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In today’s edition: we’ll tackle the battle over a shorter 3-year degree and exciting news….🥁🚨 my updated Buyers and Sellers list is now available.
⚡️ Breaking: The number of students earning any kind of college degree fell by nearly 100,000, or 2.8%—the second year in a row there has been a decline— according to a new report released this morning from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
EVENTS
🖥️ You’re invited to register for three virtual events with me in the coming weeks.
1️⃣ For families and counselors | Tuesday, April 16 at 7 pm ET/4 pm PT, I’ll be joined for an audio-only webinar, hosted by Huntington Learning Center, on making the most of the college search with three senior admissions officials:
Rick Clark, Georgia Tech and co-author of The Truth about College Admission: A Family Guide to Getting In and Staying Together
2️⃣ For families and counselors | Sunday, April 21 at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT for a special evening edition of the “Next Office Hour” focused on the transition into, through, and out of college when it comes to careers. We’ll talk about everything from picking a major to navigating internships to building a network to searching for a job with:
Belle Liang and Timothy Klein, authors of How to Navigate Life:The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, and Beyond
Ben Wildavsky, The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections
2️⃣ For college leaders | Thursday, May 2 at 2 pm ET/11 am PT for a “Next Office Hour” on how campuses are addressing enrollment challenges and finding opportunities for growth in the coming decade with:
Angel Pérez, CEO of National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC)
Abbey Bain, Vice-Chancellor for Student Engagement, Louisiana State University-Alexandria, which has seen a 44% increase in enrollment in the last decade by awarding credit for prior learning.
Carlos Sanchez of Davenport University, where he is Executive Director of Casa Latino, a new set of bilingual degree programs to attract Latino learners in Michigan.
Last Friday afternoon, my phone buzzed with a text from Ron Lieber. Ron, as many of you know, is a personal finance columnist for the New York Times, author of The Price You Pay for College, and someone I look forward to talking with as often as I can about the biggest purchase many of us will make in our lifetimes: college.
Paying for college is not like buying any other expensive item, even a house or car. I think most people find it even more difficult to figure out than saving for retirement. That’s why beyond his book, I also recommend Ron’s paid course on merit aid–what it is and how to get it.
“I thought it would be another year or two,” Ron wrote to me. So did I. In 2005, I wrote a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education headlined “How Much Is Too Much?” It focused on Bates College, which at the time was one of 75 colleges that passed what some felt was a significant pricing milestone then: $40,000. That was less than 20 years ago. Ten years earlier, in 1995, I graduated from Ithaca College the year its price tag surpassed the $20,000 mark.
By the time my youngest graduates from college in 2034, might we be talking about about the $120,000 or $130,000 mark, really?
Of course, few pay full price, although as Ron noted at Vanderbilt–where his piece was based on a bill for a newly admitted engineering student of $98,426–about 35% of undergrads pay the entire freight.
This is also an appropriate place to remind you that the average list price for a private college in the U.S., according to the College Board, is about $56,190; it’s $24,030 at four-year public colleges for in-state students. What’s more, the average coupon in the form of a tuition discount that families get at a private college is now around 56% off.
This wide variation in pricing, and how it relates to the approach campuses use to manage their enrollment, makes college pricing akin to something more like airlines and hotels. I saw this on full display during the reporting for Who Gets In and Why, when students applied to top-ranked schools, got in, but then didn’t get any of those discounts everyone talks about.
That’s because they applied to what I called the sellers, a select group of colleges that give out financial aid mostly on financial need; meanwhile, they didn’t apply to the vast majority of colleges, which are buyers, and need to offer discounts to fill their seats (even if they offer a superior undergrad experience).
I released a list of these buyer and seller schools soon after the book was published. It is my rough guide to colleges that are more generous with merit aid. In 2022, I released a new list with updated data.
Today, I’m releasing the third update of the Buyers and Sellers list. For those who have used the list in the past, I made some changes:
First, we added a bunch of schools. Still, some prominent names aren’t listed because we’re missing the necessary institutional data.
Second, we no longer designate public colleges and universities as a buyer or seller. We provide the information to help you make that determination. But we decided to drop the designations ourselves since there are too many variables for students who attend a public, namely whether they are in-state or out-of-state.
The panel I moderated of accreditors, state policymakers, and higher-ed leaders this week around the idea of a shorter degree.
When Harvard was founded, the university started with a three-year degree. But by 1654, Harvard switched to a four-year plan–and most of higher education followed, of course, because everyone followed Harvard even then.
Some 370 years later, the idea of the three-year degree is rearing its head again in the birthplace of higher ed–New England
What’s happening: On Tuesday night, I moderated a panel of accreditors, state policymakers, and higher-ed leaders during a gathering of the “College-in-3 Exchange,” a network of campuses trying to design a shorter undergraduate degree.
The initiative is led by Bob Zemsky, a veteran professor at Penn’s Graduate School of Education who has been pushing the idea for years, and Lori Carrell, chancellor of the University of Minnesota at Rochester, which recently launched a two-and-a-half-year bachelor’s degree.
One of their early collaborators was Chris Hopey, the president of Merrimack College in Massachusetts, which hosted this week’s meeting and has submitted proposals for shorter degrees to its accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE).
Driving the news: The idea has received a cool reception among some colleges in New England, which see a shorter degree as a competitive threat in a market that is already under immense pressure with a declining student population and a high density of institutions.
The college infrastructure is built for four years–from the size of the faculty to residence halls. Cut 25% of revenue out, and the thinking goes you have to cut 25% of expenses.
NECHE has rejected overtures in the past from colleges that wanted to offer shorter baccalaureate degrees.
But last month, the commission reversed course and released guidlines on ways it would consider programs of less than 120 credits. “It’s an immense change,” the commission’s president, Lawrence Schall, said during our panel discussion.
Between the lines: Still, Schall seemed less enthusiastic about the idea than one of his counterparts on the panel, Sonny Ramaswamy, president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, which has already approved three-year degrees at Brigham Young University-Idaho and Ensign College, as Kelly Field recently wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“I’m very careful not to call it a three-year degree,” Schall said during the panel discussion.
Indeed, NECHE’s guidelines require colleges to have a name that clearly distinguishes a shorter degree from a traditional baccalaureate. “It will be interesting to see what creative names institutions come up with,” Schall said.
Background: Of course, some students already complete a four-year degree in three by bringing in credits from AP or dual-enrollment or taking additional courses during the summer.
This is different: it’s fewer credits than the typical 120 needed for a bachelor’s degree. That’s achieved, in part, by cutting out electives or general ed requirements.
Ramaswamy said the Northwest commission determined that student outcomes are “equivalent” in the 90-credit degrees it approved.
But in New England, the NECHE guidelines state there needs to be an “appropriate mix” of credits in the major, including electives. The proposals in New England so far include more than 90 credits but less than 120.
—What’s so sacrosanct about 120 credits? Nothing, said Peter Stokes, managing director at Huron Consulting Group.
“Forty-nine European countries are offering three-year baccalaureate degrees, we have master’s degrees of every shape, size and dimension, and contours,” Stokes said during the panel discussion. “I understand the need for quality assurance and the need for standardization. But there are all kinds of cracks in these standards.”
Reality check: Given individual disciplines outline their own degree requirements, the experiences of students differ vastly anyway, depending on their major. An engineering student might need 100 credits to complete a major, while a history major might need only half that many.
Bottom line: While critics of a shorter degree see it as a lesser replacement for the four-year baccalaureate degree, advocates see it as another option for students who might not be interested in college at a time when enrollment is falling.
“We need to use this opportunity to redesign and do things better,” Carrell said. “That means that we all need to stay curious. We need to be a learning enterprise…and learn from the evidence we produce.”
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SUPPLEMENTS
💰 FAFSA Goes to Capitol Hill. At a hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, “a panel of college financial aid experts concerned about a potential enrollment crisis this fall bemoaned ongoing problems with the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, and derided the Education Department over what some called a “crisis of credibility.” Even a Republican congressman from Texas who is the father of two high school seniors chimed in to say his family hasn’t been immune from the delays.” (USA Today)
🧗♂️ When Is Enough Enough? The title of this blog post by David Graves, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Georgia, caught my eye. Sure, colleges talk out of both sides of their mouth: they want students to be balanced, but they also have high expectations. But those expectations are also caused by a surge in applications by students who try to do it all. It’s a vicious cycle. “While colleges want students who are academically strong, they also want students to be a member of a community, both in high school and in college,” Graves wrote. (University of Georgia)
⚖️ Who Goes to Harvard Law School? I wish more grad schools and employers would do something like this: a list of where the 1L class at Harvard Law School did their undergrad. (LinkedIn)
OUT AND ABOUT
🛫 In San Diego for the annual ASU/GSV Summit, April 15-17, where among other things I’ll be leading a conversation with the chancellor of the University of Texas System and the CEO of Coursera about credentials embedded in degrees.
🖥️ Virtually, on May 1, I’ll be joining my friends at Grown & Flown at 8 p.m. ET as part of their membership group on college admissions to provide an update on this crazy admissions year and what it might portend for next cycle. If you join that group now, you can get a 21-day free membership that includes a great line-up of weekly live sessions, including mine. Sign up here.
🛫 In Chicagoland April 24 at Hinsdale Central Auditorium as part of a speaker series for Districts 86 and 181. Free and open to the community.
