Giving Compass' Take:

• The Hechinger Report examines how some colleges across the U.S. are lowering tuition costs in response to a drop in enrollment and backlash from consumers.

• Will this effort be enough to help students and their families afford higher education? Or will this simply be a temporary fix on an institutional problem?

• Here's why work colleges might become a low-cost, high-value model for the future.

It may have been one of the biggest back-to-school sales ever: a 36 percent drop in the advertised cost of a college education.

That’s what awaited students this fall at Mills College, one of a growing number of higher-education institutions that have started freezing or dropping their prices in the face of a years-long enrollment decline and heightened price sensitivity.

The 1,300-student private college in Oakland, California, which like many private colleges has been having trouble attracting students, dropped its sticker price from $45,000 to $29,000 a year.

“We listened to our prospective students and their families, who said the cost was prohibitive for them,” said Mills President Elizabeth Hillman. “We want more students to apply.”

It’s an increasingly common example of market forces finally coming to bear on college costs, which have consistently grown much faster than prices for other goods and services thanks to a steady supply of students. In the 10 years ending in 2016, college tuition and fees rose 63 percent, or three times the rate of everything else tracked by the Consumer Price Index, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Today, however, because of a decline in the number of 18- to 24-year-olds and an improving economy that is sucking people straight into the workforce, colleges have 2.9 million fewer customers than they did at the last peak, in 2011, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks this.

Read the full article about colleges lowering tuition costs by Matt Krupnick at The Hechinger Report.