☕️ Good Morning! Thanks for reading Next. If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for free here.

🙏 Thank you to everyone who reached out after the last newsletter where I asked for those whose Plan B for college worked out better than Plan A. I was overwhelmed with responses, but will be reaching out to those I’m interested in talking to further in the coming weeks. And I’m always looking for more sources. Learn more here.

In today’s edition: New data from the Common App on application trends for this cycle, including another big jump in application volume so far; the middle class and college; and what happens when someone who knows a lot about how higher ed works goes through the admissions process as a parent.

EVENT

🖥️ The first “Next Office Hour” of the new year will be Thursday, January 25 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT.

• We’ll examine what it means for college students to be AI-ready for the workforce. What should colleges be teaching their students about AI? What will be the impact of AI on their future work?
• More details to come soon, but reserve your spot now to join in an interactive discussion and get an on-demand recording.

👉 Register for free here. (Support from Workday)

THE LEAD

When we consider innovations in the U.S. last century, an often overlooked development is the high-school movement. The trend toward mass education through 12th grade in the early 1900s made the GI Bill nearly a half century later even possible because returning American soldiers had a high-school diploma.

I think about the lives of my own parents who went to high school in the early 1950s. If they had lived in Europe, it’s possible high school would not have been available in their community. Many elites in Europe felt high schools weren’t needed for the masses until much later than the U.S.

“The United States took a fundamentally different route,” David Leonhardt, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning author told me and Michael Horn on a recent episode of the Future U. podcast. “It’s worth remembering today that in the past when other countries said, ‘Oh, come on, not everybody needs to go to high school,’ we said, “No, everyone does need to go to high school,” and history suggests we were right, and Europe was wrong.”

Leonhardt is author of the new book, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. Our conversation with him was at times distressing, but also compelling and hopeful.

As a time when states and employers are dropping degree requirements for jobs, Leonhardt said it’s important to take on the argument that we don’t need more education now than we did in 1900.

“If 13 years was the right amount of mass education for this country and all of our citizens a century ago,” he said, “surely 13 years cannot still be the right answer when you think about how different our economy is.”

We asked Leonhardt what the high-school movement of 2023 might be.

He suggested that it needs to be more varied than the one-size-fits-all high school movement of a century ago—although that one size is what higher ed has essentially become this century. Four-year colleges are “not the full answer by any means,” he said. But he added what I think was a critical point to the debate over the value of college: “While four-year college may not be for everyone, the opportunity to go to a four-year college absolutely should be for everyone.”

Bottom line: As I discussed with Michael later in the show, we already have the varied system that Leonhardt imagines—it’s just that it’s often by chaos and neglect. Just like we didn’t say to 8th graders a century ago, “go find your own high school,” we need to design a post-high school system with clear and well-designed pathways that include:

1. Apprenticeships outside of the building trades so students can learn a variety of jobs by doing the job.
2. Short-term certificates that lead to jobs without necessarily having the college degree immediately, but having the option to return for a college degree later on.
3. Transfer pathways where credits earned in high school really count in college and the move from two-year college to any four-year institution is seamless.

🎧 Listen to the complete episode here and subscribe to the podcast.

Rethinking Admissions

I occasionally hear from college leaders who go through the admissions process with their own kids and say to me, “So, this is what our families face.”

In the last three years, Martin Van Der Werf, a former colleague from The Chronicle of Higher Education (and in my much earlier life, The Arizona Republic), went through the admissions process with his two sons and recently wrote not only about what he learned during the second go-around, but how the system might be reformed.

You can read the entire series here. Last week, I emailed him about what prompted him to write the series and his big takeaways. His responses follow:

There’s a lot of information (some might say “noise”) around college admissions. Why did you decide to write this series?

It started with me just wanting to write about my son’s process of finding the college that he went to. And I did write about that. But I had taken a lot of notes, and once I read them again, I thought they might be observations that were interesting and useful to others—about what colleges do right and wrong, how parents and their kids get intimidated by the application process, how people in the middle of it are being slammed by recruiting and deadlines and don’t know in the moment if they are doing the right thing. I had just finished going through the process for the second time, and I wanted to put what I had learned out there.

