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WICHE: North Dakota bucks the demographic decline as federal Higher Ed changes and distance‑education pricing pose questions for states
Summary
WICHE officials told lawmakers that North Dakota is projected to see a roughly 19% increase in high‑school graduates across the next decade and that recent federal changes to the Higher Education Act could reshape state planning. WCET, WICHE’s digital‑learning arm, reported that institutions often do not price distance courses in relation to their production costs, and that fees and regulatory work can make online offerings more expensive than commonly assumed.
Patrick Lane, vice president for policy analysis and research at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), told the Interim Higher Education Institutions Committee that North Dakota’s incoming pipeline looks very different from most U.S. states: projections show about a 19% increase in the number of high‑school graduates over the next decade before later settling into a slight decline.
Lane said that context matters for state higher‑education planning and that North Dakota’s stronger projections are “a very big deal” for campus planning. He reviewed regional tuition and aid metrics: two‑year public tuition and fees in North Dakota were about $5,900 for 2024–25 and four‑year public tuition roughly $10,400–$10,500, while state appropriations per FTE for North Dakota institutions were about $10,300 compared with an average student share of about $9,600.
Lane outlined recent federal legislative changes that states and institutions are watching closely. The reconciliation package includes new graduate loan limits (a $200,000 cap for professional graduate programs and a $100,000 cap for other graduate programs, subject to rulemaking), a new short‑term Pell program slated for implementation July 1, 2026, and an accountability framework that ties a program’s federal eligibility to graduate earnings relative to lower‑credential medians. Lane said many definitional questions remain open in rulemaking, including how the law will define “professional” and how program earnings comparisons will be applied across diverse state labor markets.
Van Davis, vice president for digital learning at WICHE and executive director of WCET (the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies), presented a national analysis of distance education cost and pricing. WCET used the IPEDS definition of distance education (courses offered exclusively at a distance) and surveyed roughly 200 national respondents about the relationship between institutional cost to produce distance courses and the price charged to students.
WCET found that most institutions fund distance education the same as face‑to‑face instruction and that for a majority of respondents there was no tuition difference between the modalities. Nevertheless, fees produced a divergence in many cases: about half of institutions reported no difference in mandatory fees for distance students, but nearly one‑third said distance students paid greater fees, often because of a dedicated distance‑education fee. When tuition and fees are combined, WCET found that total price for distance students sometimes exceeds price for face‑to‑face students.
The WCET analysis also found a widespread disconnect between cost and price: nearly 80% of institutions said there was no direct relationship between what it costs to create and sustain a distance course and what students are charged for it. WCET identified specific cost components that are commonly higher for distance education — regulatory and state authorization costs for out‑of‑state students, instructional design and content creation, accessibility and ADA compliance work, technology and software, and faculty training.
Committee members asked about particular fee types (for example, campus facility and athletics fees), whether online students are charged the same mandatory fees as on‑campus students, and whether students choose online programs primarily on price. WCET said institutional practices vary and that student motivations include availability of program, convenience for adult learners, price sensitivity and local ties to institutions. Davis also raised access concerns in rural areas and warned that the spread of generative AI may create new authentication and proctoring costs in the future.
Why it matters: North Dakota’s more favorable projected high‑school pipeline weakens the urgency for some of the statewide scaling or consolidation plans other states face, but the federal changes and the nuances of distance‑education cost and price will reshape financial planning and state policy choices. The disconnect between institutional cost and student price — and the role of mandatory fees — are issues state policymakers may need to address if online enrollment grows or if short‑term Pell and accountability rules are implemented.
