College Recruiting

Report Outline
Current College Enrollment Crisis
Cycles of Attendance at U.S. Colleges
Future Demand for Higher Education
Special Focus

Current College Enrollment Crisis

Cost-Squeeze Consequence of Enrollment Slump

The great rush to get into college appears to be over. Enrollment, which quadrupled during the past 20 years, is leveling off and could decline by the 1980s. With the fall term now beginning, there still are about a half-million vacancies in the nation's 2,686 colleges and universities, according to the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC). This was unheard of in the halcyon days of the 1960s when schools were flooded with more applicants than they could admit.

To fill these empty seats, many colleges are resorting to promotional and recruiting techniques they once would have dismissed as demeaning. In some cases, enrolled students are being given tuition rebates for recruiting others. Some colleges are paying free-lance recruiters according to the number of students they produce. Several private universities are enticing students with “no-need” academic scholarships to keep them from attending less-expensive public institutions.

Some college admissions officers denounce such tactics as crass attempts to buy students, but others insist that they are necessary if the colleges are going to survive. “It's hard to kill a college,” Earl Cheit, associate director of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, said recently. “They're pretty resilient. But there's more worry now than last summer. There has been a tremendous surge of inflation, and there has been a continuing slowdown in the rate of growth of enrollment. This autumn it seems inevitable that the cost squeeze will be greater.”