📊 Higher Ed in 4 Charts

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In today’s issue: Higher ed in 4 charts and the Future U. podcast is back.

EVENTS

🍂 The “Next Office Hour,” my monthly webinar series, continues this fall. On Thursday, September 19 at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, we’ll focus on the Role of Faculty in Driving Value.

• Faculty play a critical role in ensuring positive outcomes for institutions, yet colleges don’t always have the data they need to showcase faculty impact.

I’ll be joined in conversation with:

• Thomas Finholt, Vice Provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs at the University of Michigan
• Junius Gonzales, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Montclair State University
• Linda Arey Kosten, Senior Vice Provost, University Budget, Planning and Administration at the University of Denver

📚 On Wednesday, September 25, 2024, at 8 p.m. ET/ 7 p.m. CT, I’ll be in conversation with author and professor Tony Jack as part of the virtual event series from Family Action Network (FAN).

• Jack is one of the most compelling writers and speakers about student success in higher ed today. He has a new book out calledClass Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price.
• The book looks at how underrepresented students at elite colleges still face challenges despite the resources these schools have poured into efforts to diversify their student bodies.
• 👉 Register here for the free event with FAN

THE LEAD

There are so many storylines to follow in higher ed as we kick off a new academic year. Here are 4 of them, told in 4 charts:

1. We’ve reached the peak of high-school graduates.

You’ve probably heard of the “enrollment cliff” in higher ed. In many ways, undergrad enrollment been on a downward slope for more than a decade. But now reality is really hitting: as the chart below shows, the high-school graduating class of 2025 in the U.S. (as in this year’s seniors) will be the largest one for a really long time to come.

2. The colleges in the best financial shape educate only 600,000 students.

This chart comes from an analysis I worked on with Bain & Co. last year. It looks at the financial resilience of institutions based on their enrollment trends, margin (i.e. revenues in excess of expenses), and financial reserves. The red bar shows the percentage in each sector of higher ed that is considered strong. Only highly selective privates (think Ivy-plus) are in better shape than they were before the pandemic.

3. Yield is the real admissions story, not the number of applications.

Yield is the percentage of accepted students who actually enroll. These rates are a truer gauge of popularity when students have multiple options. As this chart below shows, many schools had similar yield rates three decades ago. But now there’s a big divide between the haves and have-nots in higher ed. The most selective colleges have moved up in yield, while the rates for everyone else have plummeted (h/t Scott Smallwood at Open Campus).

4. Social mobility in college is about more than exposure.

In the simplest terms, rich people go to college and graduate at much higher rates than poor people do. This chart above shows that rich people make a far greater share of their friends in college (the yellow line) than do individuals from low-income backgrounds.

The chart is from the economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues at Opportunity Insights, who analyzed a massive dataset from Facebook to figure out our social connectedness and how it comes about. Opportunity Insights is a think tank based at Harvard that studies inequality.

Even when teenagers from low-income households go to college they don’t make as many friends from wealthy families as those who come from wealth do. One reason is that there are fewer low-income students in college; another reason is that colleges have structures in place (like Greek life) that segregate students.

Why does that matter?

Because such social capital is critical to building networks and getting jobs–and eventually achieving higher ed’s promise of social mobility. It’s not enough for students from diverse backgrounds to rub elbows with each other; colleges and universities must build more intentional structures for the groups to not only mingle but also to truly connect.

So Long, Summer:Future U. Is Back

🛎️ School is back in session, and you know what that means: unpacking dorm rooms, shopping course catalogs, and kicking off another season of Future U.

While colleges—and the podcast—have been out for summer, the higher ed headlines have rolled on. Michael and Jeff break down these stories with an eye toward how they set the stage for the school year to come. You can think of this episode as a fall orientation of sorts.

The Department of Education developed new (and hopefully improved) FAFSA rollout plans; the fallout from the spring campus protests stretched into summer; Florida A&M was “gifted” a controversy; 2U went briefly bankrupt; and more.

🎧 Listen to the episode here or on your favorite podcast platform.

🎥 Future U. is also on video for selected episodes this season. Subscribe to the podcast’s channel on YouTube here.

—Daniel Curtis,

Future U. producer

SUPPLEMENTS

🏗️ Where Are the Cranes? Two decades ago, higher ed went on a building spree to serve the huge surge in millennial students coming to campuses. Now, many of those buildings, along with lots of others on campuses, are showing their age. The growing backlog of deferred maintenance at colleges and universities, according to Moody’s, equals somewhere between $750 billion and $950 billion over the next decade at just the schools the ratings agency rates for debt. (Higher Ed Dive)

🔗  College in High School.The U.S. Education Department has released, for the first time ever, the count of dual-enrollment students for every college and university. According to the new data, nearly 2.5 million high-school students took at least one dual enrollment course from a college in 2022-23. Just five states—California, Texas, New York, Indiana, and Florida—accounted for one-third of dual enrollment nationally. About 1 in 5 community college students is in high school. (Community College Research Center)

• Bonus: The author of the blog from the Community College Research Center, John Fink, joined Michael Horn and me onFuture U.last year to talk about dual enrollment. Listen here.

🗺️ A New Map to Life.Are we seeing the end of the linear pathway from K-12 to college to work? It’s a question I asked in a LinkedIn post given the rise of dual enrollment and homeschooling in K-12, alternative pathways in higher ed, and young adults skipping college altogether to get education benefits on the job. Join the conversation on LinkedIn.

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff