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In today’s edition: Catching up with the students in my last book and storylines for 2024.
EVENTS
🖥️ The “Next Office Hour” on Thursday, January 25 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT will explore how we prepare students for a future of AI.
What should colleges be teaching their students about AI and what will be the impact of AI on their future work?
I’ll be joined by:
Marty J. Alvarado, Vice President of Post Secondary Education & Training, Jobs for the Future (JFF), a national nonprofit driving transformation in the American workforce and education system.
Lance Eaton, Director of Faculty Development & Innovation, College Unbound. Lance is an instructional designer, and writer of the “AI + Education = Simplified” newsletter.
Taniya Mishra, Founder & CEO, SureStart, which partners with high schools as well as colleges and universities to train and mentor students from communities underrepresented in AI.
🖥️ Admissions webinar. I’ll be hosting a free webcast for Huntington Learning Center also on January 25 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT on the latest trends in admissions and navigating the college search. I’ll be joined by Georgia Tech’s Rick Clark for part of it.
If you read my book, Who Gets In and Why, you might recall the three main student characters I followed during their college search: Grace, Nicole, and Chris. All three graduated from high school in the spring of 2019, and started college the following fall—Grace at UCLA, Nicole at Northeastern, and Chris at Gettysburg.
All three were scheduled to graduate from college last spring, so in recent weeks I checked in with them to see how they were doing.
Of the three, I kept in touch with Chris the most because he grew up about an hour from where I did in Northeastern Pennsylvania. He was also the one I was most worried about completing college because of how his search unfolded.
Chris went to a rural high school and graduated with fewer than 100 students. Only 30% went directly on to college. His mom had to find a second job to afford Gettysburg, even though it was giving him a boatload of financial aid to attract someone with his scholastic record—a 1310 on the SAT and A average.
When I caught up with Chris recently he had just ended his shift at Walmart, where he works in the vision center. I knew he had left Gettysburg after his first year. A liberal-arts college wasn’t a good fit for someone who just wanted to focus on learning computers. “The cost was just too much for what I was getting,” he told me.
What happened next is way too common of a story for low-income students, like Chris, who after high school lack any sort of counseling support that they might have had in their initial college search.
After Gettysburg, he enrolled at his local two-year college, Lehigh Carbon Community College, for a degree in computer security. But the road to completing that credential has been long and bumpy. He works two jobs—the second at a manufacturing plant in nearby Bethlehem—so finding time to fit in classes is difficult.
After his first year at a community college, he hoped to accelerate his timeline by enrolling in an online program at Purdue Global using education benefits from Walmart. But Chris discovered right before the start of classes that he wasn’t eligible. So he had to take a semester off instead. In the fall of 2022, he enrolled in the local branch campus of Penn State thinking the scheduling would be better. It wasn’t.
Now he’s back at Lehigh Carbon Community College with plans to graduate in May—five years after he finished high school. Because all of his credits won’t “count” toward his degree, in the end, he will have paid for 110 credits—10 short of what normally constitutes a bachelor’s degree—for a two-year associate’s degree. Chris still wants a bachelor’s degree and is looking to enroll at Western Governors University. “I just need to find a place that will take my credits, won’t take me forever, or cost me a lot,” he said.
Nicole graduated from Northeastern last May. If you recall, it was not her first choice. She had been denied from the University of Pennsylvania early decision, then from her second choice, Dartmouth, in regular decision.
“I ended up where I should have in the end,” Nicole told me. “I’m really happy. I wish that I had chilled out more, panicked less. I wish I had done more fun stuff in high school.”
At Northeastern, she had multiple co-ops that allowed her to cycle in and out of school to go to work. Two of them were at brand-name consulting firms. One of them offered her a job and she accepted the first week of her senior year of college.
“It’s a dream job,” she told me. “I’m working with people from Dartmouth, and those schools I thought I wanted to go to. But here I am and it’s because of Northeastern.”
Grace was deferred in ED from Dartmouth and then denied in regular decision. She didn’t receive enough financial aid from the next favorite on her list, Wellesley. She had rebuffed suggestions she apply to schools known to be generous with money even if they weren’t brand names and she didn’t want to go to school in her home state, California. Yet that’s where she ended up—at UCLA.
She graduated last May and is on a fellowship in Africa this year.“There are 30 people in my cohort, and no one went to an Ivy League school,” she told me. “In the big picture, I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter where you go; it’s what you make of your time there.”
Making it at UCLA did mean taking more responsibility for her education. “You need to be self-driven because it’s hard to connect with professors,” Grace said. Now as she applies to Ph.D. programs, Grace said she wishes she did more as an undergraduate and got to know more professors.
Bottom line: To paraphrase Nicole’s words—things turned out as they were supposed to. For Chris, unfortunately that meant his hopes for a degree and career were derailed by cost as they so often are for low-income students. So for those bemoaning not getting into their “dream school” but still going to college, think about Chris. For Nicole and Grace, they embraced new schools and found there is no such thing as a perfect fit.
Looking back, Nicole and Grace wish they enjoyed high school more and worried less about getting into the “right” college. It’s what I usually hear from families years later after the college search is in the rearview mirror. Yet, every year, there is a new crop of students and their parents who hear these stories yet ignore their lessons.
So, why do we continue to recognize what we’re doing wrong, but not change course?
Storylines for 2024
Just an excuse to share one of my favorite shots from a business trip last year: the tip of the Grand Canyon taken on a flight from Phoenix to Salt Lake City in November.
As we enter 2024, here are just some of the storylines I’ll be following (along with some background info for further reading/listening):
Online education evolves into its post-pandemic phase. Online ed was hot during the pandemic as everyone rushed online. Then in the last two years, it was “So, now what do we do?” This year, these online strategies begin to take shape. The Biden administration seems to have paused during this election year any further regulation of the third-party entities (OPMs) that help universities get online. But that industry will continue to see further consolidation as their legacy university customers, as well as new partners, push to move faster and bigger into online education for additional revenue and to play catch up to the largest players that mostly run their own online shops, such as Arizona State, Southern New Hampshire, and WGU. (Future U., “Midseason Report”; “Future of Online Ed”)
The alternative credential marketplace begins to be seen as an answer to questions about the degree. The traditional college degree is facing an identity crisis. Yet there has been hesitation by many colleges and universities to embrace the alternative credential/microcredential market. Some see it as a competitor to their own degrees, especially master’s degrees. Others worry about their utility in the job market. And some are concerned about scaling programs and maintaining quality. There’s been so much progress on the quality front in recent years around alt certs, however. Stanford, the University of Texas, and Northeastern have all released frameworks around credentials that colleges can build on. Now with worry about enrollments in traditional degree programs, an ever-shifting job market, and a potential expansion of the Pell Grant for short-term programs, more institutions will likely dip their toes into microcredentials. (“The New Learning Economy,”white paper/free registration required)
The bachelor’s degree could get its mojo back. One reason microcredentials will grow is because more colleges might add them as a component to the bachelor’s degree in an attempt to boost its value. Also, in a tightening job market, even those employers who started advertising jobs without degree requirements will continue to hire people with the degree (“Making the Bachelor’s Degree More Valuable,”white paper/free registrationrequired)
New pricing models emerge in higher ed. In recent weeks, I’ve had several conversations with CFOs about how they feel their discounting strategies are long in the tooth, but they don’t want to do a “tuition reset” (where they reduce the published tuition rates down to their discounted rate). This may be the year where we see more experimentation in pricing from differential tuition by major to guaranteed four-year rates to continued consolidation in academic programs to bring costs more in line with real prices. Microcredentials may also allow colleges to unbundle their prices or come up with subscription models. (“The Financially Resilient University”)
A hugely unpredictable situation in admissions and enrollment. From the fallout of the Supreme Court affirmative action decision and free speech at highly selective colleges to lagging enrollment at less selective institutions requiring them to pull out all the stops to make their classes, admissions will only grow more complicated. Then at the end of the year, we might see which institutions have been juicing their application numbers as a significant change comes to federal reporting standards around what constitutes an application. (Higher Ed Dive)
SUPPLEMENTS
🏛️ FTC Sues Grand Canyon University. “The Federal Trade Commission is suing Grand Canyon University and its president over what it says were deceptive advertising practices. The FTC accused Grand Canyon University of misleading potential doctoral students about the cost and course requirements. In addition, the commission contends the school misrepresented itself as a nonprofit organization and misused telemarketing calls to increase enrollment.” (USA Today)
📈 ICYMI: More Applicants Not Reporting Test Scores. “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,” according to the Common App. (LinkedIn)
✏️ Yet, Will There Be a Return of the Tests? “A growing number of experts and university administrators wonder whether the switch [to test optional] has been a mistake. Research has increasingly shown that standardized test scores contain real information, helping to predict college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success. Test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation in recent years. (The New York Times)
