It seemed like a win-win: A proposal to let community colleges in Illinois award bachelor’s degrees in certain fields to rural residents and working adults who live beyond commuting distance of any four-year university.
Backers, including Governor JB Pritzker, said the change would not only make things “easier and more affordable for students,” but also increase the supply of workers with the skills employers need.
But four-year universities lined up against the proposal. A political ally, flanked by several of their presidents, was blunt about why: It would cut into their business.
“We’ll lose those students to the community college level,” Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford said.
Under political attack, scorned by the public over their cost, and facing unprecedented enrollment and financial problems, colleges and universities are taking the fight—to each other.
Even as they lobby against community college bachelor’s degrees, four-year universities are pursuing the fast-growing dual-enrollment and short-term workforce training markets that community colleges have dominated.
The most selective schools are expanding their early decision programs to lock in more applicants and prevent them from enrolling elsewhere. Recruiters are poaching students from competing colleges, even after they’ve put down their deposits—something admissions officers once explicitly agreed never to do.
Public universities are dangling incentives to lure high school graduates from neighboring states away from their home-state campuses, while private nonprofit colleges are opening satellite branches in other schools’ backyards.
“This is the clash that occurs when you have declining populations overall and declining high school graduating classes,” said Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)
Some of this intensifying competition could benefit students and families, who are getting more choices, larger discounts, and other perks from colleges and universities that need to fill seats.
In many cases, however, “turf wars” and “mission creep”—as critics call this infighting—are heightening anxiety among students and families and preventing changes that could serve them.
“That was one of my biggest frustrations with the debate, because it felt like there wasn’t even a willingness to acknowledge a problem, and we have a problem in this state,” said Emily Shields, executive director of Community Colleges for Iowa, where lobbying by private four-year colleges blocked a plan to let community colleges in rural areas offer bachelor’s degrees.
“We have people in every region who would like to get a bachelor’s degree but can’t” because they live too far from four-year campuses and have families and jobs, Shields said.
More than 35 million people live beyond what the federal government defines as a typical commuting distance from a public four-year university, according to a study published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
That helps explain why legislators in 24 states have passed laws allowing community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees.
But momentum behind this approach has slowed, as four-year colleges worry it will siphon off some of their dwindling supply of students. Enrollment at colleges and universities nationwide already fell by nearly 2 million from 2010 to 2023—the most recent period for which the figure is available—and the number of 18-year-olds, who make up most first-year students, is projected to decline by 13 percent from this year until 2041.
Only about 76,000 students are enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs at community colleges nationwide, compared with 5.3 million at four-year colleges and universities. Research shows that most are 25 or older and unlikely to choose a four-year campus otherwise. It also shows that adding bachelor’s degrees at community colleges does not significantly affect enrollment at their four-year public and private, nonprofit counterparts.
Yet private four-year colleges in Iowa argued that some would be forced to close if legislators let community colleges offer four-year degrees. The idea has also now stalled in Illinois, where more than a dozen community colleges are in areas where the nearest four-year university is too far away to commute.
An even bigger battleground in the fight for students is dual enrollment—also called dual credit, early college and concurrent enrollment—through which high school students take college-level courses for credit. Community colleges provide these courses to more than 70 percent of participating high school students. The market has quickly grown to 2.8 million students—so many that they now comprise more than a fifth of community college enrollment and its fastest-growing segment.
This has not escaped the notice of four-year colleges and universities, which are adding their own dual-enrollment programs at an accelerating pace.
The number of four-year universities that have joined the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships, or NACEP, which accredits these kinds of programs, rose by 36 schools between 2022 and last year—a 27 percent jump.
“To see that kind of increase really raised our eyebrows,” said Amy Williams, NACEP’s executive director.
A NACEP survey found that institutions’ top reason for entering the market was to use dual enrollment as a recruiting tool.
That may serve universities, but NACEP warns that it does not always help students. NACEP found that more than one institution now provides dual enrollment in 90 percent of the high schools that offer it. In nearly 60 percent of those cases, two or more providers offer the same courses to students in the same high schools.
“Understandably, learners cite challenges navigating different enrollment deadlines, fee structures, degree pathways and transcript requests across institutions,” NACEP notes.
Four-year universities continue to expand their dual-enrollment offerings, however. In Nevada, for instance, the state’s faculty association wrote that universities were doing so as “a means to mitigate the impacts of declining enrollment among their traditional students.” In the process, faculty members alleged, “quality and rigor are often trampled upon.”
