Is SNHU the Most Expensive Large Institution?

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In yesterday’s post I shared a visualization of the proposed risk-sharing net impact (risk-sharing reimbursements offset by Promise grants) per institution, based on the data set provided by the US House Committee on Education & Workforce (CEW) in the proposed reconciliation One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB). Before I share too many other visualizations, I’d like to share two examples that show significant flaws in the data used to calculate these estimated payments.

What caught my attention was that the two largest online education providers had drastically different outcomes. Western Governors University (WGU) was estimated to receive a positive annual net impact of $69 million (i.e., an increase in federal funding tied to student financial aid) while Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) was estimated to owe a negative annual net impact of $15 million (i.e., they would owe the federal government this amount due to risk-sharing). Both institutions are based on using online education at scale to provide low-cost programs - what explains the difference?

Net Impact vs Net Price for Large Institutions

For today I created a similar chart but instead of comparing net impact to percent of students receiving Pell Grants (as a proxy for serving low-income students), I wanted to compare net impact to the annual net price of a program (taken from the College Scorecard, which is one of the sources for CEW). Net price combines tuition and fees and living expenses (room & board & meal plans) and supplies, minus grants and discounts. The risk-sharing net impact is based on total program price, more or less four times the annual net price. I then filtered for large institutions with 30,000 or more students.

And there is the problem! SNHU in reality is not more expensive than NYU or USC at more than $41 thousand per year.

SNHU’s tuition shared online is roughly $9,900 for online students (and 90+% of SNHU students are online, There should be no living expenses or parking or health insurance fees, but adding in books or other fees could raise this to $11 or $12 thousand, worst case. SNHU’s net price for on-campus students is roughly $33 thousand, including all fees. $41 thousand net price makes no sense.

If you look at individual SNHU undergraduate programs in the CEW data, the total program price metric that is directly used to calculate the risk-sharing and grants shows $122 thousand.

The total program price for the vast majority of SNHU students is likely in the $40 - $50 thousand range. My guess is that the CEW data grabbed the SNHU on-campus price from previous years and multiplied by four.

And if you look at the CEW data and the College Scorecard data, there is no way to differentiate on-campus from online programs, unless the institution is all online (like WGU) or has a separate UnitID for an online campus. This is why WGU shows its undergraduate net price as $9,800 and its total program price as $30 thousand.

Two very large online institutions both charge low tuition and fees (roughly $9,900 for SNHU and $8,300 for WGU), yet the former is listed with a total program price four times larger than the latter. This is likely why WGU would receive $69 million and SNHU would owe $15 million.

Inconsistent Data

There are other problems in the data. Brigham Young University (BYU) is listed in the CEW data with a total program price for undergraduate degrees of roughly $17 thousand dollars, despite annual net price of $14 thousand in the College Scorecard that should already factor in grants and discounts.

There are plenty of institutions that we have spot checked where the numbers make sense. But the SNHU and BYU examples show that there are serious flaws in the data. And given that this is the data being used to design the proposed bill and theoretically to be used to determine payments and grants, this is a huge problem that needs to be solved.

In the off chance that SNHU executives have not already discovered this problem, my unsolicited invoice will provide the volume discount price of 5% of risk-sharing savings. Plus a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 20 Year Family Reserve.

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