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In today’s edition: The return of a proposal to look at higher ed data at the student level; latest application trends; and listening in on Future U.

EVENT

The “Next Office Hour” on Tuesday, March 19 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT will focus on keeping up with a job market that is expanding and contracting at an alarming rate.

• We’ll examine how learning providers and workers can better identify the gaps between existing skills and the skills required in the new workplace and what models for upskilling and reskilling really work.
• More details to come soon, but reserve your spot now to join in an interactive discussion and get an on-demand recording.

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THE LEAD

Publicly available data on the performance of colleges and universities from the federal government has drastically improved over the last thirty years.

Basic facts such as a college’s graduation rate or how many students remain enrolled from year to year or the earnings of graduates by major are now so ubiquitous on government and consumer web sites that it’s difficult to imagine how any of us searched for colleges back in the day without such information.

Even so, there is one way consumers would benefit even more: if we could evaluate colleges by how well they serve different types of students. Imagine if you knew how the average net price of a college differs by a student’s major or can get access to graduation rates by income level or if transfer students complete a degree at the same rate as those who started on a campus as freshmen?

Colleges have such information inside their vast databases, but the federal government has been banned from using that information as part of a so-called student unit-record system under a 2008 law passed by Congress.

Private colleges, in particular, have long been opposed to the formation of a unit-record system out of concern that it would be a violation of federal privacy law. At least that’s their public stance; in private, many college leaders fear that information disaggregated by types of students could bring unwanted transparency to the performance of some institutions.

Now the idea of a student unit-record system has re-emerged.

Alison Griffin, a former congressional staffer who now lives in Colorado and writes a regular newsletter on the future of education and work called “Boundless Potential,” wrote to me over the weekend with an update. Alison joined with now U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal back in 2018 in urging Congress to lift restrictions on collecting student data.

Here is Alison’s update: “Last month, the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce advanced the College Cost Reduction Act, to the full House. Tucked in the legislation is a provision that effectively repeals the ban on a federal student unit-record data system.

That ban was part of the Higher Education Act, last updated in 2008. What many don’t know is that the provision surfaced years earlier in 2005 as an amendment offered by Rep. Virginia Foxx to H.R. 609, the College Access and Opportunity Act. In the aftermath of the federal government’s use of data following 9/11 and the Spellings Commission report, which recommended the federal government build a federally managed data system, the amendment sought to protect individual student-level data and had bipartisan support.

The new College Cost Reduction Act proposes to create a federal data system that is limited to students who receive federal financial aid, federal assistance through programs at the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and learner-earners who participate in federal workforce development programs. The new data system would leverage data of these individuals to better understand enrollment and completion rates, at a minimum, and be additive to the College Scorecard, which provides information on debt and earnings of recent graduates.”

Bottom line: At a time when the value of higher ed is increasingly being questioned and the college-going rate is falling, the need for better consumer information has never been more critical. Since the student unit-record system was first suggested two decades ago, the number of consumer websites has proliferated and the visualization of data has improved greatly—helping to disseminate this information more effectively.

Current government data sources, including IPEDs and the College Scorecard, can’t keep up. Case in point: net price by income level, which stops at $110,000, was roughly based on income quintiles when it was released nearly twenty years ago and never adjusted for inflation.

Sure, the new unit-record proposal won’t cover all students, but it’s a necessary start.

Black, Hispanic Applicant Numbers Rise

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of race in college admissions last June, there were predictions that enrollment of underrepresented students would drop significantly, especially at highly selective colleges.

• We won’t know until later this year, after colleges release their enrollment figures, whether earlier predictions come true.
• But admissions deans tell me a robust applicant pool is more important than ever—a big reason they’re not interested in slowing down the surge in applications to their institutions.

What’s happening: At the most selective colleges—those that accept fewer than 25% of students—the number of applications from those who identify as Black/African-American are up 3.4% compared to last year, according to the latest report on application trends from the Common App.

• Hispanic applicants are up even higher at the most selective schools, some 4.9%.

Driving the news: The plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill argued that race-conscious admissions discriminated against Asian Americans. It was a different strategy than past affirmative action cases before the high court, which had been filed on behalf of white plaintiffs.

• As a result, the Supreme Court’s decision last year was seen as a victory by the plaintiffs for white and Asian-American applicants to highly selective colleges.
• But applications to those colleges from students identifying as white dropped 5.8% over last year, while among Asian-American students they essentially remained flat.
• The Common App attributed the big increase from last year to this year in “unknown,” where applicants don’t list their race/ethnicity, to an unexplained dip last year in this category over the previous year. Still, the proportion of applicants not listing their race/ethnicity has grown the most of all categories since 2019-20.

By the numbers: Some of the biggest increases across racial and ethnic groups were at colleges classified by the Common App as “more selective,” meaning they admit between 50% and 74% of applicants.

• This group of institutions along with less selective colleges (admit >75%) have seen some of the larger jumps in apps in recent years, according to the Common App data.
• That trend is likely a reflection that admission to top-ranked colleges has become nearly impossible, so students are applying to more institutions further downstream.

Just to note: The Common App counts more than 1,000 institutions as members, but the update focuses on 834 institutions that have maintained Common App membership since before the pandemic.

—Overall, applications to public colleges have grown more than private institutions, 11% vs. 5%.

• Publics—especially flagships—increasingly are seen as a good deal by in-state students, and in some states are showering merit aid on out-of-state applicants, making their prices more competitive with private colleges, which have played the discounting game for a lot longer.

A few other notable trends:

• The growth in international applicants continues to outpace that of domestic applicants: 14% vs. 5%.
• The proportion of applicants not reporting a test score continues to grow faster (up 9.9% over last year) than those who are choosing to report one (up 1.4% over last year).

👉 Read the full Common App update report

A MESSAGE FROM GROWN & FLOWN

To add to your playlist, three recent episodes of the Future U. podcast:

Stuck in Neutral on Student Success. Last December, a social media post by a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin at Madison went viral when she said it was the “worst semester in terms of students’ ability to get work in on time.” Students are struggling to get back into gear after the pandemic. As a result, colleges are overhauling their student success strategies by developing everything from care teams to new approaches to orientation. Listen.

Inside the Reporters Notebook. The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus and Chris Quintana of USA Today joined the podcast to talk about recent stories they wrote including what happened to colleges in Japan when the college-age population fell there and what’s next for the Biden administration’s student loan repayment plans. Listen.

Unbundling the Traditional College Model. A look at College Unbound, which became the 13th accredited college in Rhode Island in 2020, and is an institution really like no other. It offers just one degree, maximizes the credits that students can transfer from other institutions, and also leans into giving its students credit through assessments of their prior learning. The result: their average time to a bachelor’s degree is about two-and-a-half years. Listen.

SUPPLEMENTS

💰For Once, the Rich Don’t Get Richer. “Small endowments posted substantially higher returns than large ones did in the 2023 fiscal year,” according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.The average return for college endowments with less than $50 million in assets was 9.8%; the average return for endowments worth more than $5 billion was 2.8%.

💸 Well, Maybe They Do Get Richer. In her last year as president of the University of Pennsylvania, before stepping down in 2022, Amy Gutmann received almost $23 million in total compensation, mostly from deferred compensation set aside over the course of her 18-year tenure as president. “It is the highest payout documented since 2008,” according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, which began collecting data on such compensation that year.

🙁 The Loneliest Generation. “Generation Z is America’s most diverse cohort yet — but they’re united by deep anxieties about the world around them. Just 44% of Gen Zers say they feel prepared for the future,” writes Erica Pandey in Axios.

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff