They're Discounting the Degree 57% — and Still Can't Sell It

What the enrollment cliff means for your kids and grandkids...

“What's the going price of a college degree these days?”

Trick question. Nobody pays sticker anymore.

According to Inside Higher Ed, private colleges are now discounting tuition for first-time freshmen at an average of 57.1%—an all-time record. More than half off.

Think about that the way you'd think about any other product. When a store marks something down 10%, it's a sale. When it marks something down 57% and people still aren't lining up... something is deeply wrong with the product.

And people still aren't lining up.

Fortune ran a piece last month on what they call the enrollment cliff: the babies who weren't born after the 2008 financial crisis are now college-aged, and the universities are paying the price. The University of Vermont watched its freshman class shrink 15% and is planning around a $12 million deficit. The University of Wyoming is short $15 million. The University of Oregon is cutting $30 million.

And roughly 80 private colleges have closed or merged since 2020—16 closed last year alone—stranding more than 52,000 students.

”What happens to a kid who's two years into a degree when the school folds?”

I'll tell you what happens. Their credits go into limbo. They scramble to transfer. Some just quit and eat the debt. The diploma they were promised evaporates... but the loans don't.

The sellers know something:

Here's the part I want you to notice, because most people miss it.

The colleges themselves are behaving like an industry that knows the game is up. Record discounts. Budget cuts. Mergers. Closures. These are not the moves of confident institutions selling something the world can't live without. These are going-out-of-business moves.

Meanwhile, the idea of college—the prestige, the promise, the "investment in your future"—is still being sold to your kids and grandkids at full emotional sticker price. The guidance counselors, the brochures, the teary campus tours... none of that has been discounted at all.

The gap between those two prices is where families get hurt.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world:

I'm writing this in the middle of July, which means fire season.

The AP reported this week that fire bosses are juggling stretched crews across more than a dozen states—16 incident management teams overseeing nearly 17,000 people, with over 5,600 square miles already burned this year, ahead of the ten-year average. The West is burning, and the country needs every competent set of hands it can find.

I know what that world looks like from the inside. I got my EMT and wildland firefighter certifications through The Preparation, and I've deployed to fires in Oregon and Nebraska earning $600–650 a day—as a teenager and a 20-year-old, with no degree in sight.

Nobody on a fireline has ever asked me where I went to college.

And that's one skill cycle out of three years. Add ranch work in Wyoming, shoeing horses, packing mules into the backcountry, sailing in the Falkland Islands, scuba certification, flight training (passed the FAA written at 90%), Muay Thai in Thailand, an agricultural drone business in Uruguay with paying clients, 100+ books, 150+ essays, and a published book.

”Which of those can be shut down by a budget committee?”

None of them. That's the point. A college can close. A skill can't.

Everything I've built in three years lives in me—not in an institution that might not exist by the time my "class" would have graduated.

How to actually talk to your teenager about this:

Don't lead with "college is a scam." That starts an argument, not a conversation.

Ask questions instead. “What do you actually want to be able to DO in four years?” Then make it concrete: would you rather have a transcript, or a resume with fire deployments, a pilot's written exam, and a business with paying clients on it?

Most 17-year-olds have never once been offered a real alternative. They're not choosing college over something else—they've never seen the something else. Your job isn't to push. It's to put the other option on the table and let the numbers speak.

I'm not saying nobody should go to college. If your granddaughter wants to be a surgeon, she needs the credential. But the default—”go because that's just what you do”—was built for a world where colleges were stable, degrees were scarce, and the price made sense. None of those three things is true anymore.

If you read last week's update, you know I've been heads-down polishing The Forum—a community for people running The Preparation themselves. And this Saturday, July 18th, I'm hosting a Zoom call for exactly the people this article is written for: parents and grandparents trying to figure out what to tell the young people in their lives. As well as those actually running the program. Come with questions.

The conventional path is discounting itself into oblivion. The alternative is being built in public, one week at a time, right here.

Do you know a family about to pay full emotional price for a half-off product? Send them this.

And leave a comment below—I read all of them.

I'll see you next week.

-Maxim Benjamin Smith