A few days ago, I posted about a pattern that has been bothering me for a while: the CSU system admitted 86% of applicants in 2024, and yet only 13% of those admitted students actually chose to enroll. Then I received a question about the net price and the value proposition.

It’s a fair question. A great question, actually. And I had the data to answer it.

I went back to the IPEDS dataset and pulled the average net price of attendance for 2018–19 and 2023–24 academic years. Then I ran a two-way ANOVA to test whether cost levels and cost changes differed meaningfully by sector, and whether any sector’s cost trajectory stood out from the others.

The short answer: CSU cost is not the problem. If anything, it’s the most counterintuitive finding in the entire dataset. Let’s start with where each sector sits today.

Institution type	Avg net price 2023–24	Change since 2018–19
CSU	$11,073	−4% (median)
UC	$17,968	+1.2%
Private non-profit 4-yr	$29,640	+11%
Private community college	$26,467	+17%
Public community college	$10,326	+30%

A few things jump out immediately. First, CSU’s average net price is almost identical to that of a public community college — and statistically, those two numbers are indistinguishable from each other (p = 0.46). The CSU is not expensive relative to its direct public-sector peers.

Second — and this is the part that genuinely surprised me — CSU median net price fell 4% over this period. It’s the only sector in the dataset that moved in that direction. A paired t-test confirms that CSU’s cost change is not statistically different from zero (p = 0.25). CSU essentially held the line on comprehensive cost while every other sector raised prices.

For comparison: public community colleges — often seen as the most affordable path into higher education — saw a median cost increase of 30%. That’s not a typo.

When we say CSU’s cost change is ‘not statistically significant,’ we mean: given the variation between campuses, we can’t confidently say a real trend exists rather than random noise. Some CSU campuses got slightly more expensive; others got cheaper. The net result rounds to zero. The 30% increase at public community colleges, by contrast, is highly significant — we can say with confidence it’s a real trend.

The Two-Way ANOVA — What the Statistics Tell Us

To properly test the hypothesis, I ran a two-way ANOVA: net price of attendance as the outcome variable, with sector (5 groups) and year (2019 vs. 2024) as the two factors.

So, did any sector’s costs move differently from the others over this period? The answer is statistically: no. All sectors moved in broadly similar ways — except that CSU happened to hold flat or even dip slightly while others rose.

Source	Result
Sector effect	F = 143.5, p < 0.001 — massive. Sectors are genuinely, significantly different in cost.
Year effect (2019→2024)	F = 9.5, p = 0.002 — prices did rise overall across the period.
Sector x Year interaction	F = 0.36, p = 0.84 — not significant. No sector had a meaningfully different cost trajectory.

The Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric test confirms all of this regardless of distributional assumptions. Sector differences in price level: H = 151.3, p < 0.001. Sector differences in percentage change: H = 32.4, p < 0.001.

If Price Isn’t the Problem, What Is?

Students choosing UCs and private colleges over CSUs are paying significantly more to do so — deliberately. UC students pay an average of $6,895 more per year than CSU students. Private non-profit students pay $18,567 more. These are not small differences. And yet students are choosing those institutions anyway.

That is a revealed preference. When someone pays more for something they could get cheaper elsewhere, they’re telling you something about what they value. In this case, students appear to believe they will receive something at UCs and private colleges that they don’t believe CSUs can offer at the same level.

What might that be? The data can’t answer this definitively, but it raises possibilities enrollment leaders should be taking seriously, like perceived labor market outcomes or brand and prestige.

The bottom line is that the safety-school perception reinforces itself in net price analysis. A 13% yield rate is the statistical fingerprint of being a backup option. The more students treat CSUs as a fallback, the more the institutional identity calcifies around that role — which makes it harder to attract students who see themselves as first-choice material.

What This Means for Enrollment Leaders

If you’re an enrollment leader at a CSU — or watching these trends from any California institution — the cost hypothesis is probably not where your attention should go. The question worth sitting with is harder: Why are students willing to pay more — sometimes dramatically more — to go somewhere else?

That’s a question about perceived value, outcomes, and institutional identity. It doesn’t have an easy answer. But it’s the right question. What do you think is driving it? I’d genuinely like to know what you’re seeing on the ground.