My streaming habit for the past few weeks has toggled between “WeCrashed,” the Apple TV+ series on the downfall of WeWork’s Adam Neumann and Hulu’s “The Dropout,” the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.
There are many similarities between the founder-hero stories of Neumann and Holmes, and both ended in spectacular and well-publicized crashes, of course.
One theme underlying both stories is the impatience of investors for a quick return. Perhaps the Theranos machine would have never worked no matter how much time Holmes & Co. had to perfect their research, but when we compare innovation in most sectors of the economy to higher ed, the time horizon for change is so much shorter outside of the campus gates.
Maybe until now.
If higher ed learned one thing from the pandemic, it is that things can shift in an instant—traditions we assumed would last forever, expectations we had about the classroom experience and campus life, and the time we assumed we had to plan for changes in the workplace.
What’s clear coming out of the pandemic is that universities need to be more flexible in their operations and improve their response time to changes in the market. But higher ed is not really built for this kind of agile thinking. For much of its modern history (post-1965), higher ed has been a stable industry in growth mode with ever rising enrollment numbers.
So, where does higher ed go from here?
Recording the first stop on the Future U. Campus Tour at Northeastern U. with President Joseph Aoun.
It’s a question we’ve been exploring this past month on the Future U. podcast I co-host with Michael Horn as we celebrated two major milestones: our 100th episode and the kickoff of our “campus tour,” which started at Northeastern University in Boston at the end of February.
In the podcast interviews, as well as in discussions during my other travels in recent weeks to Arizona State, UCLA, Xavier University in Cincinnati, and a dinner I hosted in New York for regional public university leaders, three themes about the postpandemic future in higher ed keep coming up:
A flexible student experience. College leaders talk about whether online and hybrid learning will stick postpandemic. In many ways, it’s the wrong question to ask. Now is the time for colleges to focus on making the end-to-end student experience more flexible. Not only do students expect to deal with a lot less friction inside and outside the classroom, an improved experience will create a more inclusive future for higher ed because it meets students where they are, and, fundamentally, whether they feel a sense of belonging and purpose to their education.
Adult students. On our 100th episode of Future U., we asked three college presidents who were with us in our first season of the podcast—Arizona State’s Michael Crow, Trinity’s Pat Maguire, and Michael Sorrell of Paul Quinn College—to give us their predictions for the next five years. Spoiler alert: without any prompting by us, they all talked about the need to better serve adult students. Adult students are the siren song of higher ed right now, but most institutions have no idea how to serve them or exactly who they’re even talking about. Is it the 37 million Americans with some college credits but no degree? Or the 15 million who have an associate’s degree but no bachelor’s? Or those with a bachelor’s degree who need upskilling and reskilling?
The capacity of higher ed for innovation. This is perhaps the most important: the years ahead will require both financial and human capital that many colleges simply don’t have at their disposal. Education is so autobiographical for many people who work in it. That’s often why everyone from college presidents to trustees to faculty are slow to let go of their vision for what they had in they own educations to serve those who had different experiences.
Whatever the strategy a college ends up following, the simple truth is that the clock-speed of planning and execution needs to speed up. Facing growing uncertainty, however, many campuses are reluctant to embrace even more of it. They’ll need to, if they want to thrive, or maybe even survive.
🎧 Give a listen to the first stop on the Future U. Campus Tour at Northeastern University. We’re also making stops at UCLA, Georgia Tech, and Bowie State.
🌆 Good evening…and welcome to a special Sunday night edition of Next.
One Number We Should Care More About
The college search is all about numbers: acceptance rates, tuition, financial aid, test scores, and GPAs. But one number that’s often overlooked by too many perspective students is a key one in finding the right fit: retention rate.
What’s happening: Retention (students who return to the same institution) and persistence (students who return to any college) took a hit during the pandemic.
Background: One of the reasons students and families don’t ask about a college’s retention rate is that they often don’t know what’s considered a “good” rate.
