Between eroded state support and declining enrollment, public college and university budgets have been hit hard over the past decade. Federal pandemic financial support to colleges has helped, but that money is ending. As a result, many schools are looking for new ways to attract more students and the tuition dollars that come with them.
In what appears to be an effort to bolster enrollment after a decade of declines, 22 of the 64 colleges in the State University of New York system (SUNY) are offering to match the tuition and fee rates of the public flagship universities in eight states.
Attending a public college or university in a different state usually costs a lot more than attending one in your home state. State taxes support public colleges, subsidizing tuition, so students pay lower tuition in their home state compared to someone enrolling from a different state. As funding for higher education declined, particularly after the Great Recession, public colleges looked to increased numbers of out-of-state (OOS) students to bolster their budgets. Some public colleges, including the University of Vermont and the University of Alabama, enroll more students from other states than their own.
The program uses the state flagship institutions as the tuition benchmark to determine what students will pay if they attend one of the participating campuses. The tuition match offer is available to students from the following states based on the respective flagship university in-tuition and fees:
· Connecticut: University of Connecticut-Storrs
· Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University-University Park
· New Jersey: Rutgers University-New Brunswick
· Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts-Amherst
· Vermont: University of Vermont-Burlington
· New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire-Durham
· Illinois: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
· California: University of California Berkeley
SUNY schools usually charge OOS students significantly more for tuition and fees, but the total varies greatly by campus. How good of a deal this is for OOS students depends on which SUNY campus they enroll at. For example, The SUNY University at Albany campus charges more than $28,308 for OOS tuition and fees, so a student from Pennsylvania would receive a discount of over $9,000, to bring tuition down to the $19,286 that Pennsylvania State University-College Park charges for in-state undergraduate tuition. The tuition deal looks rather different for a student who wants to attend somewhere like The Oswego campus of SUNY, where OOS tuition is $18,679. In this case, a student from Pennsylvania would pay the standard OOS tuition since Pen State’s tuition is higher than Oswego’s.
SUNY is likely using the tuition match offer to attract students who cannot gain a spot at their in-state flagships, which typically have quite low admission rates for public institutions or other state schools and might be tempted to come to a SUNY school even if the tuition discount is negligible. The tuition match will also likely attract students who want to go further from home and have the financial resources to do so.
SUNY has faced declining enrollment for more than a decade
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been declines in enrollment as fewer students have chosen higher education for various reasons, including a hot job market and uncertainty about what a college experience will look like, given COVID restrictions. The declines accelerated existing enrollment declines and have been concentrated at schools without the prestige or brand name recognition that comes from being a state flagship or well-off private school.
Total SUNY enrollment has fallen from 468,006 in 2011 to 375,620 in 2021. COVID undoubtedly played a role in these declines but is not the only cause. Declining populations in rural areas and a decrease in the number of high school graduates also play a role. Many of the campuses participating in the tuition match are in more rural areas of New York, making it harder to meet their enrollment needs with students from their shrinking populations.
Given those challenges, attracting students from other states might be the easiest way to improve enrollment trends at sparsely populated SUNY campuses. Heaven knows that senior enrollment managers have a tough job. Another strategy colleges have used in the past is recruiting international students, though COVID complicated that. However, there are more innovative ways colleges with declining enrolment can think about improving their enrollment.
Over 39 million Americans have completed some college classes but did not finish their degree or credential. Many colleges have started working on re-enrollment programs to bring students back to college so they can complete their degrees. These programs benefit schools with increased enrollment and tuition revenue and students who can complete their degrees and increase their earning power.
It is understandable that SUNY is trying to attract out-of-state students with a tuition match, but thinking more creatively about the issue could yield better results. There are only so many students with the financial resources to attend an out-of-state college, and every other college and university is trying to attract those students. It would be nice to see an institution like SUNY doing as much to attract back students who never completed their studies as it is putting into attracting wealthier out-of-state students.
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