Late Thursday night, I arrived home from my last business trip of the year—35 trips and 82,000 miles after 2022 began, according to an alert from my TripIt app.

We might have returned to 2019 when it comes to travel, but from what I’ve seen this past year on the road, that’s not the case for higher ed. We clearly have entered a new, post-pandemic era for higher ed that is only starting to come into full view.

There’s so much to explore about what’s changing in higher ed—and we’ll do that in this space and elsewhere in the new year. But late last week as I sat at Deloitte University in Dallas with a few dozen college and university presidents talking about higher ed’s “new era,” I found myself repeatedly writing three words in my notebook.

Value. Optionality. Moment?

The value of higher ed was under pressure even before the pandemic. Enrollment was on a downward trend for several years, while tuition discounts moved in the opposite direction as many colleges used money as a lever to persuade students to enroll—both those who couldn’t afford a degree as well as those who could but didn’t see the value in paying full freight.

Then the pandemic hit and the overnight transition to remote virtual learning didn’t give students and parents much confidence in higher ed’s ability to operate in the digital world. Students who couldn’t find their “place” in college or didn’t seem to think there was much purpose to their studies, left higher ed (and many others never even enrolled). As we all know by now, higher ed enrollment is down by some 1.3 million students since 2019.

In several discussions and presentations last week at Deloitte U. by those who study these trends, it’s becoming clear that something else is going on with college enrollment beyond just the pandemic.

In 1950, the U.S. accounted for almost half of world’s post-war highly trained workforce; even in 2000, it still accounted for some 20 percent. But now it’s on track to be overtaken by China, and likely India, within the next two decades.

The reasons why that is happening are plenty and overlapping and not fully understood yet.

For one, there is a lack of affordable higher ed options for an increasing number of Americans. Two, male enrollment in college is particularly lagging, some of which can be blamed on the opioid epidemic and video games. Third is the changing nature of the workforce—as jobs and careers change at a rapid pace—it’s not clear to some prospective students what they’re even going to college for.

That brings us to the second word in my notebook: optionality.

It’s something I wrote about in this space earlier in the year after our first two stops on the Future U. Campus Tour. The higher ed “system” is not working for most of today’s students.

As a college president said last week of today’s students: “They’re just different.”

They don’t want an experience largely designed centuries or even decades ago. They want more flexibility in how they do college. That might mean taking courses online and in-person simultaneously. It might mean more work-based learning and training and less classroom time. It might mean more flexible degree requirements so not everything requires four years right after high school. It might mean earning a certificate that’s valuable in the job market immediately while also earning a degree.

There are plenty of institutions working on shifting the traditional pathway through college and several of them were in Dallas talking about how they’re doing it. But in a nation of 4,000+ colleges, there aren’t enough doing it fast enough.

Among the images from my travels this year: Sunset over Hastings, MN as we prepare to land at MSP.

So many times as I sat Deloitte U.—which isn’t one of those 4,000 institutions but has about a thousand Deloitte employees a week come for training at a campus which really defies description—I kept thinking about the presidents who weren’t there but needed to be to better understand the various forces at play. As I looked around the room, I also noticed that many of the presidents were more my age—Gen Xers—rather than the Boomers who got us where we are today in higher ed.

Is this “a moment” when turnover at the top of universities ushers in a new generation of leaders in higher ed who think differently about its mission, value, and the overall student experience? We don’t know yet, but perhaps by the end of this decade we’ll be talking about a group of institutions who did rise to the education challenges of this century rather than the same dozen places we seem to talk about all the time and dominate the top of the rankings.

As I wrote in my first book, College (Un)Bound, which is 10 years old in 2023, “the truth about change is that we tend to overestimate its speed while underestimating its reach.” So 2023 likely won’t be that much different than 2022 for higher ed but give it time. As we head into the new year, the stories I heard last week of what colleges are doing and how they’re bending historical curves gave me hope for what’s next.

☀️ Good Monday morning. Thanks for reading Next. If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for free here.

Building Deeper Employer Partnerships

Bowie State’s president Aminta Breaux answering an audience question during the Future U. recording

The last stop for 2022 of the Future U. Campus Tour was at Bowie State University, an HBCU that got $25 million from the philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.

By the numbers: Despite the gift, Bowie State’s endowment is still only $36 million, Bowie State’s President, Aminta Breaux, pointed out to us.

• The top 10 HBCU endowments combined equal around 4% of Harvard’s $50 billion endowment.

What’s happening: Like many other HBCUs, Bowie State is seeing a surge in interest and enrollment.

• “Top-tier HBCUs… are increasingly becoming the first choice for some of the nation’s most sought-after talent,” Erica L. Green wrote in the New York Times earlier this year, reflecting “a renaissance in recent years among the nation’s [HBCUs], where their nurturing mission, increased funding and growing visibility have been drawing a new wave of students.”
• Bowie State projected it would welcome 920 students this fall. “We brought in about 1,200 students,” the president told us.

Driving the news: All colleges and universities like to tout their relationships with employers, but one thing Breaux told us on the podcast was how Bowie State’s partnerships have shifted over the years with deeper relationships.

• A partnership in the past simply meant employers came to campus to hire; now they help recruit high-school students for the university, provide scholarship money, and offer experiential learning and internships to students. “They see themselves as in partnership,” Breaux said.

☕️ One unique partnership the president highlighted is one I wish more campus vendors would do. It’s with Saxby’s, a Philadelphia-based coffee shop, which has set up an “experiential learning cafe” on campus.

• 45 students operate the cafe. The campus CEO is a student who gets a stipend and academic credit.

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

In this final newsletter of 2022, I’m introducing two new features that you’ll see from time to time in 2023.

• One is called Mailbag, where I answer your questions that might be helpful to other readers (you can just reply to email if you have a question).
• The other is Data Point, where I highlight a data graphic in the news or one that I’ve seen in my travels.

📈 DATA POINT

This first Data Point comes from Matt Sigleman, president of The Burning Glass Institute, who showed this slide at a recent conference I attended (thus, the somewhat poor image from a picture I took sitting in the audience).

Bottom line: Tech employers like to make news by saying they’re dropping degree requirements but then their job postings don’t always reflect that. 

📮 MAILBAG

Question from Holly D.: How do families evaluate the financial sustainability of a college before they commit so they don’t face the possibility that their college will close or struggle to offer a quality education? Are there warning signs the general public should know?

Answer: Unfortunately, you have to do a lot of detective work.

• Look at their enrollment trends: Are they going down?
• Check out their IRS Form 990 and financial statements (which you might find on the college’s website): Are they running deficits? Do they have lots of cash on hand?
• One source I like to look at are their bond ratings as I described in this New York Times article in 2013.

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