75% should the minimum acceptable retention rate, says Wil Del Pilar, a vice president at The Education Trust, a nonprofit research organization.
If a college can’t keep at least three out of four students, that’s a red flag, Del Pilar says. “Is it a campus climate issue? Is it an affordability issue? Is it a lack of sufficient or even good advising?”
Be smart: Retention numbers are useful, but you have to figure out what the numbers really represent, according to Vince Tinto, distinguished university professor emeritus at Syracuse University and a veteran researcher on the subject.
Tinto advises perspective students to interrogate retention numbers for the “asterisk next to the data,” and ask questions like, “I have a certain academic average or a certain income or I’m a certain race or gender, so how are students like me doing at that institution?”
The catch? Most institutions don’t break down their retention rates with such granularity but it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Bottom line: Retention rates can be a useful tool for prospective students, but both Del Pilar and Tinto encourage applicants to dig deeper, and consider what’s behind the numbers when deciding on a college.
Many campuses are facing a critical decision: to build new data centers or power their technology in the cloud. These discussions are happening as colleges grapple with their digital transformation and how to embed technology in every aspect of campus life to increase student success, research prowess, and prestige. Read the latest paper in a new series about digital transformation in higher ed.
Fixing Admissions
My question in a recent newsletter about how you’d fix the admissions process generated dozens of responses.
Many blamed the Common App for the madness and suggested applicants go back to the days of applying to individual colleges. Others said the Common App should lower the cap on the number of colleges that students are allowed to apply to (most suggested 10).
Here is a sampling of what I heard:
Susan West: “Just as home buyers get pre-approval on financing before making an offer, students should get a pre-assessment of aid before both they and the schools go through the process of seeing who’s a good match.”
Denise Bynum: “The budget allocated to ‘recruitment and marketing’ should match the admit rate. If the admit rate is less than 5%, then there is no reason to seek MORE qualified candidates to deny.”
Ken O’Connor: “Absolutely end early admission so that high school can go back to being at least a three and a half year experience.”
Frances Zopp: “Give kids a sense of why they did not get in. They don’t have to go into detail, but ‘it was such a large applicant group’ is such a cop out.”
Kim Manley: “The date students find out their admission decision should never be end of March and early April. It’s the largest financial investment a family makes other than a house. To give students and families 30 days to decide where they are attending is wrong.”
🙏 Thank you to everyone who wrote in.
SUPPLEMENTS
—Marymount California University (MCU) to Close. The university near Los Angeles was the subject of a Future U. podcast last fall on mergers and acquisitions. St. Leo University in Florida was trying to acquire MCU. But the merger plan was scrapped because of complications in getting approval from the accreditor. (Twitter)
—Colleges Create New Confusion With SAT and ACT Score Policies. “The jumble of policies is leaving high-school students baffled over whether they should take the exams, and if so, whether they should submit their scores to particular institutions. ‘You’re expected to have the spreadsheet skills of a middle manager. I think that’s asking a lot of applicants,’ said Anna Ivey, an independent college counselor.” (Wall Street Journal; subscription required)
—Will Republicans Try to End the Federal Student Loan Program? “If Republicans take control of Congress in the November elections, I fully expect a serious effort to stop issuing federal student loans… Possible replacements include education savings accounts, income share agreements (a la Jeb Bush), or simply turning the issue over to colleges and states to figure out.” (Kelchen on Education)
—Is Grade Inflation Getting Worse? “A study of high school transcripts found that high school students in 2019 were taking not only more courses, but also more rigorous courses and earning higher grades compared to a decade earlier. But 12th graders posted lower test scores during this same time period. Their achievement fell.” (Hechinger Report)
—The Bachelor’s Degree and the Job Market. “Those with bachelor’s degrees fared worse than those with associate or advanced degrees in a tight labor market. The 2021 unemployment rate for people ages 20 to 29 who had recently earned an associate, bachelor’s, or advanced degree was 4.5 percent, 13.1 percent, or 2.6 percent, respectively.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education; registration required)
