Greetings from beautiful eastern Tennessee! Since my last post, I have accepted a position as professor and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It is an incredible professional opportunity for me, and the Knoxville area is a wonderful place to raise a family. I start on August 1, so the last month has been a combination of moving, taking some time off, and getting data in order to keep making progress on research.
Speaking of getting new data in order, the U.S. Department of Education’s newest iteration of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data came out with a fresh year of data on tuition and fee charges, enrollment, and completions. In this post, I am using the new data on tuition and fees in the 2020-21 academic year to look at how colleges changed their listed prices during the pandemic.
I limited my analysis to 3,356 colleges and universities that met three criteria. First, they had IPEDS data on in-district or in-state tuition and fees in both the 2019-20 and 2020-21 academic years. Second, they reported data for the typical program of study (academic year reporters) instead of separately for large programs (program reporters). This excluded most certificate-dominant institutions. Third, I kept colleges with Carnegie classifications in 2018 and excluded tribal colleges due to their unique governance structures. I then classified public institutions into two-year and four-year colleges based on Carnegie classifications to properly classify associate-dominant institutions as two-year colleges.
Now on to the analysis. There was a lot of coverage of colleges cutting tuition and/or fees for 2020-21 on account of the pandemic, but now analysts can see how prevalent this actually was. The majority of public and for-profit colleges either froze or decreased tuition in 2020-21, but two-thirds of private nonprofit colleges increased their list prices. This does not mean that private colleges actually increased tuition revenue due to the possibility of increased financial aid, and this answer will not be known in publicly available data until early 2023. Public colleges and universities were somewhat more likely to reduce fees than tuition, while for-profit colleges were less likely to do so.
The rightmost column of the first table below combines tuition and fees and provides a more comprehensive picture of student charges. Although a majority of public universities froze tuition and fees, combined tuition and fees still increased at 56% of institutions. This suggests that colleges that froze tuition increased fees and colleges that froze fees increased tuition. Colleges found a way to get the money that they needed. Fifty-three percent of community colleges increased tuition and fees, while 71% of private nonprofit colleges did so compared to just 42% of for-profit colleges.
Changes in tuition and fees, 2019-20 to 2020-21.
| Tuition | Fees | Tuition and fees | |
| Four-year public | |||
| Increase | 35.6% | 35.8% | 56.1% |
| No change | 61.2% | 55.5% | 30.7% |
| Decrease | 3.2% | 8.6% | 13.1% |
| Two-year public | |||
| Increase | 41.0% | 45.1% | 53.4% |
| No change | 55.3% | 40.0% | 39.9% |
| Decrease | 3.8% | 14.9% | 6.6% |
| Private nonprofit | |||
| Increase | 66.9% | 38.6% | 71.2% |
| No change | 28.2% | 54.0% | 21.3% |
| Decrease | 4.9% | 7.4% | 7.5% |
| For-profit | |||
| Increase | 34.7% | 25.3% | 42.3% |
| No change | 49.6% | 66.8% | 41.5% |
| Decrease | 15.7% | 7.8% | 16.2% |
The next obvious question is whether the 2020-21 trends differed from past years. I pulled IPEDS data going back to 2015 to look at trends in tuition and fees over the past five years. The share of tuition freezes increased in every sector of higher education, with the increase being most pronounced among public universities (9.5% in 2019-20 to 30.7% in 2020-21). Other sectors had smaller increases, although around one-third of community colleges and for-profit institutions had no changes in tuition and fees in prior years. The only sector with a large increase in tuition and fee cuts was public universities, with a jump from 5.1% to 13.1% between 2019-20 and 2020-21.
Changes in tuition and fees over time.
| 4-year public | 2-year public | Private nonprofit | For-profit | |
| 2020-21 | ||||
| No change | 30.7% | 39.9% | 21.3% | 41.5% |
| Decrease | 13.1% | 6.6% | 7.5% | 16.2% |
| 2019-20 | ||||
| No change | 9.5% | 31.7% | 13.7% | 34.0% |
| Decrease | 5.1% | 6.9% | 4.7% | 12.0% |
| 2018-19 | ||||
| No change | 10.5% | 27.2% | 14.6% | 38.0% |
| Decrease | 6.0% | 6.5% | 5.2% | 22.4% |
| 2017-18 | ||||
| No change | 7.4% | 27.2% | 12.4% | 34.8% |
| Decrease | 3.2% | 5.9% | 3.6% | 25.0% |
| 2016-17 | ||||
| No change | 13.8% | 24.5% | 12.4% | 28.7% |
| Decrease | 4.4% | 8.0% | 3.8% | 16.0% |
| 2015-16 | ||||
| No change | 8.7% | 29.3% | 10.8% | 33.5% |
| Decrease | 5.2% | 7.3% | 4.3% | 18.2% |
As the pandemic enters a new stage, the higher education community continues to get more information on the broader effects on the 2020-21 academic year. It will take a few years to get a complete picture of what happened in the sector, but each data release provides additional insights for researchers and policymakers.
Robert Kelchen 