I work for an R1 private 4-year institution at our Computer Science department as an academic administrator. I have a master’s degree in higher education & student affairs, if that’s helpful context. I’m writing to see if you or the readers have discussed how academic units make or should make strategic planning decisions that blur the line between academics and business.
Our department, a few years ago, launched an OPM-supported online graduate professional program that has drawn a different audience than expected. I’m currently helping moderate conversations between provost-level administrators, the graduate school, our dean, and the department as they decide how to boost enrollment, improve the student experience, and see if major changes need to be made to our online program portfolio. What is curious is that I’m quickly learning that few of these stakeholders are equipped with an extensive financial/business background. While I’m grateful that most of their focus is on the quality of the program, how to structure things to support students, etc., I’m stuck wondering if this is normal? What are the best practices surrounding making larger-scale decisions, such as whether graduate programs need to be maintained, modified, reformatted, or cut? I read about larger schools like WVU (though I hear that’s also impacted by demographic changes and state disinvestment) and am eager to learn how to frame these large-scale decisions.
Honestly, I’m heartened to hear that the senior leadership is as focused on quality as you say. That’s encouraging, and not universal.
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I’ll start by acknowledging that my management experience has been at undergraduate institutions, rather than research universities. I’m hoping that some of my wise and worldly readers will be able to chime in with relevant context.
The theory of shared governance is that various constituencies have different realms of expertise, so having each relevant group bring its perspective to the table is supposed to work as a form of quality control. It can also help generate support for the final outcome in a couple of ways: it offers a shared sense of ownership in the outcome, and it offers exposure to the context for the decision. Sometimes a given option is the least bad one available, but if you don’t know what else was available, it’s easy to attack as being, well, bad. Involving more people in the discussions early can help get past the tendency to postulate the perfect solution that presumes a different universe.
In practice, shared governance isn’t perfect. At one level, in the paragraph above, you can sometimes substitute “interest” for “perspective” and quickly see the issue. At another, sometimes everyone involved in a given discussion is missing key information or perspective, as in the case above.
One helpful approach is to set out decision rules that stand apart from any given case. For example, in any given year we’d get more requests for new faculty positions than the budget could support. That meant saying yes to some and no to others, which can be a fraught enterprise. To make the process fairer, we came up with several criteria that we’d use to rank requests against each other, and then tried to stick to them: overall program enrollment, direction of enrollment (climbing or falling), availability of adjuncts and programmatic accreditation requirements. They’re necessarily imperfect, but they offer a rational basis for choosing one request over another.
In the case above, though, the budgetary parameters were given; our job was to maximize the usefulness of what we had. Your case is more complicated.
My first recommendation would be to recruit someone from the financial side of the institution to join the discussion. OPM agreements have been known to go off the rails; if nothing else, it would be helpful to have their sense of the finances.
To the larger point, no, it’s not unusual for higher-level academic leaders to be relatively untrained in finance. There’s typically a separate side of the organization that specializes in that. Having worked at a for-profit many years ago, I can say that you don’t want finance folks making every academic decision, and I’ll just leave it at that.
Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Is there a reasonably elegant way to get some folks with financial acumen to weigh in without causing undue conflict?
The Supreme Court’s decision striking down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan is “devastating” for millions of borrowers and likely will further complicate plans to restart student loan payments in two months, advocates said.
“It is a dark day for 40 million student loan borrowers,” said Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center, during a press conference Friday, reiterating that the court got it wrong.
The court’s conservative justices ruled in a 6-to-3 decision that the administration did not have the authority under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act of 2003 to forgive up to $20,000 for federal student loans for eligible Americans. That law allows the Education Department to waive or modify parts of the student loan program so that borrowers affected by war, military operation or national emergency—such as the coronavirus pandemic—don’t end up in a worse position financially.
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But, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote in the majority opinion, the debt-relief plan went beyond a modification or waiver. Instead, it would create a “novel and fundamentally different loan forgiveness program.”
“The secretary asserts that the HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal,” Roberts wrote. “It does not. We hold today that the act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up.”
The court’s decision comes nearly a year after Biden first announced his plans to forgive some student loans—a plan that was aimed at helping borrowers avoid default when payments resumed following a three-year pause. Restarting payments without canceling student loans first will be “catastrophic,” advocates for cancellation have said. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently said that millions of borrowers are at risk of defaulting.
About 26 million people applied and more than 16 million were approved for relief before a federal judge blocked the administration from moving forward with the plan.
Payments are set to restart in September, and advocates for debt relief and borrowers are urging the Biden administration to take action now to prevent a wave of defaults.
“In the face of the Supreme Court’s unjust decision, the responsibility to fight for student debt relief falls squarely on the president’s shoulders,” said Natalia Abrams, president and founder of the Student Debt Crisis Center. “This is a moment that demands swift action.”
President Biden said in a statement, “The fight is not over.”
“I will stop at nothing to find other ways to deliver relief to hard-working middle-class families,” the statement said. “My administration will continue to work to bring the promise of higher education to every American.”
Under Biden’s plan, announced last August, individuals who earn less than $125,000 a year would’ve seen their student loan balances drop by $10,000 while those who received Pell Grants in college would have seen an extra $10,000 in relief.
Heritage Foundation legal fellow Jack Fitzhenry and Lindsey Burke, director of Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, said in a joint statement that the court “rightly found that this was an issue for Congress, not the administrative bureaucracy, to decide.”
“If we want to help students deal with the increasing cost of getting a degree, giving a bailout to the very colleges and universities that hike prices is not the answer,” said the representatives of the right-leaning think tank. “Breaking up the monopoly of college accreditors and offering students more higher education options, while simultaneously cutting off the open spigot of federal higher education subsidies, is a start. Ultimately, students should be equipped with the knowledge and certainty that the student loans they take out can be repaid in future employment.”
The Court’s Decision
Six Republican attorneys general sued the Biden administration in September seeking to block the debt-relief plan. The attorneys from six states—Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina—alleged that the plan would harm state revenues and agencies that hold student loans.
“As someone who paid for my education in blood, sweat, and tears in service to my nation, I am extremely pleased with the Court’s ruling today,” Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey said in a statement. “The court recognized that Joe Biden’s plan to force farmers, schoolteachers, and truckers to pay the student loan debts of Ivy League graduates was a gross abuse of power and a slap in the face to every working American who didn’t attend college or who paid off their debts.”
A majority of justices agreed that the state of Missouri had standing to sue the administration because of potential harms to the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), a federal loan servicer. About half of federal borrowers would have their loan balances wiped up under the debt-relief plan, which would cost MOHELA about $44 million a year in fees.
That loss in revenue was a financial harm to MOHELA.
“Today, we have concluded that an instrumentality created by Missouri, governed by Missouri, and answerable to Missouri is indeed part of Missouri; that the words ‘waive or modify’ do not mean ‘completely rewrite’; and that our precedent—old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy,” Roberts wrote.
Whether the plaintiffs had standing was a key issue discussed during oral arguments earlier this year and in many court filings. A separate lawsuit challenging the plan was tossed because the justices unanimously agreed that the two private plaintiffs lacked standing.
“From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the dissenting opinion. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.”
On the merits of the case, Roberts wrote that the statutory text of the HEROES Act alone precludes the debt-relief program.
“What the Secretary has actually done is draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by ‘waiving’ provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new text,” he wrote. “The secretary’s comprehensive debt cancellation plan cannot fairly be called a waiver—it not only nullifies existing provisions, but augments and expands them dramatically.”
In reaching their decision, the justices also applied the major-questions doctrine to the case, which says in part that agencies need clear congressional authorization when carrying out policies that have economic and political significance. Whether the doctrine applied was another key issue raised at oral arguments and in court filings.
Roberts said the debt-relief plans’ economic and political significance “is staggering by any measure.”
“The dissent insists that ‘student loans are in the Secretary’s wheelhouse,’” Roberts wrote. “But in light of the sweeping and unprecedented impact of the Secretary’s loan forgiveness program, it would seem more accurate to describe the program as being in the ‘wheelhouse’ of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations.”
Kagan wrote that the court overreached its role in the nation’s governance in striking down the debt-relief program by granting the states standing and then determining that the HEROES Act does not authorize the plan.
“Wielding its judicially manufactured heightened-specificity requirement, the Court refuses to acknowledge the plain words of the HEROES Act,” she wrote. “It declines to respect Congress’s decision to give broad emergency powers to the Secretary. It strikes down his lawful use of that authority to provide student-loan assistance. It does not let the political system, with its mechanisms of accountability, operate as normal. It makes itself the decisionmaker on, of all things, federal student-loan policy.”
Pressing Biden to Act
Yu, with the Student Borrower Protection Center, and other legal experts said during a press conference after the decision that the opinion did not affect other potential tools the administration could use to provide student loan forgiveness—such as the Higher Education Act of 1965.
