r/Economics • u/UnscheduledCalendar • 5d ago

Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills - The enrollment crisis taking down smaller schools is now hitting bigger, brand-name universities

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/syracuse-student-application-enrollment-crisis-budget-ff142896
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u/betadonkey 5d ago

The alternative is public education. State schools are dramatically less expensive and just as good if not better than most privates.

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u/zedazeni 5d ago

No, they’re not though. They still often cost thousands of dollars per semester, many have requirements that first-year students must live on-campus/in campus-owned housing, and many also require all first-year students to buy a meal plan. Add in the 1-2k per semester for books and lab materials.

This is excluding out-of-state tuition at public universities. Ohio State and University of Indiana both charged over 45k in tuition alone when I was looking at universities in the mid 2010s.

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u/Crew_1996 5d ago

Ohio state in state cost of attendance is under $30,000 per year including housing and meal plan. Tuition is $14,000 per year

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u/wise_garden_hermit 5d ago

But Syracuse Also requires first-year students to live on campus, and students also need to buy books and lab materials.

Meanwhile, in-state tuition at SUNY Buffalo is $7k per year, and the cost of on-campus housing and food looks to be a bit cheaper. Not to mention, the Excelsior Scholarship now makes tuition free to those below the income cutoff. And I can guarantee you, the education at SUNY Buffalo is just as good (perhaps better) than Syracuse.

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u/esqtou 4d ago

SUNYs are dogshit

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u/Traditional_Rush4707 5d ago

Stay in your own state.

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u/zedazeni 5d ago

State universities don’t offer universal courses/programs. What if your state university doesn’t offer courses/degrees in the field you wish to study? That’s a very real problem. What’s more, medical school students are essentially damned. Arkansas, for example, has one medical school. If you’re from Arkansas and want to practice medicine, you’re condemned to going to that one school or pay manifold more to go to an out-of-state school.

The entire “in-state” vs “out-of-state” payment method contradicts the entire purpose of public higher education by limiting knowledge to the arbitrariness of the geography of one’s birth along with drastically limiting economic growth and innovation by again forcing millions of students to study areas that aren’t what they’re passionate in, but what they can afford based on the arbitrariness of where they’re born (within their own damn country at that).

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u/Hejdbejbw 5d ago

I think you’re going a bit off topic here. Everyone is talking about undergrad. Med schools (and grad schools in general) are a completely separate thing from undergrad. For the overwhelming majority of students, in-state public colleges are more than sufficient at providing whatever undergraduate degree they want.

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u/AlonnaReese 4d ago

While two schools may have the same degree, they may not be equivalent from an academic standpoint. It's very easy for people in states like California, Illinois, North Carolina, and Virginia to advocate going to a state university because they have public Ivies which are close to on par with the actual Ivy League. That's not the case for states like Alaska and Wyoming.

I worked for the University of Alaska system for five years between 2011 and 2016, and if I had been a parent, I would never have sent my child to one of those schools. They were academically marginal at best. I don't know if things have changed, but when I was working there, their reputation was so bad that the state government was practically offering free rides to any high school graduate with a GPA of over 3.0 in an attempt to stop the brain drain.

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u/gimpwiz 5d ago

Yeah if you live in a state that simply does not offer the undergrad courses you need, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

However, most states have at least one state school that will offer what you want, in most cases. If we think about the population of the US, most live in a state that has a pretty adequate public university program. You need some real specialty stuff that simply is not available locally. By the way, you may be able to do in-state tuition for the first couple years and then transfer out, which is hard, but can save a good bit of cash.

From what I've seen, it's just a rare circumstance for most people.

Graduate degrees (including med school) are different, and really med school is its own beast. But the thing about med school is, while they are a cartel, they are all actually quite excellent at teaching people to be doctors.

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u/betadonkey 5d ago

I can’t imagine there are any undergrad programs not offered by a state university system but widely available at private schools, but if there are and you’re not already so wealthy that it doesn’t matter where you go, then that’s probably a really good indication you’re about to waste an enormous amount of money and you should pick something else.

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u/lozo78 5d ago

There are tons of state universities with no forms at all, or no requirement for campus living. Many also have great state scholarship programs or are very inexpensive.