2026 UPCEA BOnES Report

Reading the 2026 UPCEA BOnES report through the lens of mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities requires a bit of translation, since the survey doesn't segment directly by public/private control. It does, however, segment by institution size, budget size, and Carnegie classification, and those categories (medium institutions, M1/master's-level classification) cluster in roughly the same place mid-tier tuition-dependent privates do. So read this way, I find several troubling and challenging issues in the data that look like risk and exposure.

The clearest issue I find is in the structural disconnect of 39% of online enterprises running on general funds. For a well-endowed R1, this has never been an issue. For a tuition-dependent mid-tier private, it's more serious, because online is now being hailed as the one growth engine expected to offset flat or declining traditional enrollment. Leaders of online enterprises that run around with crappy PowerPoint slides and cliche talking points about entrepreneurial thinking (when they're general-fund dependent) are pinning their promised 300% online enrollment increases on a false premise. It's deplorably disingenuous. 

That gap between responsibility and accountability (and the lack thereof) shows up in the report at the strategic level. Eighty percent of respondents say leadership has named online a strategic priority, yet "strategic direction/governance" is the single most-cited barrier to success, ahead of funding. Mid-tier privates with dangerously thin administrative bench strength and pathetically weak starting lineups have no slack to absorb this ambiguity. So what we have are centralized budgets and reporting authority paired with courses and curricula scattered across semi-autonomous schools and colleges. Double-check the decision on who you've asked to operationalize that mess. Tuition-dependent privates with eight-digit deficits don't have the resources to carry expensive centralized online infrastructure when there is nothing in the pipeline from the schools/colleges and zero accountability at the top for delivering on previously hyped enrollment numbers and programs.

Competitive positioning data in the report indicate larger institutions differentiate on marketing and brand, while smaller, lower-budget, and M1-classified respondents (the segment closest to mid-tier tuition-dependent privates) lean hardest on price as their top competitive strategy. That's a structurally risky position for tuition dependent privates with the least pricing power and the thinnest margins, inviting a race to the bottom against better-resourced competitors. The mid-tier privates that have bought into poorly conceived online growth projections with high confidence paired with low resourcing will devolve their online enterprises into underinvested units borrowing capacity from academic departments that were never budgeted for it. That'll last one budget cycle, then the entire enterprise will implode.

Taken together, the BOnES report suggests rising revenue, rising strategic status, and growing administrative centralization for institutions with the scale to back it up. For mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities, the same trends point toward something closer to catastrophic failure through centralization without matching accountability, dependence on general funds, price-based competition, thin or absent program-launch reserves, and rising confidence set against anemic traditional enrollments and shrinking budgets. This is what the data are telling us. Someone just needs to listen to it.