“[Biden] has other tools, and he must use those other tools,” Yu said. “We are calling on the administration to immediately issue relief in order to deliver relief to the more than 16 million borrowers we already know qualify for this relief.”
Abby Shafroth, co-director of advocacy and director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the National Consumer Law Center, called the decision heartbreaking.
“It’s wrong on the law, and more importantly, it threatens the financial security of millions of low-income Americans who are struggling with unaffordable student loan debt,” Shafroth said. “They were counting on this debt relief to be able to manage their payments when bills resumed in September for the first time in over three years.”
Shafroth said the decision was narrow in that it leaves open the possibility that the Biden administration could use other avenues to provide debt-relief.
“With a massive wave of defaults and financial distress at risk for borrowers without debt relief in September, it’s clear that every option must be on the table to ensure that Americans with student loan debt … can get the relief they need and can get it now,” she said.
Chavis Jones, associate counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee, said Black and brown borrowers will be hardest hit by the court’s decision.
“The fight for student debt relief continues, and we will not give up,” Jones said. “The letter of the law is clear: student debt relief is and always has been legal.”
Repayment Concerns
Regan Fitzgerald, manager for the Pew Charitable Trust’s project on student borrower success, said she’s worried about how the court’s decision will affect the return to repayment in a few months.
“This means that millions more borrowers than the department was expecting will be returning to repayment this fall,” she said.
Higher education experts and advocates have been worried for months about the department’s ability to turn payments back on following an unprecedented three-year pause. That effort has been further complicated by budget cuts at the Office of Federal Student Aid, which did not receive additional money from Congress for this fiscal year.
“We’re really concerned about the level of service that will be available, and that borrowers will be confused about when their loans are due, who their servicer is, how much they’re going to have to pay, how they can pay and what their options are to pay,” she said.
Fitzgerald said clear communication from the Education Department to borrowers and loan servicers will be crucial to making sure all parties understand the process and their options.
The department is currently working to finalize a more generous version of an income-driven repayment plan that would make payments more affordable for borrowers and provide more pathways to forgiveness.
Fitzgerald said rolling out that plan will be “a huge undertaking” for Federal Student Aid on top of resuming student loan payments.
Yu said that the administration’s plan to offer a more generous income-driven repayment program is not enough to address the student debt crisis.
“Income-driven repayment cannot be the plan to prevent tens of millions of borrowers from falling into financial distress,” she said. “The servicing system is not prepared to administer income-driven repayment for 43 million borrowers.”
Higher Ed’s Response
Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, said the decision likely won’t have a direct impact on colleges and universities, though the fight over forgiveness highlighted the ongoing concerns about affordability of higher education.
“There’s so much frustration with the system,” he said. “While forgiveness wouldn’t have fixed that, it certainly would have helped a lot of people with the problems they are facing.”
He said the student loan system is broken and that a “comprehensive overhaul of how we pay for college” is needed.
That effort would take Congress working together, though, which Fansmith said would be very hard in the current political environment.
In recent weeks, congressional Republicans have proposed their own plans to reform the student loan system. Fansmith said the debate and movement has shown that this is an issue that people care deeply about.
“If that doesn’t drive you to take action, that’s a real missed opportunity,” Fansmith said.
Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said the decision will be “difficult—if not devastating—news” for student loan borrowers nationwide.
“And as we prepare for student loan payments to resume after more than three years, we must get on with the work of helping these same borrowers face the reality of student loan repayment,” he said in a statement. “Today’s Supreme Court decision only underscores the urgent need for student loan reform.”
That includes increasing the federal Pell Grant, which several other associations and institutions mentioned in their statements reacting to the decision.
The University of California system said in a statement that it was disappointed in the court’s decision.
“This historic relief program would have made a significant impact on the lives of college graduates, particularly for those from low-income backgrounds who are more likely to take on debt to complete their education,” the statement said. “It also harms society as a whole: Those with student loans are less likely to earn advanced degrees, purchase a home, start their own business or make other investments that benefit their communities.”
The system encouraged student loan borrowers to consider all their loan-repayment options through the Education Department.
“At the University of California, we are committed to helping students make payments more economical and less burdensome,” the statement said.
Dominic Quan Treseler, president of the California State Student Association, said in a statement that the decision “overlooks the crippling impact of student debt on millions of graduates and the wider implications it has on the socioeconomic fabric of our society.”
“Despite this setback, CSSA remains steadfast in our commitment to advocate for accessible and affordable higher education,” Treseler said. “This decision does not mark the end of our efforts; rather, it fuels our determination to push for systemic changes that will lead to a more equitable education system.”
