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In today’s edition, what two university presidents said at Milken, improving mental health on campuses, and whether students are really flocking to the South for college.

EVENTS

🦾 How AI can help colleges improve their enrollment strategy and streamline processes will be the topic of the “Next Office Hour” on Thursday, June 6 at 2 pm ET/11 am PT. Among other things, we’ll be talking about the role AI can play in predicting enrollment trends and how it can automate parts of the application review process. I’ll be in conversation with:

• Michael Bettersworth, Chief Marketing Officer, Texas State Technical College
• Lenell Hahn, Director of Admissions, Southeast Missouri State University
• John G. Haller, Vice President for Enrollment Management and New Student Strategies, University of Miami

👉 Register for free. (Support from Element451)

THE LEAD

I’m back in D.C. after a few days in sunny California for the Milken Institute’s Global Conference. I first attended Milken in 2015 to moderate a panel on higher education, and now it’s one of the only conferences that I mark in my calendar a year in advance.

As an annual gathering of bold-faced A-listers (this year including Bill Clinton, Elon Musk, David Beckham, and Argentina president Javier Milei), the Beverly Hills Hilton doesn’t seem like a place for college and university leaders. But the conference has long had education as one of its primary tracks thanks to Michael Milken’s interest in the topic. Milken seems to have a broad set of interests, and so I’ve always enjoyed the conference because where else can you learn about finance, sports, politics, health, and also be entertained all in one place.

My panel on Monday morning featured two university presidents, Ben Sasse of the University of Florida, and Michael Roth of Wesleyan University, both of whom also happened to have dueling op-eds over the weekend in the New York Times (Roth) and Wall Street Journal (Sasse).

The panel also included Eric Gertler, CEO of U.S. News & World Report, and Daphne Kis, president of WorldQuant University. Given the focus on university presidents right now, four of my key takeaways from the conversation focus on what Sasse and Roth said to the Milken crowd, but you can watch the entire conversation here.

1️⃣ Managing campus protests shouldn’t be as hard as Columbia, USC, and other universities are making them out to be. Sasse wouldn’t directly criticize his counterparts, but he did say that the protests are contributing to the declining faith in higher ed.

There are two “fundamental truths” at the University of Florida, Sasse told the audience. “We will always defend your rights to free speech and your rights to free assembly and your right to protest,” he said. “But that doesn’t include the right to camp.” When people start to build encampments on campus, he added, “it’s pretty clear that their goal is to create clickbait that goes viral on social media.”

2️⃣ Stop conflating belonging on campus with being comfortable. The idea of “belonging” is all the rage in higher ed right now as colleges put a focus on helping students find their place and people on campus in order to improve retention and engagement. Belonging, however, shouldn’t be confused with harmony, Roth said. “Being uncomfortable is a really important feature of learning intellectual humility because you start to realize there’s a good chance you’re wrong,” Roth said.

The idea of being comfortable gets its foothold during the college search as families look for their “fit.” Too often, Roth said, that means “gravitating to being with folks like themselves, gravitating to information that makes them feel good, gravitating to schools that make them feel good, and that there’s faculty and administrators there to placate them, instead of actually challenging them.”

3️⃣ Don’t think of tenure as one size fits all. “We definitely still need tenure,” Sasse said, “but I don’t think we probably should be tenuring as many roles.” Tenure still makes sense at the “advanced research level,” he said. But as most roles outside of academia become more specialized and technology disrupts teaching, “tenure is probably a constraint against growing great teaching,” Sasse said.

Just like medicine has specialties that go beyond “doctor,” Sasse said, colleges need specializations in teaching that go beyond “professor,” focusing on course design, leading discussions, lecturing, mentoring, and working with instructional technology. In order to have that flexibility with their teaching corps, universities can’t grant tenure in the numbers they have in the past.

4️⃣ The liberal arts never dominated like we like to think they did. Yes, liberal arts majors once made up a much bigger proportion of the overall number of bachelor’s degrees awarded, but as Roth reminded the Milken audience, the majority of American students in the modern era never pursued a liberal-arts degree.

“Colleges and universities have retooled themselves, not in the age of leftist America, but in the image of corporate America,” Roth said. “The brightest students are supposed to want to get the most money, and so becoming a schoolteacher is seen as a failure because it’s not going to pay you enough.” (It was a statement that got a lot of nods, even from this audience).

