Campuses feel squeeze

Which listed school has gone quiet at the enrollment desk?

Nosy Tarsee’s little birdie says the corridors are not as crowded as they used to be. The registrar’s windows, once a scrum every June, now open onto shorter lines. Classrooms built for a full house sit half-lit. Management, we hear, has stopped enthusiastically throwing out the word “enrollment” in meetings and has started whispering “pipeline” about debts.

The school is listed, so the disclosures are public. Revenue is described as “resilient.” Costs are described as “investments.” Somewhere between the two, the margin is getting thinner. The school does not say the first-year students are not coming; it says it is “calibrating.”

It is not alone.

An old, well-known Manila university has fought the same fight for years. The K-to-12 shift emptied its freshman classes first, and it has been working to rebuild since. Its recovery has been slow, and a campus expansion launched during the pandemic is still unfinished.

Another storied institution, once the biggest by head count in the region, now waives entrance tests and trims payments to get students through the door. A school that once turned away applicants now avidly courts them.

The pattern repeats across the sector. Fewer students are enrolling, tuition cannot rise fast enough to cover the gap, and the buildings still need to be paid for. Faculty must be kept, and so must the air-conditioning. Fixed costs do not shrink when the classrooms do.

Nosy Tarsee said the school newly in the doldrums has tried the usual remedies. New programs were announced with fanfare. Marketing was refreshed. Scholarships and discounts were offered, but discounts tend to eat the very revenue they are meant to protect. Some of the spending went into brick-and-mortar, on the bet that new campuses would attract students, but it found that buildings do not enroll anyone.

How long can a school carry capacity it cannot fill? Dividends and share prices tend to answer that one eventually.

The school’s handlers insist all is well, that the dip is “cyclical” and the demographics will turn.

Perhaps, but students vote with their feet, and lately the feet have been heading elsewhere — to state universities where tuition is free, to cheaper technical programs, and to find jobs.