Wow. Michigan has 9 public colleges with ABET accredited engineering programs. I didn’t realize how unusual that is.
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For comparison, Wisconsin has 8, Minnesota has 5, Indiana has 6, Illinois has 6, and Ohio has 11 state universities with any ABET accredited engineering (but could be fewer for any specific type of engineering).
Many of those with only 1 or 2 state universities with ABET accredited engineering are small or low population states like Connecticut, Delaware, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming.
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I mean, I thought that was what everyone responding to you had been saying, you know?
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This is not accurate with respect to Connecticut. First, with a population of 3.7 million, which ranks 29th, it is in the middle population range and would not qualify as a small state. It certainly doesn’t belong on that list, which includes 10 of the 11 smallest population states. Maybe you had us confused with Maine, which is the only one of the 11 smallest states not included in the list. (With a population of 3.1 million and a rank of 32, Nevada really doesn’t belong on a list of small states either.)
Second, Connecticut has 4 public universities with ABET accredited programs, not 1 or 2.
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Off topic, but did you know that Yale was originally the Land Grant institution in CT?
I forget the details, but something along the lines of after years of not producing graduates in relevant fields, U Conn petitioned for the Land Grant institution and it was awarded to them.
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I did not know that! 
I didn’t know that CT had four public universities with ABET-accredited programs, and I have lived here almost 30 years.
Of the 4, 2 of them (UConn and CCSU) have ABET-accredited engineering programs (though CCSU has only civil and mechanical). The other 2 (WCSU and SCSU) have only ABET-accredited computer science.
That the state of Connecticut is in the middle population range does make it more an outlier in terms of limited access to ABET-accredited engineering programs at its state universities.
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Boston College just took 400 applicants off its wait list. This is at least partly driven by the loss of international students. As aspirants accept these acceptance offers, it will have a ripple effect. As in musical chairs, some college(s) will be left standing after losing tuition paying students and without anyone to replace them. This will accelerate college closings.
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That is assuming, though, that the students who moved off the waitlist don’t suddenly realize that they can’t actually afford it. I worked closely with students who asked to stay on the waitlist, explaining the realities of what they could expect in terms of aid. No problem, I was so often told … only to have them say no (on the last day of the response period) because they finally realized the financial implications.
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I saw something about Union College in Schenectady New York missing their enrollment goal, but cannot read the article without a subscription.
Since this is the second year they are missing their enrollment goal, the failure cannot be fully attributable to be loss of international population. In the article I read yesterday which I cannot find now, I believe it said that the average payment is 1/2 of the $89,000 cost of attendance.
Union College has fallen short in filling its freshman class for two years, and is now pulling millions of dollars from its endowment to balance …
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I was able to read this article without a subscription, perhaps because I do not read any of the publication’s articles on a regular basis. Much of the information came via a college email that was not intended to be made public, but that the college acknowledged was authentic.
https://www.timesunion.com/education/article/union-college-falls-short-enrollment-fewer-20328682.php
But as a quick synopsis:
Union typically enrolls 560 freshmen each year.
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Fall 2024 freshman class: 511 students and needed more financial aid than previous classes.
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Fall 2025 freshman class: Did not specify the enrollment, but it’s under-enrolled.
In SY23-24 there were 200 international students enrolled at Union, and Union has said there’s been a drop in international enrollment.
Union’s endowment is $525M and it’s been drawing $27M/year and will draw an additional $5.5M (so, $32.5M) for this year. Moody said Union has a negative financial outlook and needs to do less discounting (Union currently discounts about 50% of its COA).
Union’s opening a new hockey arena this year and is adding a $60M engineering building. There will be no raises for staff and they are decreasing benefits for new employees. The president is stepping down and on July 1 will be replaced by Elizabeth Kiss who led the Rhodes Trust in Oxford. A new strategic plan and programmatic changes are anticipated.
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I’m sorry to hear that they’re having trouble. It’s a great school and has been around since the 1790s.
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Thanks for summarizing.
This is probably the same article I read on my phone yesterday. Sometimes I can view articles on my phone that I cannot view on my computer.
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I was paywalled from that article too, thanks for summarizing.
Average tuition discount per NACUBO hit 56.1% last year (among the 400 or so private colleges in their survey), so Union isn’t an outlier. I also think highly of Union, I hope they are able to persevere and find the right pricing strategy and mix of students.
The large discounts that many college are offering has led to net college costs decreasing for the last decade or so. Lots of sources on that, but this Atlantic article is good:
In reality, Americans are paying less for college, on average, than they were a decade ago. Since the 2014–15 school year, the cost of attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation, according to College Board data analyzed by Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. (Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend a public institution.) The cost of attending a private university has risen in raw terms over the same time period, but is down 12 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s. “People have it in their heads that prices just keep going up, up, up,” Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. “And that’s actually not what’s happening.”
But, as sticker prices have soared, so has the gap between them and the amount that people actually pay. The effect is most pronounced for low-income families, but middle- and upper-middle-income families receive substantial discounts too. In the 2021–22 school year, 82 percent of first-time, full-time undergraduates at public four-year schools received aid, as did 87 percent of those at private institutions. Only students whose families make more than about $300,000 a year and who attend private institutions with very large endowments pay more than they did a decade ago, Levine said.
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Not closed, but sad and worrisome for Clark:
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Someone also started a thread here:
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New York Conservatory of Dramatic Art is closing
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Coming in very late to this (been in Europe for two months and not paying much attention to CC), but regarding Jacksonville’s basketball team, I’m old enough to remember when they were in the national championship game. What I thought was VERY impressive about Jacksonville was that they had two guys on the front line who were over 7’ tall. Even having one 7-footer on a team back then was exceedingly rare. I was growing up in Columbus, Ohio at the time, and I think the tallest guy on the Ohio State team was 6’9’'.
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