A Virtual Spring for Higher Ed

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College campuses are shut down across the country in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

There’s never a good time for a crisis like this in higher ed, but for colleges and universities we’re in the midst of “yield season” for the incoming class.

This is like the end of a quarter for sales executives or Black Friday for retailers. It’s when colleges must close the deal with students and parents who might be weighing multiple offers. As a result, getting families on campus in these weeks is crucial and now that’s not going to happen.

• While we tend to think the campus tour happens at the beginning of the college search, about a quarter of all campus visits by students occur at the end—in the month of April. Of those visits, about half of families are stepping on campus for the first time.

Those figures come from VisitDays, a company that helps colleges schedule student visits. I asked Sujoy Roy, the founder of VisitDays, how colleges should think about their spring admissions programs.

“It requires a change in mindset,” he told me. “The on-campus experience is about managing an event, while moving the experience online requires thinking about it as a production.”

Next on the calendar for potential disruption could be freshman orientation, a key event to stemming “summer melt.”

That would be especially true this year if incoming students don’t get to campus this spring, said Drew Magliozzi, founder and CEO of AdmitHub.

• AdmitHub uses artificial intelligence to power chatbots that colleges use to answer students’ questions about campus policies and services. Many of those questions right now relate to Covid-19.
• When many of AdmitHub’s customers asked for help with those questions, the company developed a resource that automatically answers them via web chat or text message. (The company is offering the resource for free to any K-12 school or higher-ed institution.)
• So many students have so many questions right now “it’s important for schools to destigmatize the shame the most vunerable students have in asking for help,” Magliozzi told me. “Let students know that anyone can ask for help on anything.”

The Successful Pivot to Online Learning

While higher ed has increasingly embraced online learning over the past decade, the sudden pivot to remote education because of Covid-19 has been a steep learning curve for many institutions and their faculty members. Turning a course virtual on a dime is nearly impossible for professors accustomed to lecturing in front of undergraduates.

In talking to college leaders and faculty members over the last week that those with existing online programs have had an advantage in making the switch compared to the vast majority of institutions that pride themselves on in-person education.

“Our conversion was somewhat easier because we had the experience of offering dozens of online programs.”

-Arkansas State's Thilla Sivakumaran

Go deeper: With an article I published on LinkedIn today.

What's Next

Colleges are ramping up their scenario planning to figure out what to do about everything from the remainder of this semester to commencement.

In those scenarios, here are three things officials should be thinking about:

1. Admissions. Some colleges have already shifted their May 1 deposit date to June 1. What other tools will schools use to manage their admissions pipeline in the months ahead? After the Great Recession in the fall of 2008, the lever some colleges used was early decision. Schools that traditionally filled maybe a quarter to one-third of their classes through ED boosted that proportion to upward of half in the fall of 2008. This time, look for colleges to build longer wait lists that they could keep going back to over the summer.
2. Career services. The job market for college seniors has been strong for much of the last decade. Now career services will need to shift their focus to assist seniors navigating a job market where hiring freezes are already being put in place and widespread layoffs are likely to happen in the coming weeks.
3. Enrollment. Higher ed enrollments tends to be countercyclical: they rise when the economy goes south. But our last experience with a big economic downturn like the one we’re likely to see is more than a decade old, when tuition prices were lower, state spending on higher ed was greater, and online education was still something mostly for-profit institutions did. Among the questions I have now:

• Will the newly unemployed turn to colleges for training and education or alternative providers that have entered the market since 2008?
• Will mega-institutions with national online footprints such as Arizona State, Western Governors, and Southern New Hampshire capture market share for adult students from smaller, regional institutions without an online presence?
• What academic programs will prove resilient in coming year? Might students flock to public-health programs, for instance?

Stay safe everyone — Jeff

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