It is more “noise,” yes, but I don’t have an angle: I am not trying to steer people toward a particular choice (other than against Early Decision!), and I am not trying to make money or anything. I just want to help people take a calmer rational approach.

You’ve been covering higher ed for more than two decades. Did you learn anything from writing this series that you didn’t know before or appreciate?

I’ve written a lot about colleges, but never about admissions. I had read and written about the difficulties that small colleges have attracting applicants, and as I skimmed through the hundreds of emails and pieces of mail that my sons got, I started feeling bad for some of these colleges, They are up against astronomical odds, and I really began pulling for them a little bit. My son applied to Clark University, for example, which I think is a wonderful but little-known college in Worcester, Mass. I came to appreciate how precious it is to win a student in the recruiting war for Ursinus College, Albright College, McDaniel College, to name just a few that got students I know to enroll.

But I kept wondering how unsustainable this seems. You have to be able to scale these recruiting wins, and win two kids at every high school instead of one. So it got me thinking a lot about how these colleges can break through. That’s why I wrote about the blandness of much of the recruiting materials I saw and thought about how some colleges might be better off recruiting students as a group. Given the current state of affairs, they have very little to lose by trying to do something completely different.

How is the college search different for those who cover this or work in higher ed (like you do) and then go through it as a consumer/parent?

There is a real temptation to drive the bus. I know a lot about colleges, right? And I thought I could put that knowledge to work. But I wanted to stay neutral because I thought if Reid went to a college only because I wanted him to go there, he might resent it and not make the college experience his own. A person only gets to do the full-time residential undergraduate experience once—it was fundamental for me because my parents were very hands off.

The closest I got to steering him is I would look at the list of colleges that were sending representatives to his high school and suggest which sessions I thought he should go to. But I learned that my 60-year-old mind couldn’t always express to his 17-year-old mind why I liked a certain college, and why he should consider it. And so a lot of the time he didn’t listen to the colleges I thought would be good fits for him.

But I think he appreciated my advice on other issues, like whether he should submit SAT scores. That was when I felt I could use my knowledge and experience to benefit him. For a lot of the rest of it, I felt like I was just along for the ride. I am a lot more knowledgeable of a consumer than most people in this process, but I tried to relax and let him drive.

As I write in Who Gets In and Why: “No one sends high school juniors a glossy brochure explaining that the top liberal arts colleges are pretty similar. Or a viewbook about engineering co-op programs that says here are a couple of good options for you. Who can blame students for focusing instead on individual brands? Remember that’s what colleges are selling.” So as a result, I was interested in your one piece about marketing in groups. It seems like such a good idea, especially as student search becomes more expensive. Why don’t you think colleges adopt that?

In one word: pride. Every college starts immediately by telling you how “different” it is. And it feels like they are competing against all 4,000 four-year colleges in this country. But that isn’t how consumers see it. Most people looking at colleges are considering only a small group, in similar locations with similar profiles.

Students self-select into niches. One student is generally not looking at six colleges in the Carolinas and one in Oregon. They are very likely to stay in the Carolinas. Another student who wants to study music isn’t looking at technology schools. So a college doesn’t have to wrest a student away from 4,000 competitors, it only has to beat 4 or 6 similar colleges. Every college knows what the other colleges are with the most overlapping applications. So they should focus on how they can win students over those closest competitors. And I think the best way to do it is to embrace the idea that students are considering you head-to-head, and if you give us equal time on the same stage, I can win enough students over by talking about our commonalities and our differences. That would require a pretty big shift in recruiting, however.

You write about the trap of early decision (ED), which were in the midst of right now. Most kids apply regular decision, but more selective schools are leaning more into ED than ever before as their yield rates fall. So how can students not fall into the traps that colleges are setting up everywhere if they want a chance to get in or get merit aid? This seems to be a game where colleges set the rules and win more often than not. How can students/parents become more like consumers in other sectors and maybe win at the game sometimes?

