Hildreth Institute in The Boston Globe
Enrollment is plummeting. Can the state’s regional public colleges compete?
This article originally appeared in The Boston Globe.
Operating in the shadows of some of the biggest brands in higher education, the state’s nine regional public colleges have trained generations of teachers, nurses, social workers, and others for essential jobs, offering a more affordable path to a four-year degree and professional career.
But facing a sustained drop in enrollment, and short on funds to maintain campuses and state-of-the-art programs, these academic workhorses are approaching an inflection point: Will they have to consolidate, as has happened in other states? Or will Beacon Hill’s new investments in financial aid revive them to serve a new generation of students?
“Let’s not just wait for this to hit us as a crisis,” said Richard Freeland, a former state commissioner of higher education. “Let’s get ahead of it.”
Collectively, enrollment at the nine schools fell 21 percent between 2012 and 2022, to 41,000 from roughly 52,000. Enrollment is expected to contract even more rapidly after 2025 due to a dip in US birth rates.
Although the state’s high school graduation rates have increased in recent years, a smaller share of students are going on to college, in part because of rising costs, according to the Hildreth Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit focused on college affordability and equity. Over the past two decades, average tuition and fees at public four-year colleges have more than doubled as the state reduced financial aid by 47 percent between 2001 and 2021, the group said. Student debt, meanwhile, has grown faster in Massachusetts than in all other states but one.
“The students that are opting out are students of color and students that come from low-income backgrounds,” said Bahar Akman Imboden, the Institute’s managing director. “Affordability is a problem.”
When Elijah Antunes received the bill for his first semester at Salem State after graduating from Methuen High School in 2022, he reconsidered his plans. The tuition, currently just under $12,000 a year for in-state commuter students, was less expensive than other four-year schools he had been admitted to, “but it just wasn’t affordable for me,” Antunes said, even with federal Pell Grants.
He opted instead to enroll at Northern Essex Community College, where he was able to pay the first semester’s bill with earnings from his summer job.
Other students are pursuing online degrees while they work rather than living on campus for four years, adding another element of competition for state colleges. Southern New Hampshire University, which specializes in online learning, reported a 58 percent increase in enrollment from 2018 to 2022, to more than 164,000 students.
The resulting loss of tuition, room and board, and fees has left some regional campuses scrambling to fill holes in their budgets, short of money to maintain aging campus facilities, and, in many cases, unable to offer competitive wages and salaries. Campus leaders have tried to reduce costs by offering voluntary retirement incentives, refinancing debt, and selling unused campus spaces. Some have dipped into reserves.
High fixed costs, including staffing for dozens of academic programs on each campus and employee pensions, remain.
“At some point, there’s only so much efficiency you can squeeze out of any institution,” said Vincent Pedone, executive director of the Massachusetts State Universities Council of Presidents.
Facing similar challenges, more than 20 private colleges have closed or merged in Massachusetts since 2014, according to the state Department of Higher Education.
Other states, including Vermont and Maine, have already begun the difficult process of consolidating or redesigning their regional public systems to address enrollment challenges and changing student needs.
In Pennsylvania, persistent enrollment declines at regional public campuses prompted a consolidation of six universities into two, which cut administrative and staffing costs.
“The trend lines were pretty terrifying,” said Daniel Greenstein, chancellor of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, who has overseen the consolidation. “The biggest part of the problem was, we were just too expensive.”
Some say it’s time Massachusetts considers doing the same. Rick Staisloff, founder of the higher education consulting practice rpk GROUP, said the reality is Massachusetts has enormous overcapacity in higher education.
“There’s going to come a day of reckoning, where the bottom line just doesn’t hold up,” Staisloff said.
For example, he noted some of the state colleges have more than 80 majors and minors, even though roughly two-thirds of students at any institution, on average, are enrolled in 12 or fewer programs. Many niche areas of study — theater, geography, exercise science — are available at multiple campuses.
State officials and campus leaders acknowledge they have work to do rebuilding enrollment and improving graduation and retention rates. But they are not considering structural changes or consolidation.
“Have we hit a point where we’re hitting the panic button?” Pedone said. “No, far from it.”
Instead, they say recent funding to make college more affordable, funded by a new tax on the wealthy, could help reverse enrollment slides. They point to Governor Maura Healey’s $62 million expansion of the MASSGrant Plus program, which, as of last fall, covers tuition, fees, and books for students eligible for federal Pell Grants and reduces the cost for middle-income families.