Biggest Upset in College Athletics Is Yet to Come

??? Why what's happening in college athletics matters to everyone; changing weather patterns and higher ed; net tuition prices drop.?These are excerpts from my newsletter, Next. To get the full version in the future, sign up here .

??BREAKING: Early figures on fall enrollment in higher ed were released yesterday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, and results have a mix of good and bad news for colleges.

?? The bad news: Enrollment among freshmen is down 5% compared to last year. Most of the decline, according to the Research Center, is driven by 18-year olds not going right onto college from high school. Many reasons for this, including the botched rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) last year.

?? The good news. Enrollment at community colleges with large numbers of Pell recipients grew by 1.2% (and held their own overall on enrollment). So it could be that rather than skipping college altogether because of the botched FAFSA, those students decided to enroll in cheaper? (and in some cases free) community college. Now it will be up to 4-year colleges to improve their transfer pipeline from 2-year colleges so as not to lose those students forever.

My friend Scott Smallwood over at Open Campus posted these two charts. One shows that growth is stronger in the West and South than in the Northeast (the shifting geography of higher ed gets a whole chapter in my next book).

Also, while freshmen enrollment is down, the number of dual-enrolled students—who are assumed by the Research Center to be 17 and younger and still in high school while taking college courses—are way up.

?? Michael Horn and I explored the crazy growth in dual enrollment earlier this year on the Future U Podcast with John Fink of Columbia's Community College Research Center: https://www.futureupodcast.com/episodes/the-wild-west-of-dual-enrollment-its-growth-benefits-and-drawbacks/

EVENT

??? The November edition of the Next Office Hour will tackle an issue on the minds of many professors and academic leaders I talk with: how to engage Gen Z.

For many of today’s students, college has turned into a stopping point on the way to a job. It may be impossible for institutions to shift that mindset, but how might they ensure students broadly learn both the soft skills and the job-related skills they need for the workplace? That’s the topic we’ll explore with my guests:

• Debra Fowler , executive director for the Center for Teaching Excellence, Texas A&M University
• Marianna Savoca, Ph.D. , associate vice president for Career Readiness & Experiential Education, Stony Brook University, and co-author of A Good Job Campus Employment as a High-Impact Practice.
• Dr. Amber Williams , vice provost for student success, University of Tennessee at Knoxville?

?? Register for free to join us live or access a recording afterwards. (Support from Workday )

THE LEAD

College football has seen two big upsets in recent weeks with Vandy over Alabama and Oregon over Ohio State. But the biggest disruption is yet to come. And that’s the drip??, drip??, drip?? of changes to intercollegiate athletics that just never stops:

?? A huge antitrust settlement that will require a big payout by universities.

?? A growing market of NIL collectives, which are akin to unregulated money with PACs in politics. An article in the Washington Post this week (gift article) revealed “a lack of transparency that forces many athletes to navigate an unfamiliar economy in the dark, leaving their interests at the whims of the powers holding the purse strings.”

??? And we still have the possibility that college athletes are going to get classified as employees.

Oh, and by the way, there’s conference realignment and lawsuits filed every month from former national champions – like the 1983 NC State men’s basketball team – who want to be (and IMHO should be) compensated by CBS and everyone else who has benefited from their names, images, and likenesses over the years.

All of this has big risks for institutions. But whenever I talk to faculty and administrators on campuses about this, many will wave me away and say, “Well, I’m not a college sports fan” or “We’re a Division III school, so that all this doesn’t impact us.”

Nothing is further from the truth, as we explored on a recent episode of the Future U. podcast , where we welcomed in Matt Brown, editor of the Extra Points newsletter , which looks at academic and financial issues in college sports.

As we learned, despite the siloed nature of higher ed, everything is connected to athletics: research, academics, market position. Institutions can rise and fall on the backs of their athletics programs – and we’re not talking about wins and losses, but real budget dollars.