It may be the only game I can think of where the only way to win is not to play.

Colleges have used Early Decision to create artificial scarcity. I think it is a red flag when a college admits half of its class through Early Decision. That is not a college that is being honest and fair with its applicants. It is heartbreaking to see people take out $50,000 loans to attend a particular college for one year when they could have gone to any one of five dozen other colleges that are just as good.

We have this sick obsession that a person will be defined for the rest of their lives by the college they went to (see Huffman, Felicity). And so these people are dying to get into a particular college. But I think you have to look at it from the flip side: there are a lot of colleges that are dying to have your child. And they will pursue the applicants that they really want with merit aid. But you will never know how well you could have done if you play by the college’s rules.

Application Inflation Continues

The numbers keep rising—of applications to colleges, that is, according to the last data from The Common App.

What’s happening: Total application volume through December 1 to the 834 institutions that were part of the Common App last year have risen 12% so far over the 2022-23 cycle.

• Some 4.5 million applications were submitted through the Common App through December 1.
• Meanwhile, individual applicants have only increased by 8%.
• So that means students are applying to more schools, with the average number of applications filed per student up 3%.

Yes, but: As you can see in the chart below, growth in applications since 2019–20 was slowest for the most-selective institutions (those with admit rates below 25%) and highest for less-selective institutions (with admit rates at or above 75%).

Driving the news: In the wake of last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in admissions, many colleges have either held off on transferring data from the race/ethnicity box applicants check on the Common App or colleges hide it from those reading the applications.

• Still, the Common App is collecting that information, and in its December report said applicants identifying as an underrepresented minority race/ethnicity increased by 15%, driven largely by growth in applicants identifying as Black or African American (15%) and Latino (15%).
• While the fact that the pool is larger is good news for colleges worried about a drop off in minority enrollment this year, it’s unclear if those applications are going to the most selective colleges, where the use of race in the past allowed colleges with limited seats to diversify their classes.

By the numbers: To submit or not submit a test score to test-optional schools is perhaps the No. 1 question I get from applicant families these days.

• So far this year, slightly more students have chosen not to report than to report for the first time since there was a major disruption in test-taking during the 2020-21 application cycle (see chart below).
• “Growth is meaningfully faster over the past year for students not reporting test scores, indicating that this dynamic may accelerate going forward,” the Common App reported.

Bottom line: Reading various Facebook groups and online forums over the weekend, after many ED/EA decisions were released, frustration continues to build among students and their families about a process that is overwhelmed with applications—even at what were long considered less-selective public flagship institutions.

💣 To me, college admissions remains a ticking time bomb where one side needs to change tactics—either colleges stop using all the enrollment management strategies they employ (like deferring most of their EA pool to protect yield) or students apply to fewer colleges. Who will blink first? Feel free to hit reply to give me your thoughts.

SUPPLEMENTS

💳 Slow Start to Loan Repayments. This fall, more than 28 million borrowers of federal student loans returned to repaying them for the first time since the onset of the pandemic. According to the Department of Education, only 60% made a payment by mid-November. That’s means 40% are delinquent on their loans (without any consequences) following the resumption of repayments in October. This could just be a slow start to repayments following such a long pause, so it will be interesting to see how those numbers shift in the coming months. (The U.S. Department of Education)

🌎 Latest Future U. Tour Stop. The Future U. Campus Tour made its last stop for 2023 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Among our interviews in front of a live audience, Michael and I talked with Santa Ono, the president of Michigan. He told us that the university is discussing its appropriate size since he knows “people who have applied to Ivy League schools and the University of Michigan and have been accept to an Ivy and not Michigan.” But whenever big publics discuss their size, another question is the mix between in-state and higher paying out-of-state students, and on that, Ono told us the mix seems to be what it should be. (Future U.)

🖥️ Watch a clip from the Ono interview below. Also, sponsorships and stops for the 2024 Campus Tour are now available (reach out if you’re interested in learning more).

This is the last edition of Next in 2023. Have a happy holiday, and I’ll see you next year — Jeff