☀️ Good Morning! Thanks for reading Next.If someone forwarded this to you, get your own copy by signing up for free here.
I’m experimenting a bit with the format of Next as we head into the summer, inspired by my former colleague Brad Wolverton’s new newsletter on newsletters. Don’t worry, this isn’t a permanent change. Just trying a few things out. Let me know what you think of the newsletter in general by hitting reply.
In today’s issue: why college is more about the job than ever before; social listening on the value of higher ed; and colleges that punch above their weight.
EVENTS
In June, we feature two gatherings of the virtual Next Office Hour:
🦾 Thursday, June 6 at 2 pm ET/11 am PT, we’ll discusshow AI can help colleges improve their enrollment strategy and streamline processes. I’ll be in conversation with:
Michael Bettersworth, Chief Marketing Officer, Texas State Technical College
Lenell Hahn, Director of Admissions, Southeast Missouri State University
John G. Haller, Vice President for Enrollment Management and New Student Strategies, University of Miami
🔗 Thursday, June 20 at 2 pm ET/11 am PT, we’ll discuss how to make deeper partnerships between institutions work. I’ll be in discussion with:
Harriette Scott, Vice President for Postsecondary Education, Southern Regional Education Board
Kathy Ulibarri, CEO, Collaborative for Higher Education Shared Services
Thomas Chase Hagood, Senior Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Office of Undergraduate Studies, University of Utah
👉 Register for free here to join live or get an on-demand recording afterwards. (Support from Workday)
Higher ed is an enrollment-driven business. And at the undergrad level, basically the last decade has been full of bad news since the millennials aged out of college and the Great Recession reset what Americans seem to want from higher ed.
When I tell audiences that undergrad enrollment in the U.S. peaked in 2011, I often get a puzzled look. Maybe it’s because the enrollment slide has been slow in the last decade—until the bottom fell out during the pandemic. Maybe it’s because we see headlines like we did yesterday in Inside Higher Ed, with the latest National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data showing enrollment up 2.5% this spring.
Of course, dig deeper into the numbers and you’ll see a few interesting (worrisome?) trends:
Nearly a third of the increase was because of the number of dual enrolled high-school students in college. As colleges reach deeper into high schools to fill their seats, we will see more of a fight from high-school teachers and counselors to keep students in their own classes.
Private colleges saw their enrollment dip, putting more pressure on that sector where we’ve seen the most closures in recent months.
Enrollments in the top 20 fields are driving most of the increase, creating a greater divide between STEM and health-related majors—and everything else on campuses.
Anyway, wait until the fall when the botched rollout of the FAFSA is likely to lead to some drop in enrollment.
Deposits from prospective students continue to lag at many campuses.
“Mindblowing numbers,” is how Brian Zucker, president of Human Capital Research Corporation, a higher-education consulting firm, described the numbers in late April, when some colleges were down 60% in deposits over last year. Since then, many have caught up, he said.
Still, one CFO at a small liberal-arts college who wrote to me last week said among their competitors, “only one school made its numbers and I suspect they did it by breaking the financial-aid bank.” He expects the melt this summer–where students walk away from their deposits and go elsewhere (or don’t go to college at all)–to be greater than in past years.
1. Leading With the Job
There are many reasons undergrad enrollment is down, but they all come down to two interrelated trends: jobs and affordability.
As Michael Horn and I heard this week on Future U.from Terrell Halaska Dunn, who led a survey and series of focus groups underwritten by the Gates Foundation, people who skipped college (which is increasingly happening) or left college, don’t see the short-term trade-offs as worth it EVEN IF THEY KNOW THE DEGREE IS WORTH IT OVER THE LONG-RUN.
I put that in caps because all I hear from colleges is “If we could only market ourselves better” and “Higher ed needs to better tell the story of the value of the degree.” Well, it seems everyone knows about the value of the degree AND they are still skipping out on college.
What do they want: a job. And that’s true for even those who go to college. The job has become so central to what students want out of the experience. As Michael and I talked about in the second half of the show, it’s almost as if colleges now need to guarantee a job.
“I really view this as a problem that institutions have,” Dunn told us. “This isn’t a problem that these potential students have…Institutions really need to recognize the reasons kids go to college is to get a good job, to get economic stability, to get social and economic mobility over time. And so how is this college degree going to help you? We all talk about the economists and the data and the things that we know about the long-term value of college…[what we really need is to] convince them that the long-term benefit is worth the short-term trade-off.”
🎧 Listen to this episode (and subscribe) to Future U.
🚨 As I mentioned in the episode, to engage more students in higher ed, many colleges will need to rethink the learner relationship with work.
Instead of college with work on the side, we might need to move to more of a mindset of work with college on the side.
