Declining International Enrollment Causes More Problems For Colleges

Building at Northeastern Illinois University.

While I’m on the theme of college doom and gloom, I’ll link back to this January piece from the New York Times talking about the declining enrollment of international students at many schools. This is important financially because those students pay top dollar.

Just as many universities believed that the financial wreckage left by the 2008 recession was behind them, campuses across the country have been forced to make new rounds of cuts, this time brought on, in large part, by a loss of international students.

Schools in the Midwest have been particularly hard hit — many of them non-flagship public universities that had come to rely heavily on tuition from foreign students, who generally pay more than in-state students.

The downturn follows a decade of explosive growth in foreign student enrollment, which now tops 1 million at United States colleges and educational training programs, and supplies $39 billion in revenue. International enrollment began to flatten in 2016, partly because of changing conditions abroad and the increasing lure of schools in Canada, Australia and other English-speaking countries.

…

International students pay double the $6,445 tuition of Missouri residents, and the lost revenue amounts to $14 million, according to Roger Best, the chief operating officer for the school, in Warrensburg, Mo. Dr. Best said that the university has been forced to cut instructors in computer programs, where many of the foreign students were enrolled, as well as defer maintenance and shave money from other departments, such as the campus newspaper.

Nationwide, the number of new foreign students declined an average of 7 percent this past fall, according to preliminary figures from a survey of 500 colleges by the Institute of International Education. Nearly half of the campuses surveyed reported declines.

Click through to read the whole thing.

And while I was doing research on another topic, I stumbled across a blog by a guy named Bryan Alexander that has an entire section devoted to colleges that are downsizing and eliminating programs. It seems to be happening a lot.

from Aaron M. Renn
http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/03/02/declining-international-enrollment-causes-more-problems-for-colleges/