🚨 The “Next Office Hour” for October will focus on artificial intelligence with two sessions:

• Thursday, October 5 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, we’ll examine how to use AI on the administrative side of colleges and improve student pathways through higher ed.
  
  • Register for free here (Support from Amazon Web Services)
• Thursday, October 26 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, we’ll discuss experiments with generative AI in gathering, organizing, and refining content for courses as well as personalization for students.
  
  • Register for free here (Support from Coursera)

🗃️ The black box of college admissions

Holistic admissions and financial aid are black boxes—and only colleges can see inside of them. Applicants, their families, college counselors, and increasingly lawmakers, all want more transparency.

Why it matters: The push for more transparency is driven by a huge surge in applications to colleges as well as financial-aid packages that often surprise families right before enrollment decisions need to be made.

• Those pushing for more information believe it will make the application process more efficient and allow families to make better financial decisions.

Yes, but: How much information is enough? What information would be most useful? Those were two of the questions debated during a panel I moderated last week during the annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) in Baltimore.

• “What kind of information would settle that down?” Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, asked in response to whether more information would put the brakes on the rising number of applications.
• Whatever figures are published, Soule said, wouldn’t ever align to the personalized way that applications are reviewed at institutions like Penn, where applications are abundant and seats are scarce.
• What applicants essentially want to know, Soule said, is what is the acceptance rate for students like me?

—More information creates either “a false sense of security about outcomes” or “stops students before they apply,” Soule added.

Where information helps: Whitney Gouché, a vice president at EMERGE, a college-access group in Houston, recalled an information session with a competitive engineering college in California (which she lightheartedly didn’t name) where admissions officers shared that if applicants don’t have AP Calculus BC they might not get accepted.

• “There was a high school principal with me whose school didn’t even offer Calc BC, and without that information, he didn’t even realize he was limiting access for his students,” Gouché said.

How about test-optional? Right now, applicants and counselors want data that could help them decide when and where to submit test scores.

• Sure, SAT/ACT score ranges help. So do figures about who submitted scores and who was admitted with and without scores.
• But what that information doesn’t tell applicants is whether the “tests influence the decision making of that institution,” Soule said.
• “Was testing next to nothing for that school or was it a driving component in a conversation—none of that is reflected” in what campuses might release around test optional, Soule added.

👏 The biggest applause lines: Came after Gouché and Ron Lieber, a columnist for the New York Times and author of The Price You Pay for College, called for colleges to offer more up-front pricing information.

• Lieber has written about the need for colleges to guarantee prices before students apply. In the absence of that, he said, colleges should open up phone lines if their net-price calculator doesn’t work for a family’s specific circumstances or their financial-aid offers don’t make sense.
• “There has to be a way that doesn’t cost three more full-time personnel to take these calls and give people a little bit better sense of what to expect,” he said.

What colleges say matters: And students often respond accordingly. Soule ended our panel with an interesting anecdote about the time a few years ago when Penn announced its new class and said that, among other attributes, one-third of students did research.

• Within months, that one-third figure became “amended” and “monetized” in some places to “Penn requires research,” she said.
• “It’s an anxiety that I hold in watching information that looks very clear and specific get very far away from its genesis and take on a story of its own,” Soule said.

Bottom line: Higher ed is a business, and like any business, colleges will only be transparent with information in ways that serve their priorities. Nearly every college wants an admissions funnel filled with lots of prospects at the top. Anything that reduces that number—whether it’s pricing information or data on who really gets in—isn’t ultimately in their best interest. There’s only one thing that will change this dynamic: Congress (and they can’t even pass a budget).

🔥 The best higher ed “brands”

Whenever a scandal erupts on a campus—such as Michigan State recently or the University of Southern California seemingly every year—there is inevitably a news story about the impact on the school’s brand and ultimately its enrollment and fundraising. Yet some brands in higher ed are like Teflon—they can’t be pierced.

What’s new: Rather than traditional academic metrics or employment outcomes, a ranking of “global university brands” by American Caldwell, a Washington DC-based marketing firm, tracked news mentions of universities as well as social media following, public interest level, web citations, and website visitors.

• The firm re-ranked the top 50 global universities using those metrics.
• Purdue, ranked No. 10, was among a group of universities that over the last decade followed in the footsteps of corporate America and created the role of Chief Marketing Officer.
• What’s more, institutions then often hired for that role from outside of higher education. Purdue’s CMO, Ethan Braden, came from the pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly.

By the numbers: Harvard University, probably not surprisingly came out on top, but the first 20 spots did have a few surprises when compared to other rankings such as U.S. News.

• The University of Toronto, (No. 5), Penn State (No. 13), University of Florida (No. 19) all cracked the top 20.
• A few other notable mentions: the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign came in above the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and ready for this: The Ohio State University.

Why it matters: Ultimately, like most rankings in higher ed, it doesn’t. But as American Caldwell’s Nino Alexander Kader told me, if you’re choosing “between two schools that are relatively unknown, you probably want to go to one more employers have heard of.” And that’s what a lot of this ranking comes down to: places that tend to be in the press more often.

• Unlike the U.S. News rankings with a methodology that really dings the public universities, this ranking is full of big flagship public universities.

Supplements

💪 Building resilience. Colleges says they can’t keep up with the demand for mental health services. Rather than struggle to keep up, Jim Gash, president of Pepperdine University joined Michael Horn and me on the latest episode of Future U. to tell us about how the university “moved upstream” by integrating resilience across the curriculum from academics to residential life to social programming. It’s an interest case study for other colleges. (Future U.)

⏲️ The new FAFSA is coming soon? Hopefully. The simplified Free Application for Federal Student Aid is expected to drop by December 1, two months later than normal. But now the threat of a government shutdown has financial-aid officials worried that the December date is in jeopardy. Either way, expect some changes to the outputs with the new form compared to the old one. Brookings has a useful interactive to simulate changes for hypothetical students. (Brookings)

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff