Xavier University was one of the universities I actively considered back in the mid-1980s, when I was a high school student shopping for a college. XU has long been one of Cincinnati’s major institutions of higher education, along with the University of Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky University. I’ve met many people over the years who attended Xavier. All of them have had good things to say about the school.
But Xavier University is anticipating a 17% drop in incoming enrollment during the 2025-2026 academic year. The university will be making some cuts to cope with the shortfall.
Back in the mid-1980s, the university was considered a high-growth business model, almost by definition. Practically all universities were in a constant state of expansion, even in Cincinnati.
But university enrollment has been declining for more than a decade now, after peaking in 2010. Colleges and universities reported a 15% decline in enrollment between 2010 and 2021.
Some analysts are blaming the “demographic cliff”. Birthrates in the USA have also been declining since the 00s. There will be fewer 18-year-olds in the fall of 2025 than there were in 2005 or 2015.
But US birthrates have always fluctuated. My generation, Generation X, was much smaller than the Baby Boom generation. And yet, college enrollment either increased or remained steady. There was certainly no sense of an enrollment crisis.
Here’s the real problem. Tuition at Xavier University now costs $52,736 per academic year. And that’s for commuting students. If you live on campus, the cost is $67,256 per year. This means that a 4-year degree at XU will cost somewhere between $210,944 and $269,024 per year, based on current rates.
The XU website notes, “Nearly all incoming Xavier students receive financial assistance each year through grants, scholarships, loans, and work-study opportunities.”
Perhaps. But that’s by no means a guarantee. Wouldn’t it make more sense to price the product affordably to begin with?
Xavier, I should note, has never been a cheap school. It was expensive even in the mid-1980s. (That’s one of the reasons I didn’t go there.) But it wasn’t this expensive, even when you factor in inflation.
Tuition at the University of Cincinnati (where I actually got my degree) now runs about $14,000 per year at the main campus. That’s an improvement on $52,000, to be sure.
But annual tuition when I attended UC, from 1987 to 1991, was around $3,000 per year. The cumulative inflation rate since 1989, the middle of my time there, is 160%. So factoring in inflation, annual tuition at UC should be about $7,803 today.
But the increases in university tuition costs have long outstripped inflation. In the late 1980s, I met some non-traditional students in their late 20s and early 30s, who had completed part of their education at UC during the 1970s. They couldn’t believe how expensive UC was in the late 1980s.
And almost 40 years later, this relic from the late 1980s wonders why an education at the University of Cincinnati costs almost twice as much now, in real terms, than it did in my student days.
And keep in mind: there was no Internet back then. The Internet was supposed to make everything cheaper and more efficient, right? Except higher education, that is.
Back to declining enrollment. I have no idea how college students and the parents of prospective college students get their arms around these costs. When I was an incoming college freshman, a university education was an investment. Nowadays, it’s a high-stakes gamble.
-ET