcus also discussed the move to three-year degrees instead of the traditional four-year degrees, and the reasons behind the struggles of Harvard and other supposedly premier institutions.
