The Boston Globe published a lead article about Northeastern today. It is a mostly accurate article about the university’s journey over the past 35 years. There is a paywall but if you do not normally read the Globe there should be a few free articles. Also, if you use Chrome browser the pay wall disappears.
It mentions the tremendous changes that have occurred but also Northeastern’s adherence to its original mission of providing career preparation through coop and experiential education. It also addresses the changes in higher education that led to the need for this transformation.
Mentioned but not described in any depth is the emergence of UMass Boston, which now fulfills the role that Northeastern once did in the Boston higher ed market.
My big picture thought is this is a good illustration of how with the national (and increasingly international) demand for “top” US undergrads of various sorts having increased over recent decades, and the traditional “top” schools having not expanded their own supply of slots nearly enough to match that demand increase, logically the alternative supply side response is going to be some institutions going “upmarket”.
And that’s fine, but my concern is never really much for the main participants in those “top college” submarkets. My concern is more whether there is adequate, affordable, accessible supply through the sorts of submarkets that cumulatively do the most to provide opportunities for socioeconomic upward mobility to smart and ambitious kids who like school, but who do not come from particularly advantaged family backgrounds or school systems. And of course a few of those kids get access to the “top” colleges, but most do not, and so those “non top” colleges are really the ones that need to do most of the work for those kids.
So if UMass Boston and other colleges can help step up and supply those “non top” submarkets, then great. And honestly, I am not particularly worried about locations like Boston.
Where I get more concerned is, say, states where the highest tier of publics may have been moving upmarket themselves, and either the state is not devoting as much resources to the other tiers of publics, or it is not distributed in a way to make those publics reasonably accessible across all the state’s various communities.
Of course we virtually never talk about those sorts of colleges here, and that is understandable given the apparent makeup of this community. But when I think big picture about these things, that is where my concerns tend to settle.
As a side note, I have taken classes at UMass Boston at various stages of my life and the experience has consistently been better than my experience at higher tier privates. In the humanities anyway, my classes were all taught by professors, no TA’s and class size was 20 or less. (Now that I am of a certain age, in-person classes are free!)
I am always a bit amused when I encounter people who seem to think there is something unseemly about institutions like Northeastern which upmarket themselves. That is amusing to me because if you know the deep history of US colleges, they were ALL “new money” schools at some point in their history. It is just some did that longer ago than others.
Indeed, this includes even the colonial colleges, which at the time of their founding were overshadowed by the much older and better-established European institutions. It was actually a long climb for them to compete with those institutions, but again it happened so long ago few people think about it these days.
Anyway, to me there is nothing wrong with being a “new money” college–if you are doing it well. Indeed, again from my perspective the system obviously needs this, because the “old money” colleges simply have not expanded enough.
Yeah, I get a little frustrated sometimes with outcome measures that are not carefully controlled for all the other relevant factors. Whenever I have seen anything remotely careful, it turns out there is a LOT of valued added available at such colleges.
You do have to graduate, and not everyone does, but again that is not entirely up to the college–they often serve populations where graduation is not a given for a variety of reasons outside of their control. But most of the graduates are going to end up with much better outcomes than they could have gotten otherwise.
And part of why is really, really simple. Most of these institutions have a lot of great educators who really care, and do a really good job. And so the kids who make the most of those educators are well-prepared for success.
Yes. This fact, that one can obtain a decent college education with a free associates degree followed by two years of relatively inexpensive tuition at umass boston is pretty much ignored.
UMass Boston does not have an engineering school. CS and science faculty there have complained that there is an anti-STEM mindset among campus administrators. STEM does not fit into the school’s “mission”.
Perhaps Pennsylvania with respect to engineering majors, which are found at the more selective and more expensive (with poor in-state financial aid) CSHE schools, but are scarce at the PASSHE schools.
Of course, student/parent preferences can have something to do with it. For example, it does seem like many North Carolina students look at NCSU as the only engineering school in the state, ignoring NC A&T.
Wow, this is a real pity! By far the biggest metro area, and yet not even mechanical engineering is offered. Solid STEM careers can be such a ticket to the middle class. Instead, UMass Boston invests in sports, rec centers, amenities etc. I just don’t understand these choices.
Yes, but I would have given you the same example (Pennsylvania).
I’ve read about access issues in other states, but I really don’t know enough details to describe them in any meaningful way.
Edit: Oh, for general discussions of this issue, you might look for the term “desert” in contexts like “postsecondary desert”, “education desert”, or so on.
Like this brief is about rural access issues, and that concept of an education desert is defined and discussed:
Again, a lot of that resonates from what I have read about in PA, but I wouldn’t be confident mapping that onto other states.
