Business Services Industry

The deleted domino effect - Editor's Note

University Business, March, 2002 by Katherine Grayson

TWO DAYS AGO I WAS AT A GATHERING OF PARENTS, many of whom were discussing their children's apprehension about college acceptance and rejection.

"I just don't understand it," said the father of an intelligent, attractive young woman who had just been rejected by her safety school. "Never in our wildest dreams did we think she wouldn't get into [**deleted**]. Everyone--even her counselor--said to her, `Well, at [east you don't have to worry about [**deleted**]; you know you'll get into [**deleted**]."

And then she didn't.

"What the [**deleted**] is going on?" he asked me.

"[**Deleted**] if I know," I told him, shrugging, and trying to look as sympathetic as I possibly could. I thought about telling him I was fairly new to the business world of higher education (after all, University Business and Matrix had only recently merged, and my post was newly created). But then I thought the better of it: Some of the best minds in the industry are literally at my fingertips, as I pore over their hard-copy thoughts and analyses, daily.

Then I thought about proclaiming surprise at his daughter's state of affairs--until I remembered that my own son had been rejected by his safety: a mammoth state school accepting limited out-of-state applicants. He had been directed to reapply to a satellite campus, and after he expressed his disappointment to me ("I'm not going to any [**deleted**] [**deleted**] satellite campus," he told me sweetly), we found ourselves at the same level of anxiety the gentleman at the gathering was describing to me.

I decided I had better try to explain to this distressed parent the domino effect that the economy and the state of world affairs was having on our nation's system of higher education: how students who had been planning to apply to private colleges and universities were now reconsidering those four-year, six-figure expenditures, in favor of the excellent education offered at public institutions with lower price tags. How those public schools--already faced with expanding enrollment in 2001-2002--were now grappling with unprecedented numbers of applicants, while many private universities (planning to underaccept after record freshman class sizes in 2001) were suddenly faced with the possibility of enrollment shortfalls for the 2002-2003 school year.

I thought about tossing in some interesting budget cutback stats, so that I could impress upon him the paradox of public-school enrollment booms coupled with funding deficits. I could even mention, I thought, the quandary of state-school overflow to community colleges, and the even greater challenge of those community schools, trying to absorb the spillover with more limited resources than the schools doing the spilling.

I even considered describing, in detail, the snowballing effect that state cuts were having on public-school tuition increases, and how those recent increases might be pushing applicants back to reconsidering private institutions which--with an ability to use endowment funds to boost grants versus loans--were starting to took like bargains after all.

I thought about telling him all of these things, and anything else that I could muster, in order to ease his anxiety and send him home with some optimistic words for his daughter.

Oh, [**deleted**], I finally told myself, and put my arm around him. I'm not sure any of us knows exactly how this whole [**deleted**] domino effect is going to play out. We'll just have to wait and see.