Finding Life in College

December 18, 2020

In today’s newsletter:

• When it comes to college, what really matters.
• The latest data on college enrollment and early admissions.
• And how colleges miss the mark with academic programs that fail to appeal to students.

A New Way to Measure Value?

One question I’ve received most often in recent months as I’ve spoken to thousands of teenagers, their parents, and college counselors through virtual events at high schools across the country goes something like this: You’re encouraging us to look for colleges outside the top-ranked schools, but what should we be looking for?

Big picture: Rising tuition and stagnant wages since the Great Recession in 2008 means families are increasingly calculating the return on investment of a degree from a specific college.

• Over the last decade, colleges everywhere have been talking about their “value.” Some colleges have enhanced their career services offerings, others have added new majors with connections to “hot jobs,” and a few have been explicit about where their graduates get jobs and how much money they make.
• Last fall, the federal government published a trove of new data that for the first time allowed families to compare the student debt levels and first-year earnings of graduates based on what they studied, broken out by major or graduate degree program.

Yes, but: Thinking about the ROI of a degree only through the lens of the outcome—read: job and salary—misses what happens in the intervening years. In other words, what is the value of the residential learning experience between arriving on a campus and graduation? That’s the essence of the question I’m hearing from parents these days—how do we figure out which colleges deliver the best student experience, both inside and outside the classroom?

What’s next: The value equation that was established partly by the Great Recession is evolving because of another disruptive event—the pandemic.

• Parents with their college kids at home learning remotely are seeing for the first time what happens in the classroom—at least through Zoom—and for the most part they don’t like what they’re paying for.
• It’s not just the classroom experience. From a distance, parents are also seeing their children navigate the “silos” of higher ed, going to multiple offices on campus (or in this case calling or emailing them) to ask for help, repeating their story over and over again.

The bottom line: When I ask college graduates what remains with them long after they leave campus, I always hear about people. We all tend to forget what we learned in a politics or philosophy class, but we remember a professor, a coach, an adviser.

• The Gallup-Purdue Index, which has surveyed some tens of thousands of bachelor’s degree and associate’s degree holders nationwide, found that their well-being in life after college has less to do with where they went to school and more with what they did while they were there.
• The survey found that “six key experiences” double a graduates’ odds of being engaged in their work and thriving in their overall wellbeing throughout their lifetime.
• The six experiences included things such as professors who cared about them as a person, projects that took a semester or more to complete, and an internship or job that applied learning in the real world.
• Having a mentor in college who encouraged students to pursue their “goals and dreams” was found to be the strongest predictor of well-being out of anything that Gallup asked about.
• But here’s the problem: only 14% of graduates recalled having a professor who made them excited about learning and encouraged them.

When you’re looking for college, how do you know a campus has that secret sauce? Last month, a professor at Lehigh University posted this Twitter thread after his final seminar with a group of seniors. Here’s a key piece of it:

Read the whole thread.

? Tell me: What do you think was the magic of your college experience?How would you recommend others find that when searching for a school? Answer anonymously here on this form.

...and name some schools that you think provide those magic ingredients. I hope to use your feedback in updates I’m making to the paperback edition of Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, which will be released in August 2021. 

"Early-admission applications to Ivy League colleges skyrocketed this year, as anxious high-school seniors tried to boost their chances of getting into some of the most selective schools in the country," Melissa Korn reports in today's Wall Street Journal.

The numbers: "Binding early decision applications rose by 22% at Brown University, 23% at the University of Pennsylvania, 29% at Dartmouth College and 49% at Columbia University. At Yale University and Harvard University, applications under the restrictive early-action option jumped by about 38% and 57%, respectively."

Read more (subscription required)

Elsewhere:

• Duke saw its early apps rise 18% and admitted 16% of early applicants.
• Notre Dame admitted 32% of early applicants, including 31% admitted without test scores.
• UVA admitted 39% of students who appliced early decision from in-state and 26% out-of-state.

The Final Word on Fall Enrollment

New estimates out this week from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center show undergraduate enrollment across the U.S. is down 3.6%. Freshman enrollment alone is down 13.1%, a decline the Clearinghouse said is "unprecedented."

SUPPLEMENTS

Amid serious declines in enrollment, colleges are looking to new programs as the key to survival. But a new report from labor analytics company, Burning Glass Technologies, shows that institutions have a disturbingly poor track record of building programs that actually appeal to students. It found, for instance, that two-thirds of new programs started in 2013 and 2014 were conferred fewer than 10 degrees in 2018.  

The 23-campus California State University system was among the first to announce in the spring it would go mostly online for the fall (and eventually for the spring). As a complement to the previous episode of Future U, where Michael Horn and I talked about what it took to welcome students back to campus, in this episode we talk with the president of Sonoma State University about why the Cal State system made the early call to go online.  

One of my favorite higher ed podcasts this fall (beyond Future U, of course) has been the Pandemic Campus Diaries on EdSurge. For the series finale, host Jeff Young asked: which decision—online or in-person—was the right one for students and professors?

One Final Note...

NEXT is part of Open Campus, a nonprofit news organization focused on higher education. Open Campus is working to improve the coverage Americans get about their colleges by creating a local network of reporters dedicated to the beat. Those reporters are supported by a national team of expert journalists who bring depth to the coverage from day one.

Please consider supporting their work. Now through the end of the year, your gift will be doubled, thanks to NewsMatch. Here’s where to give.

Thank you for helping to renew local news and elevate journalism about higher ed.

See you in 2021. I know we can't all wait for this one to be over. Happy New Year — Jeff

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