And if you want to know about the impact on students, look no further than the news out of Clemson this week. It is following many other universities in adopting an “athletics fee”: $300 a year . According to an NBC News investigation from 2020 , 4 out of 5 of the 230 Division I public universities charge students a fee to finance sports teams.

?? Give a listen to this episode of Future U. if you want to catch up quick on this complicated subject, and while you're at it, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

??? Weather Alert in Higher Ed

When Hurricane Helene cut a path through the Southeast late last month and devastated Western North Carolina, several colleges and universities were impacted.

A few still remain closed and others moved their courses online for the remainder of this semester. A week later, Hurricane Milton followed, with several Florida institutions canceling classes for a few days.

As extreme weather causes more destruction nationwide, disruption to the operations of higher education will likely become more of the norm. Recently, I caught up with Bryan Alexander , the author of Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis , about how prepared (or not) colleges are for climate change.

?Here is my conversation with him (edited for space):

Q. Compared to the corporate world, how seriously are college leaders taking the risk of climate to their operations in the future?

Generally speaking, academia is behind the curve when it comes to anticipating and acting on climate risks. There are some exciting first signs of action, such as some presidents agreeing to reduce campus greenhouse gas emissions by a future date, as well as faculty conducting climate research and teaching the subject.??

Some institutions have sustainability offices, or at least officers. A few have gone further, such as setting up a sustainability academic program (Dickinson College) or creating eco-housing (Colorado College). Berea College re-sourced its electrical power to a nearby hydro power station.

Yet there has been resistance to taking more ambitious action. I haven't seen a campus decide to cut down its use of air travel, one of the most intensive contributors of greenhouse gas emissions, for example. Most campuses continue to outsource electrical power to providers burning fossil fuels; few have installed renewables on-site or nearby.?

More ambitiously, I haven't seen plans to relocate campuses away from obvious danger zones, such as coastlines or deserts.?

"Institutional leaders find climate action politically too risky, with plenty of downsides and no perceived advantages."?-Bryan Alexander

Q. Why is academia slow to grapple with climate change?

First, institutional leaders find climate action politically too risky, with plenty of downsides and no perceived advantages. Second, faculty and staff tell me they are already overwhelmed with other issues. Students, in contrast, often report being passionate or depressed about global warming, but see little or no role for their academic career in this crisis.??

Q. What are some of the risks that college leaders don't think about when it comes to climate?

Institutional leaders all too often, and surprisingly, underrate immediate physical dangers to their built environment. One hundred year storms tend to come with disturbing frequency. Campuses near ocean coastlines are vulnerable not only to sea level rise and storms (increasing in both intensity and frequency), but also to salt water infiltration of their water tables. Inland institutions can face the opposite problem of too little or compromised water, not to mention fire damage Institutional insurance policies will reflect this.

We also rarely discuss the psychological impact of escalating climate change. That is, how do we support students (as well as faculty and staff) who will increasingly come to us with climate trauma in their lives, on top of the preexisting mental health crisis?

There are political risks we should also bear in mind, beyond the challenges to researchers mentioned above. A city, county, state, region, or nation might impose climate policies which require a college or university to change behavior, create or modify buildings, alter its landscape, change its curriculum, and so on. Those policies might be pro-climate action or come from a place of climate denial; either way, campuses will have to bear their costs.

Q. For trustees, climate risk seems like an enterprise risk, such as a cyberattack or loss of accreditation. But while those two examples have executives at the college focused on them most days, climate doesn't. So how should trustees monitor climate risk as an enterprise risk?

One emerging campus strategy is to hire a sustainability officer, whose job it is to help develop institutional resilience. The jury is still out as to the impact such officers can have, depending on the configuration of their position and the attitudes of the rest of their institutions.

The COVID experience, painful as it is to recall, might give us an additional strategy. Many institutions in 2020 formed committees to handle the crisis, gathering and sharing information, generating plans, arranging collaborations, and developing policies. A campus climate committee is something to consider, especially if its members cross disciplines and other professional siloes, and includes students.

