A new book looks at how the market is affecting colleges’ futures — and where risk is most concentrated.
The appendix of a new book contains everything needed to calculate a score gauging the market stress faced by individual colleges and universities across the country.
It’s a provocative idea that could provide information of use to discerning students and improvement-minded administrators alike. It’s also an idea that’s getting more attention and growing more controversial of late as the higher education sector continues to feel pressure on several fronts and as a small number of institutions announce closure or merger plans every year.
But the authors of the book, The College Stress Test (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), intentionally didn’t include a list of institutions and their market stress scores — even though they calculated scores for well over 2,000 institutions. Instead, they spend the book’s pages examining the higher education market, discussing factors that they used to score institutions’ level of stress and discussing strategies colleges and universities can use to change their trajectory.