Escalating the heated battle for students, The Wall Street Journal reports some private colleges are offering to match public in-state tuition.
Oglethorpe University near Atlanta will match the tuition of any state flagship university for high-achieving students, and Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh said last week it will charge Pennsylvania residents the same price as local public universities, plus a $3,000 scholarship to boot.
The discounts aren’t limited to private schools. Public universities in Michigan, South Dakota and Nebraska now let students from other states pay as if they were locals. The University of Maine in Orono matches neighbors’ in-state rates. Public schools regularly charge two or three times as much—or more—for non-residents.
The price-match guarantee, a sales tactic borrowed from retailers, illustrates how fiercely competitive higher education has become. It also adds to the confusion over how much college really costs, especially at private schools.
Although the pricing campaigns suggest major savings, already generous financial aid packages mean the net price for many students won’t change by much.
At the same time as colleges are duking it out over grabbing up students, more and more businesses are waiving their formal degree policies, CNBC reports.
Recently, job-search site Glassdoor compiled a list of 15 top employers that have said they no longer require applicants to have a college degree. Companies like Google, Apple, IBM and EY are all in this group. But currently, EY’s non-degree requirements are applicable to candidates in the UK.
In 2017, IBM’s vice president of talent Joanna Daley said about 15% of her company’s U.S. hires don’t have a four-year degree. Instead of looking exclusively at candidates who went to college, she added IBM now looks at candidates who have hands-on experience via a coding boot camp or an industry-related vocational class.
Other high profile firms now accepting applicants to jobs at all levels that didn’t go to a university are Chipotle, Starbucks, Bank of America, Home Depot, Penguin Random House, Publix, Hilton, Whole Foods and Costco.
Read the full story on college tuition and check out the full story on companies’ degree requirements.
