It seemed like a win-win: a proposal to let community colleges in Illinois award bachelor’s degrees in certain subjects to rural residents and working adults who live beyond commuting distance of four-year universities.
The change would not only make things “easier and more affordable for students,” according to backers including Gov. JB Pritzker; it would increase the supply of workers with the skills employers need.
But four-year universities lined up against it. And a political ally, flanked by several of their presidents, was blunt about why: It would cut into their business.
“We’ll lose those students to the community college level,” Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford pronounced.
Under attack from politicians, scorned by the public for their cost and facing unprecedented enrollment and financial problems, universities and colleges are responding by taking the fight to … each other.
At the same time that they’re lobbying against community college bachelor’s degrees, four-year universities are pursuing the exploding dual-enrollment and short-term workforce training markets community colleges have dominated.
The most selective among them are expanding their early decision programs to lock in more applicants and prevent them from enrolling elsewhere. Recruiters are poaching students from competing colleges, even after they’ve put down their deposits — something admissions officers once explicitly agreed to never do.
Public universities are dangling incentives to lure high school graduates from going to their own public university campuses in neighboring states. And private, nonprofit colleges are opening satellite branches in other schools’ backyards.
“This is the clash that occurs when you have declining populations overall and declining high school graduating classes,” said Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)
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Some of this intensifying competition could be a good thing for students and families, who are getting more choices as well as bigger discounts and other perks to enroll at colleges and universities that need to fill seats.
In many cases, however, “turf wars” and “mission creep” — as critics call this infighting — are heightening anxiety among consumers and preventing changes that could serve them.
“That was one of my biggest frustrations with the debate, because it felt like there wasn’t even a willingness to acknowledge a problem, and we have a problem in this state,” said Emily Shields, executive director of Community Colleges for Iowa, where lobbying by private four-year colleges blocked a plan to let community colleges in rural areas offer bachelor’s degrees.
“We have people in every region who would like to get a bachelor’s degree but can’t” because they live too far from four-year campuses and have families and jobs, Shields said.
More than 35 million people live beyond what the federal government defines as typical commuting distance from a public, four-year university, according to a study published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
That’s among the reasons lawmakers in 24 states have passed laws allowing community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees.
But momentum behind this approach has slowed, as four-year colleges worry it will siphon away some of their dwindling supply of students. Enrollment at universities and colleges nationwide already fell by nearly 2 million from 2010 to 2023 — the most recent period for which the figure is available — and the number of 18-year-olds, who make up most of their new customers, is projected to decline by 13 percent from this year until 2041.
Only about 76,000 students are enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs at community colleges nationwide, compared to 5.3 million at four-year colleges and universities. And research shows that most are 25 or older, and likely wouldn’t typically choose a four-year campus, and that adding bachelor’s degrees to community colleges does not significantly affect enrollment at their four-year public and private, nonprofit counterparts.
Related: More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows
Yet in Iowa, private, four-year colleges argued that some would be forced to close if legislators let community colleges offer four-year degrees. The idea has also now stalled in Illinois, where more than a dozen community colleges are in areas where the nearest four-year university is too far away to commute.
An even bigger battleground in the fight for students is dual enrollment (also called dual credit, early college and concurrent enrollment), through which high school students take college-level courses for credit. Community colleges provide these courses to more than 70 percent of the high school students who take them, dominating a market that has quickly grown to 2.8 million students — so many that they now comprise more than a fifth of community college enrollment, overall, and the fastest-growing share of it.
This has not escaped the notice of four-year colleges and universities, which are adding their own dual-enrollment programs at an accelerating pace.
The number of four-year universities that have joined the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, or NACEP, which accredits these kinds of programs, went up by 36 schools between 2022 and last year — a 27 percent jump.
“To see that kind of increase really raised our eyebrows,” said Amy Williams, NACEP’s executive director.
The top reason institutions give for taking on this role, a NACEP survey found: as a recruiting tool.
While it may serve universities, this is not entirely helpful for students, NACEP warns. In 90 percent of high schools that offer dual enrollment, it found, more than one institution is now providing it. And in nearly 60 percent of those cases, two or more providers offer the same courses to students in the same high schools.
“Understandably, learners cite challenges navigating different enrollment deadlines, fee structures, degree pathways and transcript requests across institutions,” NACEP notes.
Related: Desperate for students, colleges resort to previously banned recruiting tactics
Four-year universities continue to expand their dual-enrollment offerings, however. Universities in Nevada, for instance, have been doing this, the state’s faculty association wrote, as “a means to mitigate the impacts of declining enrollment among their traditional students.” In the process, those faculty alleged, “quality and rigor are often trampled upon.”