The vast majority of college students today, “aren’t majoring in Feminist Gender and Sexuality Studies,” Roth said, which makes for good campaign trail fodder, but rather they’re “looking for credentials” to get a job.

Bottom line: As recently as 2016, 70% of high school graduates were still going straight to college; now the figure is 62%, and likely to drop again given this year’s issues with the FAFSA.

• But it was clear from our wide-ranging conversation— about the value of the degree, what employers want, the cost of college, student debt, and the politics of campuses— that something bigger is going on with college enrollment right now, a tectonic shift that no one can yet explain.

Improving Student Mental Health

College campuses continue to grapple with a deluge of mental health problems among students.

By the numbers: “Mental health is now a bigger retention concern than academics or finances,” Robert Hradsky, vice president for student engagement at Syracuse University, said during my “Next Office Hour” webcast recently on making colleges more welcoming and safer.

• Among four year students who consider dropping out, 69% of respondents to a Gallup survey reported emotional stress as the reason; 59% reported mental health. By comparison, about one-third talked about cost.
• 81% of students in a Healthy Minds survey indicated that their mental health negatively impacted their academic performance in the prior four weeks.

The big picture: Right before and during the pandemic, campuses expanded their counseling staffs to try to keep up with demand and rolled out a series of wellbeing strategies.

• “One of the things that became really clear is that we cannot hire our way out of this,” Luoluo Hong, vice president of student engagement and well-being at the Georgia Institute of Technology said during the webcast.
• As a result, colleges have shifted their focus on prevention and changing the culture among students, faculty, and staff.

What’s happening: Once seen as one-and-done, check-the-box programming during orientation, colleges are now deploying programming about prevention and mental health throughout the student lifecycle.

• Macalester College “thinks about doing some bite size delivery of programming, some snack size, and some meal size,” and varies the programming, said Jen Jacobsen, executive director of the college’s Laurie Hamre Center for Health and Wellness, who I interviewed in a separate short video recording recently.

In the end: Beyond providing assistance to their current students, making mental health a priority also helps with future enrollment.

• In their college decision-making process, safety and well-being are increasingly as important for Gen Z as academic rigor. Eight in 10 students said well-being is a “moderately” or “very important” consideration when deciding which college to attend, according to previous research from Vector Solutions, which sponsored this edition of the Next Office Hour.
• During the webinar, I asked Syracuse’s Hradsky what questions prospective students should ask about mental health and wellness. He told me three things:
  1. Ask how the campus you’re on is different from other campuses
  2. The accessibility of programs and services
  3. The effectiveness of what’s provided

📼 Watch an on-demand recording of the Next Office Hour, “The New Landscape for Student Well-Being” (sponsored by Vector Solutions).

🔖 You can learn more in a new guide I just compiled, Promoting Student Mental Health and Well-Being, which outlines 9 principles of effective prevention programs.

SUPPLEMENTS

📢 Fighting for Free Speech on Campus. What exactly is free speech and when does it cross the line to intimidation and violence is the question of the day on college campuses these days. So on a recent episode of Future U., Michael Horn and I talked with Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author of the bestselling book The Coddling of the American Mind, as well as the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind. Greg is known as among the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment and free speech, but as he said on the show “the First Amendment has a lot of sensible limitations in it.” Hear what he had to say. (Future U.)

⚖️ Measuring the True Value of Community Colleges. A Strada Education Foundation study last fall found that people making at least $48,000 after their community-college experience valued their education much higher than those who were below that threshold, and if they were making much higher, it didn’t change their perception in a significant way. In a recent episode of Future U., Dave Clayton, a senior vice president at Strada, told us why that threshold holds meaning and why the traditional measures of success in higher ed shouldn’t apply to community colleges. (Future U.)

🧳 Are Students Really Flocking to the South? A recent story about teenagers wanting to go South to college (the second such major piece in the last few years) made the rounds in my social feeds. But as higher ed data guru and vice president of enrollment at Oregon State University Jon Boeckenstedt writes in his blog, the numbers tell a different story. Sure, the South had increases along the margins, but New England and the Mid-Atlantic held their own as more students are simply more mobile than in the past. (Higher Ed Data Stories)

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff