Photo: Jon Marcus

Many colleges and universities are already suffering through an unprecedented fall-off in enrollment. Lower birth rates, which lead to a smaller pool of high school graduates, could squeeze them even more. 

That reality is prompting some institutions to make long-overdue structural changes—ones that could flatten or lower students’ costs, reduce dropout rates, better connect their academic offerings to workplace demand, make it easier to transfer, and adapt to the needs of older adults and other untapped markets.

Robert Mason graduated from Virginia State University in 1984. He often becomes emotional when describing how transformational the historically Black college was for a student raised by a single mother in a public housing project in Roanoke, Virginia.

In 1990, after working in admissions at Virginia State and at Clark Atlanta University, Mason founded the Common Black College Application. For $20, students can apply to all 61-member HBCUs and specify their top four choices. This year, as many colleges struggled to attract students amid the COVID-19 pandemic, applications through the Common Black College Application jumped 33 percent.

Illustration: LA Johnson

In 2001, Massachusetts families shouldered about 32 percent of the costs of a public university education; by 2018, that figure had almost doubled to 62 percent. 

Without financial aid of some sort, Nancy Grossman says her child and many more across the state would simply not be attending college. In this essay, Grossman describes tip-toeing through her son’s college years—and holding her breath every July to see the coming year’s tuition/aid package and the final out-of-pocket tally.