Colorado lawmakers recently passed legislation making it easier for four-year universities to provide more dual-enrollment courses in that state’s high schools.
“Demographics are absolutely a factor” there, too, said John Albright, executive vice chancellor of the Colorado Community College System.
“There are fewer traditional-age students. Birthrates are declining. Institutions are responding to this,” Albright said. The question, he said, is whether adding more providers “expands opportunity and keeps pathways clear for students or creates a more fragmented system. We don’t know the answer to that.”
Four-year universities are targeting another traditional community college domain—and growth area: short-term workforce training.
Enrollment in community college certificate programs has risen 28 percent since the fall of 2021. It is likely to keep growing as students in these programs can now qualify for federal Pell Grants.
Seventy percent of four-year university and college presidents said they plan to add or expand short-term workforce training, according to a recent survey by Hanover Research and the industry news outlet Inside Higher Ed. The conservative Manhattan Institute has called this a strategic opportunity—not only because such programs can attract students who would not enroll in degree programs, but also because they can “demonstrate concrete economic value and responsiveness to workforce needs” at a time of falling public faith in higher education.
But DeRionne Pollard, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges, has some questions about the blurring of these boundaries.
“Is there a need that is not being met by the two-year institutions that have traditionally delivered dual-credit or workforce training in those communities?” Pollard asked. “What’s in the best interest of students? What’s in the best interest of the communities being served?”
Students and families, she said, “don’t need duplication or competition. They don’t need confusion. They need pathways” that will help them get the education they want affordably and in a reasonable period of time—whatever kind of institution they attend.
“The future should be built on partnerships, not turf,” said Pollard.
Four-year colleges and universities are not just pursuing community college students. They are also going after one another’s.
Public universities in regions where the number of high school graduates has already started falling are offering lower tuition to students in neighboring states and even more distant, faster-growing places. California residents, for instance, can go to most State University of New York schools for the same price they would pay at a flagship public university in California.
Private, nonprofit four-year universities are opening satellite campuses in the territories of other institutions. Northeastern and Carnegie Mellon universities operate branches in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, where Vanderbilt University will also open a campus next year.
The fiercest competition comes in the admissions process.
Selective schools are relying more heavily on early decision, which can increase applicants’ odds of admission but bars those accepted from considering another college. Research from the advocacy organization Class Action finds that these schools are admitting larger shares of their classes that way. To encourage that commitment, some offer inducements such as priority housing, early move-in, parking privileges, and meal plan upgrades.
For students admitted through the conventional process, recruiting now continues well past the day on which they put down their deposits. That practice was previously barred by an admissions-officer ethics code provision that was dropped in 2020 to settle a federal antitrust case.
After the antitrust settlement, “it became the Wild West,” said Christy Pratt, former head of undergraduate admissions at the University of Notre Dame and a consultant at the executive search firm WittKieffer. Colleges and universities now poach one another’s admitted students after the traditional May 1 deposit day, and competition can drag on until September or October, when institutions close their books on the entering class.
That can mean lower prices for families, said David Attis, managing director of research advisory services at the enrollment management recruiting firm EAB. But it also “makes it much harder for students to plan and manage,” Attis said.
Nearly half of college and university applicants who were admitted from waiting lists said they were notified after May 1, according to a June survey by the college ratings platform Niche. That means most have already committed somewhere else, and have hard decisions to make, said Caroline Koppelman, founder and CEO of the private college admissions consulting firm The Koppelman Group.
“In general, the kids are more stressed out, and extending the admissions process doesn’t quell their anxiety,” Koppelman said.
To hedge their bets, students and families are increasingly putting down deposits at more than one school. Fourteen percent of students who entered college in the academic year just ended paid deposits to two or more universities or colleges, up from near-zero who did this in 2019, according to EAB. The wealthier the family, the more deposits it makes.
In some states, policymakers are stepping in to try to quash the wrangling over students. California legislators have proposed stripping the California State University System of authority it’s used repeatedly to stop community colleges from offering bachelor’s degrees, for example, as long as those degrees don’t duplicate programs available at nearby four-year universities.
In the end, said advocates, the best way for universities and colleges to vie for consumers is by giving them what they need.
“There are going to be these high-level squabbles over what are really small potatoes. What’s going to matter is that you offer value,” said Jenkins, the community college researcher.
“As far as trying to play nice in the sandbox,” Albright added, in Colorado “everyone has a shared interest in trying to be responsive to students.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about competition among colleges and universities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for their higher education newsletter.
