Source: Washington Post
The scars of the financial crisis remain with higher education in three significant ways. First, the recovery changed the financial underpinning of many colleges. The increase in the discount rate-the share of tuition revenue schools give to students in the form of scholarships-has been the result of an all-out pricing war among a broad selection of public and private schools, leading some to simply cut their tuition to the price students are essentially paying after the discount anyway. The second long-term impact… is that it led to a big swing in the majors that students choose in college. A long-running annual survey of college freshmen has found that since 2008, the No. 1 reason students go to college is to secure a better job; before that, it was to learn something that interested them. The third lingering issue…is that it led college presidents and their board to focus on short-term issues rather than the long-term sustainability of their institutions.