June 3, 2009

Colleges May Play the Name-Change Game at Their Peril, Dissertation Says

By Austin Wright

From 1996 to 2005, more than 100 American colleges rebranded themselves as universities, moves that may have had an unintended consequence: stunted enrollment growth.

Those rebranded institutions experienced the counterintuitive effect of slowing growth in their enrollment even as the rate of their annual tuition increases remained nearly constant, says a Marshall University doctoral dissertation that won the Alice L. Beeman Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award last month