State Universities, Competition, and Access for Low-Income Students

Here's a bit more on public universities and the effects of falling state support. As support has fallen, there has been an increased reliance on tuition, private sector funding of research, and donations as a means of funding, all of which subject state universities to market pressures that did not exist in the past.

How will universities respond? Of particular interest is whether the change will affect the ability of universities to provide access to low-income students. Do universities face competition and does that impact their ability to provide access? This is the enrollment manager at Oregon State University, which is about 40 or so miles north of us here at the University of Oregon, in an interview with The Atlantic magazine:

The Best Class Money Can Buy,  by Mathew Quirk,  The Atlantic:  I asked Bob Bontrager what he thought about eating other people's lunches.

"I personally prefer kicking their ass," he replied. "It's a zero-sum game. There's a finite number of prospective students out there. Are you going to get them, or is your competitor going to get them? You face the pressure and say, 'That feels burdensome to me; I don't want to deal with that.' Or you say, 'That's a pretty interesting challenge; I'm going to go out there and try to eat their lunch. I'm going to try to kick their ass.' That defines people who are more or less successful and those who stay in the position."

Bontrager, who works at Oregon State University, is the school's head of enrollment management—a relatively new but increasingly essential post in higher education. Three quarters of four-year colleges and universities employ an enrollment manager to oversee admissions and financial aid. The position is standard at private schools, and is spreading quickly across public institutions.

Over the past twenty years, often under cover of the euphemisms with which the industry abounds, enrollment management has transformed admissions and financial aid, and in some cases the entire mission of a college or a university. At its most advanced it has a hand in every interaction between a student and a school, from the crafting of a school's image all the way through to the student's successful graduation. Any aspect of university life that bears on a school's place in the collegiate pecking order is fair game: academic advising, student services, even the curriculum itself. Borrowing the most sophisticated techniques of business strategy, enrollment managers have installed market-driven competition at the heart of the university.

With their ever-expanding reach, enrollment managers are inevitably dogged by controversy. But it's the way they have changed financial aid—from a tool to help low-income students into a strategic weapon to entice wealthy and high-scoring students—that has placed them in the crosshairs of those who champion equal access to higher education. Adopting data-mining and pricing techniques from the airline and marketing industries, they have developed a practice called financial-aid leveraging that allows a school to buy, within certain limits, whatever class it wants. Often under orders from a president and trustees, enrollment managers direct financial aid to students who will increase a school's revenues and rankings. They have a host of ugly tactics to deter low-income students and to extract as much money as possible from each entering class.

All this, understandably, has given the enrollment-management industry a black eye. "It's a brilliantly analytical process of screwing the poor kids," says Gordon Winston, an economist at Williams, and an article last year in The Chronicle of Higher Education included a warning that "enrollment managers are ruining American higher education." But some in the industry use its techniques responsibly—to guarantee enough revenue to support the academic mission, or even to expand low-income access to higher education. Indeed, the sophisticated methods of enrollment management may be the only way for schools to hang on to their principles while surviving in a cutthroat marketplace. [... continue reading ...]

I'm told Bontrager was asked to use different language when descibing his competitive spirit to the media. We have an enrollment manager, and she relies on the results of an econometric model that has been developed over many years by colleagues to help uncover the responsiveness of enrollment to changes in enrollment policy and the implementation of programs designed to affect recruitment and retention. It's been a helpful tool.

The effect on access for low-income students is a big concern, though I know both the Admissions/Enrollment Manger and Financial Aid Directors here and they certainly fall into those trying to preserve the core mission of equal access and are among the most devoted advocates of these principles.

But the tension is there -- our funding and ability to provide quality education depends critically on these revenue sources -- and we have also instituted scholarship programs designed to attract quality students irrespective of need. These programs are based, in part, upon knowledge about elasticities gleaned from the econometric estimation of enrollment decision models and other statistical work and they do pay attention to the revenue that is generated.

My view from the inside, for what it's worth, is that people are worried about these issues and doing their best to preserve access, but the pressure is there and the argument that always carries the day is that we must survive to serve any low-income students at all even if that means serving fewer low-income students than we might desire to fulfill our commitment to equal opportunity. Over time, in a competitive marketplace, that leads to incentives and outcomes that bear watching as a matter of public policy.

If you are interested in these issues, the article does a good job or presenting the tensions universities feel to maximize revenue at the expense of other values such as equal access, though it may be a bit strident on the access issue.