The Kentucky Supreme Court has sided with students, allowing their suit to proceed. They are seeking more than $200 million from the University of Kentucky over its COVID-19 policies, The Louisville Courier Journal reported.
The students want a portion of their spring 2020 tuition and fees refunded because the university did not offer classes in person at that time.
The university maintains that it did not have a contract with the students.
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“In exchange for the payments of the tuition and fees, the students had a legitimate expectation to receive what they paid for,” the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled. The decision sends the case back to circuit court.
In a statement provided to the Courier Journal, a University of Kentucky spokesperson said the university’s actions during the pandemic “not only saved lives,” but also “followed the letter of the law.” He added, however, that the Supreme Court decision was limited. “The only issue here was whether immunity barred the students’ claim. It is not a decision on the merits.”
Fitch Ratings’ 2024 outlook for higher education enrollment is fairly bleak, according to data offered during an online presentation Thursday.
Emily Wadhwani, Fitch’s senior director for U.S. higher education, cited demographic declines as a primary factor, especially in the Northeast and Midwest; she said certain states, including Maine and Pennsylvania, have been particularly hard hit. She also said public doubt in the value proposition of a college degree was eating away at the remaining enrollment potential.
While higher ed’s economic outlook improved slightly since last year, Wadhwani said burgeoning expenses—in the form of rising labor costs as well as persistent inflation and the subsequent increase in utilities and materials costs—made enrollment struggles all the more damaging, especially for tuition-dependent private institutions. She also said stagnant or declining state support was making public institutions more reliant on enrollment increases, which were largely not materializing.
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The projections are in line with Fitch’s December report, which warned that higher ed’s economic standing was “deteriorating,” thanks in no small part to languid enrollment.
While the agency held relatively stable ratings for most institutions throughout the pandemic due largely to federal relief aid, Wadhwani said continued post-pandemic woes would likely lead to worse ratings for more institutions next year.
“The winner-take-all dynamic will become more pronounced,” she said. “We’re going to see more bifurcation between institutions, and that bifurcated area will likely widen.”
The institutions that have shown resilience or adaptability are those that recognized the need for “programmatic flexibility” and invested in specific offerings that could distinguish them in a crowded field, Wadhwani added. She said she expects more institutions to make “difficult choices” in the coming year, reorienting their budget priorities and cutting costs from areas that do not show returns.
Wadhwani also commented on the potential impact of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on admissions, warning that the steep drop in underrepresented students in states that previously banned race-conscious admissions could be replicated on a national scale. But she noted that most institutions have been working “quietly and strategically” to revise their admissions policies and predicted that the overall effects of the affirmative action ban will be “muted.”
A professor and two students were stabbed Wednesday in a philosophy class on gender issues at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, the Associated Press reported.
A suspect in the stabbings is a member of the “university community,” a spokesman said. The suspect is being questioned.
The three who were stabbed were being treated at a hospital for what were described as non-life-threatening injuries.
Yusuf Kaymak, a student, told CTV News the attack happened in a gender studies class. “The guy basically walked in and asked the teacher if he was the professor; he said ‘yeah,’ then he pulled out a knife and after that, everybody just ran out,” Kaymak said.
The ability to collect, organize, interrogate and make sense of data is an essential job skill in the 21st-century marketplace. A Harvard Business Reviewanalytic services report notes that nearly 90 percent of organizations say success depends on data-driven decisions made by front-line employees. To ensure students can succeed in this market, colleges and universities of all types and sizes must move rapidly to build students’ data competencies.
Yet higher ed institutions are far from ready to help students level up their data skills. Too few faculty members, instructional staff and librarians have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach students these competencies. Even among those faculty and others who are ready, too often they still face barriers to accessing the tools and materials required to fully integrate data literacies into the curriculum.
At an institutional level, it is difficult to procure access to large-scale data sets, which often come with concerns over intellectual property rights, privacy issues and various data-extraction and delivery options. All these efforts—to learn, to train, to support and to create and update curricula—also require time.
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Some institutions are taking steps to address these challenges at the local level in order to help students build data skills. Universities are creating data majors within existing departments, while others—such as the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Texas at San Antonio—have established entire schools of data science. This approach accelerates progress at these schools by adopting new courses and majors rather than retooling entrenched curricula.
Outside of creating a school or department, large institutions are setting up specialized institutes focused on teaching data literacy and working with research data, such as UNC at Chapel Hill’s Research Hub. At smaller institutions, existing staff are reskilling in areas such as Python, R, SQL and natural language processing so they can teach these skills as part of their courses. Still other colleges and universities are developing smaller departments and programs within their libraries, with data literacy acting as a natural extension of the information literacy courses traditionally taught by librarians.
