insidehighered | Wood doesn’t believe colleges are making any decisions about closures and remote learning with finances at front of mind.
“While financial considerations are always important, I do think …
their decisions are first and foremost being made around their
communities', students', staff and faculties' safety,” she said.
Two-year colleges are somewhat shielded from this particular revenue hit. According to the College Board’s 2019 trends in college pricing report, in 2015-16, 96 percent of full-time undergraduate students at public two-year colleges lived off campus or with their parents.
Still, today most colleges are scrambling to scale up their online
learning resources and put precautionary plans in place. Few have
disclosed whether they will offer room and board refunds to students who
leave campus.
Room and board is a sizable chunk of what students pay each semester,
and the fees are often excluded from scholarship calculations. The
College Board report states that students at a public four-year
universities paying in-state tuition spend on average 43 percent of
their budgets on room and board fees. For out-of-state students, room
and board makes up 27 percent of budgets, and for students at private
four-year colleges, 24 percent of budgets are room and board fees.
Requests for room and board rebates aren't the only way colleges
could lose money as a result of the coronavirus. Many have canceled
admitted student days and student tours, and closing campus could affect
enrollments in the fall. Institutions that rely heavily on endowment
payouts could see them dip in a falling market.
The virus will "certainly roil the admission market" just as student
deposits and commitments are due, said Brian Mitchell, King's co-author
on How to Run a College and the founder of Brian Mitchell & Associates, a higher education consulting firm, in an email.
"Effectively, the crisis has the potential to create a double whammy
-- unexpected [costs] and highly unpredictable future revenue at
tuition-driven institutions," he said.