Colorado lawmakers just passed legislation making it easier for four-year universities to provide more dual-enrollment courses in high schools in that state.
“Demographics are absolutely a factor” there, too, said John Albright, executive vice chancellor of the Colorado Community College System.
“There are fewer traditional-age students. Birthrates are declining. Institutions are responding to this,” Albright said. The question, he said, is whether adding more providers “expands opportunity and keeps pathways clear for students or creates a more fragmented system. We don’t know the answer to that.”
Four-year universities are targeting another traditional realm of, and growth area for, community colleges: short-term workforce training.
Enrollment in community college certificate programs is up 28 percent since the fall of 2021, a number likely to keep rising as students in these programs can now qualify for federal Pell Grants.
Seventy percent of four-year university and college presidents said they plan to add or expand short-term workforce training, according to a recent survey by Hanover Research and the industry news outlet Inside Higher Ed. It’s a strategic opportunity, the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute has said — not only because such programs can attract students who would not enroll in degree programs, but also “to demonstrate concrete economic value and responsiveness to workforce needs” at a time of falling public faith in higher education.
But DeRionne Pollard, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges, has some questions about the blurring of these boundaries.
“Is there a need that is not being met by the two-year institutions that have traditionally delivered dual-credit or workforce training in those communities?” Pollard asked. “What’s in the best interest of students? What’s in the best interest of the communities being served?”
Students and families, she said, “don’t need duplication or competition. They don’t need confusion. They need pathways” that will get them the educations they want, affordably and in a reasonable period of time — whatever kind of institution they attend.
“The future should be built on partnerships, not turf,” said Pollard.
It’s not just community colleges’ students four-year universities and colleges are going after. It’s each other’s.
Public universities in regions where the number of high school graduates has already started falling are offering lower tuition to graduates in bordering states and even farther-away but faster-growing places. California residents, for instance, can go to most State University of New York schools for the same price they would pay at a flagship public university in California.
Private, nonprofit four-year universities are opening satellite campuses in the territories of other institutions. Northeastern and Carnegie Mellon universities operate branches in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, where Vanderbilt University will also open a campus next year.
The fiercest competition comes in the admissions process.
Selective schools that offer early decision — increasing the odds that applicants will get in, but barring them from considering any other college once they do — are relying more heavily on it, admitting larger proportions of their students that way, research from the advocacy organization Class Action finds. To encourage that commitment, some offer inducements such as priority housing, early move-in, parking privileges and meal plan upgrades.
For students admitted through the conventional process, meanwhile, recruiting now continues well past the day on which they put down their deposits — something previously banned by a provision in the code of ethics among admissions officers that was dropped in 2020 to settle a federal antitrust case.
Related: The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges — and the economy
“It became the Wild West after the antitrust settlement,” with colleges and universities poaching each other’s admitted students after the traditional May 1 deposit day, said Christy Pratt, former head of undergraduate admissions at the University of Notre Dame and a consultant at the executive search firm WittKieffer. Competition now drags on as late as September or October, when institutions close their books on the entering class.
That can mean lower prices for families, said David Attis, managing director of research advisory services at the enrollment management recruiting firm EAB. But it also “makes it much harder for students to plan and manage,” Attis said.
Nearly half of college and university applicants who were admitted from waiting lists said they were notified after May 1, according to a June survey by the college ratings platform Niche. That means most have already committed somewhere else, and have hard decisions to make, said Caroline Koppelman, founder and CEO of the private college admissions consulting firm The Koppelman Group.
“In general, the kids are more stressed out, and extending the admissions process doesn’t quell their anxiety,” Koppelman said.
To hedge their bets, students and families are increasingly putting down deposits at more than one school. Fourteen percent of students who entered college in the academic year just ended paid deposits to two or more universities or colleges, up from near-zero who did this in 2019, according to EAB. The wealthier the family, the more deposits it makes.
In some states, policymakers are stepping in to try to quash the wrangling over students. California legislators have proposed stripping the California State University System of authority it’s used repeatedly to stop community colleges from offering bachelor’s degrees, for example, as long as those degrees don’t duplicate programs available at nearby four-year universities.
In the end, said advocates, the best way for universities and colleges to vie for consumers is by giving them what they need.
“There are going to be these high-level squabbles over what are really small potatoes. What’s going to matter is that you offer value,” said Jenkins, the community college researcher.
“As far as trying to play nice in the sandbox,” added Albright, in Colorado, “everyone has a shared interest in trying to be responsive to students.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about competition among colleges and universities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
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