It seems to me that Ivy League and other “top 20” universities can survive on their reputation and endowments.
However, given how expensive education has become, particularly at private universities such as NEU, I think that the schools in the perhaps 30 to 70 range have to think about how they are going to justify their cost to potential applicants (this might be even more true for private schools in the 100+ ranking range, but that is not NEU). NEU’s coop program plus career focus to me seems like valuable features where it is very strong. Moving to a more “upmarket” image seems like something that it also needs to do. It seems to be pulling this off quite well.
But I still wonder how long people will be willing to pay something north of $80,000 per year (approaching $100,000 for some schools) for an undergraduate education.
Graduate programs are also an important part of NEU’s mission. It has occurred to me that the fact that most PhD’s are fully funded seems like a significant expense for the university. However, quite a bit of the funding for PhD students appear to come from the various research programs that they are helping with. This might be another area where NEU has done well.
I agree with your sentiment here. I think that NEU has to upmarket itself, and I think that it has done a good job doing so.
I have zero issue with schools ascending the rankings and/or improving the quality of their product. I do take issue with colleges gaming (my word) the admissions system so as to artificially lower their acceptance rate, thus increasing their perceived selectivity. So yes, I have a problem with schools all but requiring ED to get admitted so their yield numbers look better than they otherwise would be. Schools whose strategy I am unimpressed with include Tulane, Colby, Colorado College, and the University of Chicago. I am sure there are others.
Obviously some people, many people, already can’t or won’t.
That said (as pointed out before in other conversations), while for many years those costs increased above the general inflation rate, they were actually more or less increasing in line with the real increases in upper middle class incomes. Indeed, I don’t think this is a coincidence, I think that was their market, and that market having more to spend on college was driving up the norms for what it took to compete for students from those families.
And then in recent years, since actually a few years before COVID, those costs have stopped increasing so fast, to the point they may actually be going down relative to upper middle class incomes. So apparently there was a limit, and we may be around it. But still, at least in nominal terms, full pay costs could keep going up even if they were actually going down relative to upper middle class incomes.
And then meanwhile, there is a LOT of “catch up” educational and economic development going on around the world, and so more and more potential International students with the academic backgrounds and economic resources necessary to be “full pay” at these colleges. Of course their domestic university systems are often developing as well, but not necessarily in a way that really tracks demand in that specific submarket.
I point all this out not to suggest it is a good thing, but I do think it all helps explain why even as these colleges got more and more expensive in real terms, they also kept getting more and more applications, not least from full pay kids.
Boston University and Boston College are only briefly mentioned in the article as former commuter schools that upscaled a generation before Northeastern. They too did it out of necessity. In the early 1970’s both were facing bankruptcy and there were reports that Boston College would close. (Same for NYU.) All of those schools had leaders who saw the environment changing and took action to change. All were quite successful.
Brandeis is currently facing enrolment and financial problems. It will be interesting to see how their leadership responds.
The pushback on Northeastern (and some others) is not that it’s unseemly- it’s that the “investment” (time, money, etc.) has seemingly gone to marketing and branding, and not actual educational expenditures. This is the High Point story- parents see the reserved parking space for visiting students and get all excited- heck, it costs $60 to buy a sign. It costs tens of millions of dollars to build a nanotechnology lab or several million dollars to endow enough academic positions to build a high quality psychology department, or even just half a million dollars to host two renowned history professors each year.
I think what Northeastern has done is fascinating. But IRL I know kids who have been admitted to colleges with equal or superior academics who are told by their parents “without the coop at Northeastern, you will be unemployable” which is insane. Coop is great, and it’s transformative for some kids. It’s a neutral for other kids (neither positive nor negative) and it certainly doesn’t mean that a kid is guaranteed a high paying job on graduation. Like EVERY other college- the kid needs to do the work, coop or not. A solid internship in CS from UIUC or Michigan or Georgia Tech… not a coop-- and the kid will likely be just fine in the employment department. And for an instate Illinois kid to take out loans to attend Northeastern for CS vs. the affordable instate option at UIUC? THAT’s the marketing speaking, not academic chops.
It’s not unseemly- but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to invest in marketing and social media than it is to hire faculty, build labs, bring libraries up to 21st century standards.
I was so grateful that my S25 saw through the marketing and slick presentations at Northeastern and struck it from their college list. We did a whirlwind college tour in the Boston area and the only school they immediately eliminated was Northeastern for feeling “corporate” and cold. It may work for some kids, but didn’t click with my kid at all.