Where to start? Campus jobs. That’s according to my followers on LinkedIn who recently voted in an online poll:
2. Listening to Consumers
For the new book, I’ve been spending probably too much time going down rabbit holes in Facebook groups about paying for college and Reddit threads about higher ed. Spend any time doing that and you’ll see why higher ed is facing an enrollment crisis.
That’s why the idea of “social listening” has fascinated me ever since I met Liz Gross. Gross founded Campus Sonar, which is solely focused on social listening in higher ed. Her firm does at scale what I try to do by myself sitting in my living room with my iPhone at night: identifying and assessing what is being said about higher ed on Facebook, Reddit, and elsewhere.
Late last year, Campus Sonar analyzed more than 13,000 online mentions about how individuals think and feel about the value of higher education. “The conversation was overwhelmingly neutral or negative even when searching for positive messages,” Campus Sonar wrote in a recent report on its research, “Rebuilding Public Trust in Higher Education.” Indeed, only 7% of the messages were positive.
To rebuild that trust, Campus Sonar suggests campuses talk more about their outcomes, better understand the student segments they are serving, and “lead with transparency.”
3. Who is Teaching?
When I first started as a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education in the late 1990s, I could basically pick up the phone and talk to most campus administrators or faculty members for an article, without going through the college’s public-relations office. Those days ended a while ago. Now the new demand is that a public relations officer sits on the phone during an interview. As veteran Chronicle reporter Eric Hoover frequently posts on X, colleges keep changing the rules on talking to reporters, making it more difficult, if not impossible, to “tell their story.”
What caught my eye was this line in the story: “lecturers teach 30 to 40 percent of credit hours across the UC [University of California] system.”
That’s a number I think prospective students should know: who is teaching you? Don’t get me wrong, adjunct faculty are great teachers, too. And often their industry connections are better for students looking for internships and jobs. But having a mix of full-time and part-time faculty is critical to a good learning experience.
Now, we just have to get colleges to be transparent and publicize these numbers–percentage of credit hours taught by full-time faculty and part-time faculty, and if I can be bold, by major.
4. This Job is Terrible
As my eighth grader gets ready for high school, she’s been asking a lot more questions about jobs.
I was particularly struck by what Liz Williams of the Greater Twin Cities United Way told Young about the influence of adults on teenagers: “They also see adults who maybe don’t have debt but hate the work that they do. … And so I think that there’s this trend toward taking a step back and really thinking about what they want to do, and if it is college, thinking more critically about ‘Why college?’, and ‘College for what?’”
It reminded me of something from our wedding rehearsal, when the priest told family and friends who were gathered in the church: don’t bad mouth marriage in front of a couple about to get married.
Teenagers should know about the warts and all of every career, but they’ll never discover what might interest them if all they hear about are the bad parts of a job.
5. Colleges That Punch Above Their Weight
“A strong correlation exists between graduation rates and earnings across institutions,” according to a new report from Bain & Company, which looks at the role of colleges in helping get their students to graduation and the outcomes they have afterwards.
That’s not surprising. What you really want to know is where students enroll who are predicted not to succeed in college because of their family income or academic preparation, and then do so against the odds.In other words, colleges that punch above their weight when you compare their predicted outcomes to actual results.
Sometimes, you can’t have it all. “Overperforming on graduation rates is no guarantee that an institution will overperform on student earnings, or vice versa,” the Bain authors wrote. That said, “it’s difficult to exceed predictions on student outcomes” compared to graduation rates.
Bain has a cool interactive graphic where you can see an array of colleges that over- or under-perform both on graduation rates and earnings as well as look up individual campuses.
There’s Montclair State in New Jersey over-performing on graduation rates….
…and Kettering University in Michigan rising way above the line on earnings.
Check it out and let me know if you find anything interesting (Note: Some colleges aren’t in the interactive because they are missing data).
SUPPLEMENTS
🏆 Princeton Has No Peers. “Each year, universities choose their peer institutions when reporting their data to the U.S. Department of Education.” Once again, The Chronicle of Higher Education compiled the peer institutions for nearly 1,500 campuses for 2022-23. It might be a good way for you to find “look-a-like” schools as you’re doing your college search. But buyer beware: I find that some colleges list their aspirational peers, and others, like Princeton, list no one. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
🖇️ Double Majors. A new study “suggests workers who double majored in college have more stable earnings than workers who majored in a single subject, meaning they’re less susceptible to sharp swings in income.” (Wall Street Journal, gift article)
💳 More Loans, Worse Outcomes. A research report by Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis traces the rise in student loans to more community college students taking on debt as well as to the enrollment of historically underrepresented students in low-quality colleges, both for-profits and open-enrollment public colleges. (National Bureau of Economic Research)
