Nothing tends to remain static in the realm of post-secondary education. Recent months have shown that many institutions have experienced large-scale growth in the number of new master’s degree program offerings. Depending on the institution, a shrinking pool of students applying for admission to college poses a hazard if tuition income is heavily relied upon to stay in existence. Any decline in endowments and donations also may result in various unwelcome outcomes, such as terminating academic programs that do not attract sufficient numbers of students and decreasing the size of faculty and staff. Financial pressures have made it necessary to convert to a greater reliance of adjunct faculty who do not need to occupy office space on campus, are not provided with health and retirement benefits, and whose salary may be limited to teaching a single course instead of being remunerated as a full-time faculty member.
Many smaller, private institutions around the United States may be faced with such challenges. As an alternative to shutting their doors, the only viable option may be to merge with another college or university. A recent example occurred earlier this month when the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia merged with Saint Joseph’s University, a Jesuit school, in that city. This new single institution will bear Saint Joseph’s name. Such mergers also may lead to the possibility that some academic offerings will no longer be available and both faculty and staff positions may have to be eliminated in order to create a leaner set of operations that will be less expensive to maintain.
Condition Of Education Report 2022
The Condition of Education is an annual report mandated by the U.S. Congress that summarizes the latest data on education in this nation. The report uses data from the National Center for Education Statistics and from other sources and is designed to help policymakers and the public monitor the condition and progression of education. For example, in fall 2020, some 69% (10.9 million students) of the total under-graduate population were enrolled at four-year institutions. The remaining 31% (4.9 million students) were enrolled in two-year institutions. At the postsecondary level, total undergraduate enrollment decreased by 9% from fall 2009 to fall 2020 (from 17.5 million to 15.9 million students). For male and female students, enrollment patterns exhibited similar trends between 2009 and 2019 (both decreasing by 5%. From 2019 to 2020, however, female enrollment fell 2%, while male enrollment fell 7%. Additionally, between 2019 and 2020, undergraduate enrollment dropped 5% at public institutions and 2% at private nonprofit institutions. In contrast, undergraduate enrollment at for-profit institutions was 4% higher in fall 2020 than in fall 2019, marking the first positive single year change in enrollments at these institutions since 2010. Meanwhile, at the postbaccalaureate level, enrollment in master’s and doctoral programs increased by 10% between fall 2009 and fall 2020 (from 2.8 million to 3.1 million students).
Gainful Employment And For-Profit Educational Institutions
A new study from The Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS) indicates that the U.S. Department of Education (ED) designed the Gainful Employment (GE) rule as a baseline accountability metric to ensure that career education programs leave their graduates with debts that are affordable relative to their eventual earnings. The rule worked on multiple fronts, from improving institutional quality, lowering costs, and saving taxpayer money to advancing racial equity in how career education programs served historically marginalized students. The GE rule also worked to mitigate the large number of students at for-profit colleges, disproportionately Black and Latino students, from ending up in student loan default. In 2019, ED officials rescinded the rule at an estimated cost to taxpayers of more than $6 billion. Since then, ED has lacked this baseline accountability measure to hold low-performing career education programs accountable for low earnings and saddling their students with unmanageable student loan debt. In early 2022, the Department presented a proposal to create an earnings threshold metric that would complement the 2014 rule’s debt-to-earnings (D/E) metric to constitute a new GE rule. TICAS has modeled how the proposed threshold potentially would have an impact on GE programs. Under the proposed earnings measure, more than 40% of GE programs at for-profit institutions would fail, risking the ability to qualify for federal student aid.