A Summer to Rethink Higher Ed

??♀? Lessons from a week of conferences; how to grow enrollment, and the college where the Olympic pool is going. Here are excerpts from Next. Sign up here .

An ask of you for my next book: I’m looking at both macro and micro shifts in admissions over the last few years to show why students should widen the aperture of the lens on their college search.?

• For the micro shifts, I want to dig down to the level of high schools. So I’d love to see some examples of how admissions to certain colleges that are hot at your high school right now have changed in recent years. For an example of what I’m talking about, see posts on X from Michael Trivette, one of the authors of a book I highly recommend, Colleges Worth Your Money: A Guide to What America's Top Schools Can Do for You .

If you have access to similar examples from your high school for colleges that have shifted in popularity and selectivity for seniors, please take screenshots and attach them in a message to [email protected] .

?? That’s a wrap on another season of Future U. You can listen to our final report on the year here . And then we want your help.

• As we plan for next season—our 8th!—we're conducting a short survey on what you think about the show. You also have a chance to win some swag.
• Here's a link to the survey .?

EVENTS

??? The July Next Office Hour on Wednesday, July 24 at 2 p.m. ET

• Innovation and Inclusivity: Leading Change on Campuses, where we’ll examine the forces that are reshaping higher ed and how to design an innovation process that is both inclusive but bold.
• More details to come, but register now for free here . (Support from the Arizona State University/Georgetown University Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership)

??? The August Next Office Hour on Wednesday, August 28 at 2 p.m. ET

• Student Migration and College Enrollment, where we’ll look at current trends in student migration and how they might change in the future.
• Register for free here . (Support from Campus Sonar)

THE LEAD

When I first started as a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1997, I was lucky to travel a lot–to campuses and to conferences–which provided me a better understanding of higher ed compared to sitting at my desk.?

• My travels this past week reminded me of those days.?
• I was a keynote speaker at three conferences since Saturday and got to spend time at each of the meetings with housing officers in Milwaukee, college presidents in Mackinac Island, MI, and enrollment and marketing leaders in Raleigh.

• I find conferences at this time of year–especially after a particularly difficult one in higher ed–provide leaders a bit of a respite but also help them strategize over the summer.
• According to Flighty, I logged more than 2,220 flight miles in 5 days.?
• Before I rest, I wanted to post some quick thoughts about what I learned. Thank you to everyone who shared their wisdom these past few days:

?? We need to think about the “why” and “how” of AI in higher ed. We need to think about the “why” and “how” of AI in higher ed. The “why” shouldn’t be just because everyone else is doing it. Rather, the “why” is to reposition higher ed for a different future of competitors. The “how” shouldn’t be to just seek efficiency and cut jobs. Rather we should use AI to learn from its users to create a better experience going forward.

??? Residence halls are not just infrastructure. They are part and parcel of the student experience and critical to student success. Almost half of students living on campus say it increases their sense of belonging, according to research by the Association of College & University Housing Officers.?

??♂? How do we extend the “residential experience.” More than half of traditional undergraduates who live on campus now take at least once course online. As students increasingly spend time off campus – or move off campus as early as their second year in college – we need to help continue to make the connections for them that they would in a dorm. Why? 47% of college students believe living in a college residence hall enhanced their ability to resolve conflicts.

?? Career must be at the core of the student experience for colleges to thrive in the future. Yes, some people might see that as too narrow of a view of higher ed or might not want to provide cogs for the wheel of the workforce, but without the job, none of the other benefits of college follow–citizenship, health, engagement.?

?? A “triple threat grad”--someone who has an internship, a semester-long project, and an industry credential (think Salesforce or Adobe) in addition to their degree–matters more in the job market than major or institution.????

?? Every faculty member should think of themselves as an ambassador for the institution. Yes, care about their discipline/department, but that doesn’t survive if the rest of the institution falls down around them.

?? Presidents need to place bigger bets rather than spend pennies and dimes on a bunch of new strategies. That means to free up resources they need to stop doing things.?

??? Higher ed needs a new business model. Institutions can’t make money just from tuition, and new products like certificates, are pennies on the dollars of degrees.?

?? Boards aren’t ready for the future. They are over-indexed on philanthropy and alumni and not enough on the expertise needed for leading higher ed.?

Growing Enrollment in the Decade Ahead

We don’t know yet the full impact of the FAFSA debacle on fall enrollment at colleges, but we do know that undergraduate enrollment has been trending downward for more than a decade.??

• “A lot of people say the demographic cliff is coming, but I say it has arrived,” Angel B. Pérez , CEO of National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), said on a recent edition of the Next Office Hour.?

Driving the news: As the number of traditional-age college students continues to shrink, colleges and universities are increasingly trying to adopt strategies to attract adult students.??

• But there seems to be little agreement on what we mean by the “adult” student: Do we mean working adults who already have a degree? Those who left college with some credit and no degree? Or engaging adults who never started college?
• All those groups are valuable segments of students but a single approach to attracting them won’t work because they have different motivations, said Abbey Bain, vice chancellor for student engagement at Louisiana State University of Alexandria, which has seen a 44% increase in enrollment in the last decade in part by awarding credit for prior learning.
• Before any strategy is put in place, “you have to fundamentally shift the culture on a campus,” Pérez said. Oftentimes, the college is not ready to receive adult students. “You have to teach at night, the registrar's office needs to be open past 5 p.m,,” Pérez said.

What’s happening: But some colleges are shifting how they operate to enroll new segments of students. “It comes from having the mindset of we can't really afford not to,” Bain said. “We're seeing a lot of universities close their doors.”

• At LSU of Alexandria, prioritizing the 670,000 adults in the state with some credit but no credential takes “a lot of one-on-one contact,” Bain said. “A lot of personalization, so that they have the confidence to finish.”
• Meanwhile, Davenport University in Michigan is launching a new set of bilingual degree programs to attract Latino learners. “One week will be in Spanish, one week in English,” said Carlos Sanchez, executive director of Casa Latino. “We're also developing an environment where the student can choose the language in which they want to be served in admissions, advising, and the library.”
• The Community College of Beaver County in southwestern Pennsylvania has moved some of its introductory courses into local libraries in the region because it found students were struggling with transportation to get to campus, said the college’s president, Roger W. Davis .

By the numbers: Despite the image we have of teenagers heading out of state for college, nearly 40% of students attend a school less than 50 miles from home. So at some point, there aren't enough customers in a region. And unlike Home Depot or Walmart, colleges can’t shut down their storefront in order to open one where the population is moving.?

• LSU of Alexandria has tried to draw local students who might be interested in going to the flagship campus, in Baton Rougem by emphasizing affordability. “Over 40% of our students graduate with zero debt,” Bain said.
• Even Trinity College, a selective liberal-arts college in Connecticut which prides itself on serving traditional students, partnered with Infosys when Pérez led enrollment at Trinity. “They wanted their employees to have liberal art skills,” he said.?

Bottom line: The prevailing conversation about higher ed right now is one of retrenchment. College and university leaders need to think more broadly about their mix of products (adding online programs), their mix of students (increasing the learners who get credit for prior work experience), their learner experience (making it seamless to navigate), and their partnerships with employers.

?? Watch the complete webinar on-demand here . (Free registration required)

?? Read a new white paper on four strategies that institutions are employing to grow enrollment (separate registration required. Supported by Cengage EMEA ).?

SUPPLEMENTS

How Do We Measure Learning? For generations, the signal of the college degree has been the strongest signal of knowledge. And for the most part that meant a bachelor’s degree, 120 credits, earned over 4 years. But now there are so many questions about how to validate learning in higher ed. On the next-to-last episode of this season of the Future U. podcast, Michael Horn and I tackle how colleges and universities can increasingly measure the skills and knowledge students are gaining with guests Amber Garrison Duncan of the Competency-Based Education Network and Kelle Parsons of the American Institutes for Research. (Future U. )?

AI Isn’t AI Alone. If you don’t follow Ethan Mollick, the University of Pennsylvania professor who writes about AI in education, you should. One of his recent newsletters caught my attention, especially this passage: “Since AI doesn't work like traditional software, but more like a person (even though it isn't one), there is no reason to suspect that the IT department…has any particular insight into the best uses of AI inside an organization. IT certainly plays a role, but the actual use cases will come from workers and managers who find opportunities to use AI to help them with their job. In fact, for large companies, the source of any real advantage in AI will come from the expertise of their employees, which is needed to unlock the expertise latent in AI.” (One Useful Thing )

Olympic-Sized Dreams. Thanks to all those Frequent Flyer miles, I had the chance to take my kids, who both swim, to a night of finals of the Olympic Swimming Trials in Indianapolis. If you haven’t heard by now, they built a pool in a football stadium...

There’s always a higher-ed angle to everything: I told Karl Einolf, the president of Indiana Tech, the story of our trip to Indy when I saw him at a conference this past weekend. “We’re buying that pool,” he said. Indiana Tech is partnering with Fort Wayne Swim & Wellness Alliance on the project . So far they don’t have a home for the pool, however, Einolf told me, so it will be put in storage until they do.

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff??

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