By Jeffrey Selingo. Jeffrey Selingo is editor at large at The Chronicle. This piece is adapted from his essay Colleges Must Prepare for a Buyer's Market, published 8 April 2013 in The Chronicle. Jeffrey will be speaking about the future of higher education in an LH Martin Institute webinar on 6 June 2013. University professors increasingly complain about the consumer mentality of their students: In exchange for shelling out ever greater amounts of tuition dollars, students expect to be treated to easy As and maximum flexibility in assignments and class attendance.
Students should be savvy consumers of higher education—but not in the classroom. Instead, they, and their parents, should adopt the consumer mind-set earlier, during their initial search for a university. Too many prospective families are captivated by the bells and whistles that institutions play during the admissions process, designed to hook students well before they fully understand the financial realities of going to their first-choice institution.
While doing research for my forthcoming book on the future of higher education, I visited nearly two dozen campuses in the U.S. and tagged along on as many prospective-student tours as I could inconspicuously join. For the most part, I found students and parents asking all the wrong questions. Universities have long benefited from the fact that they know more about prospective students than prospective students know about them. But that balance of power is slowly shifting, as consumer information about higher education improves, thanks largely to such long-overdue tools as the U.S. Education Department's College Scorecard and financial-aid "shopping sheet." Armed with these data, prospective students and parents in the U.S. become savvier consumers and begin asking better questions of the institutions they are considering. In order to continue attracting students, universities must be prepared to answer questions far more difficult than those about food service, new majors, or social life. Read more...