🔒Market Intelligence Report: Education

As a rich state with poor cities, Connecticut’s public-education system is in many ways a textbook illustration of socioeconomic disparities and impermeable boundaries between and among 169 cities and towns that fiercely protect home rule of their children’s education.

The result is some of the nation’s best-performing public schools — and some of the worst-performing — often coexisting literally cheek by jowl — Bridgeport and Fairfield, say, or New Haven and Woodbridge.

In higher education, south-central Connecticut struggles to be defined by institutions with initials other than Y. (Yale isn’t even the largest university in the city of New Haven — at least measured by undergrad population. That would be Southern Connecticut State University.)

One of the most selective colleges in the nation, Yale could remain unchanged and likely lose little of its luster — but it continues to evolve from its roots as the Collegiate School in Old Saybrook in 1701. In the last five years it has added two new residential colleges for undergrads (bringing the total to 14). Earlier this spring the university announced that it would add a new graduate school — the Jackson School of Global Affairs, slated for a fall 2022 opening.

Probably no other school in Connecticut has transformed itself more dramatically than Quinnipiac University — née Quinnipiac College, a generation ago regarded as a commuter school for business students. Now, having added graduate and professional schools, including law and medicine, it has built a whole new campus and taken its brand name national with a polling institute and Division I sports.

But if any other institution comes close, it must be Fairfield’s Sacred Heart University, which has been transformed dramatically in student body, breadth of programs, financial fitness and, most dramatically, physically, with the acquisition of GE’s former 66-acre HQ in 2017.

An easily overlooked growth segment in higher education is the upward enrollment trajectory of community colleges. Two of Connecticut’s largest community colleges — Gateway and Housatonic — are in the south-central region.