The college industry is becoming K-shaped as acceptance rates plummet. What’s happening to admissions? |
The college industry is becoming K-shaped as acceptance rates plummet. What’s happening to admissions?
Prestigious universities are seeing higher demand than ever, while smaller schools are closing their doors. So, what’s driving the split?
[Source Illustration: Freepik]
It’s a low time for higher education, depending on where you look.
In recent years, dozens of colleges and universities have closed their doors, and dozens more have merged in an attempt to survive. There are many factors that are leading to these closures, but it typically comes down to a lethal combination of increasing costs and lower enrollment. Smaller private schools are finding themselves in harm’s way, and it’s become worse over the past five years.
Conversely, other schools are thriving and becoming increasingly selective. Vanderbilt University, for instance, recently announced an acceptance rate of 2.8% out of a pool of nearly 49,000 applicants. For context, its acceptance rate was almost 33% in 2007.
Other top-tier schools are seeing similar low acceptance rates, including Duke University, Brown University, and Dartmouth College. And some small liberal arts schools, such as Bowdoin College and Williams College, are also notching record-low acceptance rates, writes Christopher Rim, the CEO of Command Education, in a recent article published by Forbes.
In effect, there’s a divergence occurring in higher education: Prestigious, top-tier colleges and universities are pulling away from smaller, more modest institutions, creating a K-shaped split.
A higher-ed divergence
Michael Koppenheffer, who leads marketing strategy, creative execution, and analytics for the Enroll360 division at EAB, an educational consulting company, says this observation is, by and large, “an accurate description of what’s going on.”
“For the past many years, we’ve seen a shift in demand toward national universities, larger universities, and more prestigious brands,” he says, and “there’s no single cause for it.”
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