Is it worth haggling over the cost of college tuition? Expert says you "absolutely should."
BOSTON – Consumers haggle over the price of big-ticket items like homes and cars. So should they also bargain over the cost of college tuition?
Yes, parents, you "absolutely should," said Jon Marcus, higher education editor for the non-profit website The Hechinger Report.
"It's a buyer's market. People have been kind of obsessed with the very low selection rates of elite private universities. However, 87% of universities and colleges accept more than half of the applicants they get. On average, 78% of applicants to college are accepted. This number has been going up because we're running out of 18 year olds starting in 2026," Marcus said. "This is the last big class of high school seniors. After this year, the numbers begin to go down. If you have fewer customers, you take more of them, and you charge them less. So colleges and universities are giving more discounts in financial aid. And I think something that consumers often don't realize is they can negotiate for more. They don't have to take the first offer for a financial aid they can go back and say, 'Can you do a little better?'"
"Financial crisis" for colleges
What's good for consumers isn't necessarily good for the higher ed industry.
Recent closures of smaller colleges speak to a looming financial crisis.
"It's a perfect storm," Marcus said. "They are running out of students ... because we're running out of 18-year-olds. During the 2008 recession, people stopped having kids. If you take that forward 18 years, that hits in 2026, the number of 18-year-olds begins to go down. It will go down by 15% between 2026 and 2039, it's already gone down by 10% since 2011 on top of that, and you are likely to see a decline in the number of international students under a Trump administration. Empirically, that happened in the first Trump administration, the number of international students coming here went down by 12%. We're hugely dependent on international students here in the Boston area, we're likely to see that number fall. You've got political attacks on colleges and universities that they have not been very good at responding to, and a lot of other issues that are coming up in the way of colleges [and their] financial sustainability."
Is a college degree worth the cost?
Whatever the cost, is a college degree still worth it in the long run?
"The value proposition is one of the reasons that fewer high school graduates are going directly to college," Marcus said. "The proportion of high school graduates nationally going directly to college has declined from a peak of 70% in 2016, it's now down to 62%. That's a lot. That's a dramatic decline. So the public isn't convinced that it's worth it. I blame colleges for that. I think that they've done a very bad job at selling themselves. They're not very good at explaining the value, for example, of a liberal arts education. It depends on the major. There are a lot of majors that aren't worth it."
Marcus also discussed the move toward three-year degree programs instead of the traditional four years, and the reasons behind the struggles of Harvard and other supposedly blue-chip institutions.
