Grants, Scholarships, and Loans as Huge Factors of Pricing in Higher Education with Christine Carragee

Christine Carragee has been working as Carragee Consulting's Business Consultant for more than six years now. She's done two different stints at the Vendavo – first as their Senior Pricing Consultant then as a Principal Consultant – so she certainly understands pricing. Christine was a Senior Pricing Analyst at Capella University. She lived on three continents before she was four years old.

In this episode, Christine explains why it's a must that you consider the segmentation of individuals when doing pricing in higher ed as she shares her pricing journey with Capella University.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Find out how Capella University sets their price to students;
• Discover how financial aids such as scholarships and loans help you create good quality for the university; and
• Understand why it's a must that think about the segmentation of individuals when doing pricing in higher ed

"A huge portion of higher ed pricing is through the grants and scholarships and loans. And so, what you're initially paying at the time that you're doing your coursework is very different from what the total cost of a program is for you."

– Christine Carragee

Topics Covered:

01:47 – How Christine got into pricing

03:02 – Learning about airlines from her roommate and the book Hard Landing

05:01 – Trying to put economic value to a university; Segmentation of individuals in higher ed pricing

08:48 – Capella University's two tuition structures; Grants, scholarships, and loans in higher ed pricing

12:54 – What Mark loves about the way they do pricing in higher ed

14:48 – Looking at how competitors do pricing + accepting high achievers and issuing financial aid

17:04 – Christine's pricing advice for the listeners

18:15 – Table topics: "Pricing champions drive pricing change"

Key Takeaways:

"There's a huge portion of pricing in higher ed that you have to think about the segmentation of the individuals, where they are in their life and then what their personal and professional goals are. There's a big pressure on colleges and universities to provide educations that have a financial ROI. But if you think about the history of university, especially in the U.S., many, many of the universities started as seminary schools or they started as state institutions with land grants, and they were more about having an educated population for a general purpose, involvement in society, and they were not the career track programs that we think of them as today." – Christine Carragee

"You can admit people who couldn't afford to come but have very high grades and have those personal statistics that make your institution look better on average by issuing financial aid." – Christine Carragee

"That's a self-reinforcing cycle, where once you become established or you have a reputation around having very good quality students, then it's going to attract more people who want to go to school with high achievers." – Christine Carragee

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Vendavo:https://www.vendavo.com/
• Hard Landing book:https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Landing-Contest-Profits-Airlines/dp/0812928350

Connect with Christine Carragee:

• LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-carragee-83642b226/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mark@impactpricing.com