College campuses are alarmingly under-populated, said Marina Villeneuve in The Guardian. Enrollment is down at more than 1,000 institutions this year thanks to soaring tuition, Trump administration cuts to financial aid and international student visas, and “growing public skepticism about the value of a college degree.” Colleges are being forced into austerity. At the University of New Hampshire, “officials closed the dining hall on weekends, shut campus pharmacies, raised tuition, and laid off dozens of professors and staff members.” At Rhode Island’s Johnson & Wales University, students have protested “worsening dorm conditions” and “the rising cost of laundry and meal plans.” More than a dozen colleges now cost more than $100,000 a year, said Jessica Dickler in CNBC.com. But “tuition revenue has actually fallen” 8.1% in the past five years, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, because so many students now need financial assistance “to make higher education affordable.” David Greene, president of Maine’s Colby College, says it has trapped higher education in a “death spiral.”
It’s not just small schools “beginning to flail,” said Douglas Belkin and Roshan Fernandez in The Wall Street Journal. Syracuse University fell short of enrollment targets this academic year, “sending the school into a 1.5% budget shortfall.” It added nearly half a billion in debt recently to build new dorms. And despite a $2.5 billion endowment, Syracuse recently eliminated 93 academic programs “that it said didn’t draw enough students, such as child therapy and Middle Eastern studies.” What universities should be cutting, said Barry Lam in The Boston Globe, is their outrageous administrative spending. “There are now more nonteaching administrative staff than students at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.” Technology is making it worse. Take the University of California system, where a $170 million digital infrastructure project was supposed to cut administrative bloat by $753 million. Instead, the project “ballooned to $942 million” and was so ineffective it required an “entirely new” IT unit to operate.
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