I want to double down on collaboration. Yes, every college and university has its unique history and character. Each meets the climate crisis based on its distinct situation. Yet we can learn so much by partnering with campuses, especially when it comes to developing and testing plans.

Q. The Wall Street Journal recently had a story that students are flocking to Southern colleges. It ran the same week that Hurricane Helene shuttered campuses for days in Western North Carolina and then Florida campuses had to close temporarily for the second time in as many weeks as Hurricane Milton came through. How should prospective students think about climate in their college search?

If students are concerned about climate risks to a physical campus during their anticipated years of study, we should make available good data on this topic. College rankings and other assessments should describe climate risks for academic institutions. Campuses should communicate their exposure and how they mitigate it.?

At the same time students should be able to determine a campus' climate offerings. Do they have climate minors, majors, certificates? What might a student do practically: organic farming, working on building or maintaining renewable energy systems, and learning social entrepreneurship.

"The climate curriculum is inter- or trans-disciplinary...we could actually conceive of such transdisciplinary study as a new form of the liberal arts."?-Bryan Alexander

Q. Final question, and let's pivot to the curricular side: colleges always seem to be following the next hot trend when it comes to their curriculum. It used to be about sustainability. Now it's AI. How should colleges be thinking about teaching about climate right now?

Colleges already teach about climate change to some degree, depending on the institution. There are undergraduate and graduate courses specifically on climate change. The science of global warming plays a role in other classes, too, from earth science to meteorology. We've seen climate start to appear in other departments, such as the environmental humanities.

We need much more. We can offer more classes tied to specific disciplines - the political science of global warming, for example, or the literature of climate fiction. We can infuse climate into other classes in a variety of ways, from providing examples and case studies to readings and course modules. We can offer various climate-oriented minors, majors, and other degrees: climate science, climate mitigation, decarbonization management, sustainable technology, and more. As the crisis escalates and our interest grows, we should expect to see climate schools at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The climate curriculum is inter- or trans-disciplinary. No one academic department wholly owns global warming. Instead, all can play a role. A campus needs to transition its curriculum broadly as well as deeply, which will require support: professional development, teaching and learning centers, and so on. We could actually conceive of such transdisciplinary study as a new form of the liberal arts.

Beyond curricula, we must also consider pedagogical issues. First, climate change can be a fundamentally frightening subject. How can we teach it without disabling our students' sense of agency or the future? Second, in confronting a topic of such complexity we can turn to simulations and games, which are proven to teach systems well. Third, virtual, augmented, and extended reality technology might be useful in helping students visualize aspects of the crisis, such as a flooded city, the center of a tsunami, or how a geoengineering project might play out. AI can play a role here as well, especially when it comes to supporting interactive simulations.

SUPPLEMENTS

? Blank Space. I noted in Next back in the winter the huge increase in college applicants who either didn’t check a box or checked “unknown” for their race on the Common App. Now that the class has been admitted and enrolled, USA Today reports, “at many selective colleges, a greater number of students chose not to identify their race or ethnicity on their applications.” (USA Today ; subscription required)

?? Cutting College Costs, Board Tensions and Consultant-mania. On the latest episode of Future U., Michael Horn and I tackled a bunch of topics, including how there’s no constituency actually in favor of cost cutting on college campuses; whether outside consultants can play a productive role in higher ed; and how Disney’s succession plan holds lessons for boards of trustees at colleges and universities. (Future U. )

?? Speaking of College Costs. “While sticker prices have continued to balloon to as large as $100,000 at some private, nonprofit universities, the average net price — the remaining cost of tuition after institutional and grant aid is deducted — for undergraduate students entering their freshman year at these institutions clocked in at $16,510 for the 2024-25 academic year, down from $19,330 in 2006-07 (adjusted for inflation to 2024 dollars),” according to a new College Board report. (Chronicle of Higher Education ; registration required)

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff??

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