This activity, while important, is uneven, and it risks leaving behind students at schools with fewer resources and missing opportunities to share services, like the aggregation of rights-cleared data sets, in ways that expedite progress.
Solutions exist that address these gaps. My organization, the nonprofit Ithaka, has developed Constellate, a free platform that helps faculty members easily and effectively teach students text analysis and data skills by integrating vast repositories of scholarly content, including from its peer services JSTOR and Portico, and open educational resources into a cloud-based lab.
This year, it also is continuing the Text Analysis Pedagogy (TAP) Institute, a program originally funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to train postsecondary educators to teach data and text analysis. The institute—open to faculty, librarians, staff and graduate students interested in teaching text analytics—trains participants in a monthlong series of courses focusing on data analytics, data visualization and machine learning. The goal is to train the trainers, empowering college educators to help students acquire marketable data skills.
Overwhelming interest in the TAP Institute shows the need for such skill development. In its first two years, it has trained more than 400 higher education faculty members, librarians, research staff and graduate students in humanities-focused text analysis. Before the 2022 institute, participants were asked if they were ready to teach text analysis, and 79 percent reported they were not. After the institute, this number fell to 27 percent. Similar interest in Constellate is coming from institutions of all sizes and resource levels in the United States and abroad.
Scaling affordable ways for schools to teach and for students to learn data competencies is essential. This type of educational training must be widespread to produce tomorrow’s workers and promote students’ success; it cannot be a privilege for students at the largest or most affluent institutions.
Constellate is one of a range of needed solutions being developed and tested to address this skill gap. Both the Carpentries and the Digital Humanities Research Institute aim to develop technical skills to support teaching and research. There have also been efforts to address the challenge of providing rights-cleared access to big data sets with support for text and data mining, like those offered by the recently retired CADRE Project.
Scaling affordable ways for schools to teach and for students to learn data competencies is essential. This type of educational training must be widespread to produce tomorrow’s workers and promote students’ success; it cannot be a privilege for students at the largest or most affluent institutions. And it should be part of the curriculum for all students, not just the data scientists. The future of data-driven careers is here, and higher education needs to be ready to help students succeed in this world.
Nathan Kelber is the educational manager for Constellate and director of the Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute. Before helping start Constellate, Kelber taught data literacy and digital scholarship at Wayne State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work focuses on data literacy, social justice and open educational resources for the digital humanities and data science.
a professor and two students were stabbed Wednesday in a philosophy class on gender issues at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, the Associated Press reported.
A suspect in the stabbings is a member of the “university community,” a spokesman said. The suspect is being questioned.
The three who were stabbed were being treated at a hospital for what were described as non-life-threatening injuries.
Yusuf Kaymak, a student, told CTV News the attack happened in a gender studies class. “The guy basically walked in and asked the teacher if he was the professor; he said ‘yeah,’ then he pulled out a knife and after that, everybody just ran out,” Kaymak said.
“I know college is something that exists out there. It’s something that I can do. But will I be able to do it?” —Seema Ramdat, graduate of John Jay College
The voice of a student from John Jay College in the City University of New York system opens this brief reflection on slow active learning. As educators at CUNY, we have heard similar voices many times, each offering a version of the same message: my educational journey is not clear. It is precarious. I see red flags.
And indeed, this is true for many college students in the United States today, including first-generation students, lower-income strivers, students who experience racial barriers and disabled students. Those students are asking, “How does higher education work? How do I fit into this thing called college? How does college fit within the trajectory of my life? How did I get here?”
Such questions point to the students’ desire for integration, their desire to better understand the relationship of college life to their life. Yet they suggest that education can interrupt or stymie the desire for wholeness rather than satisfy it. A survey published by the World Economic Forum revealed one of the top reasons students drop out is that they simply do not know why they are in college.
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In our experience as college instructors, we’ve found that the practice of writing their educational narratives is one way to help students turn their educational question marks into coordinates. Educational narratives promote slow active learning. Like narratives in literature that relate events and characters, active learning helps students to piece together their own educational moments, experiences and influences.
For all kinds of nontraditional students, their educational stories are not easy to tell or relate to. So much about education can seem random. Yet not piecing together their educational narratives makes students bystanders rather than active participants and authors of their own educational and life stories.
So how can classroom instructors help students write educational narratives that foster integration and orientation? And how can we do so in ways that do not smooth over or ignore students’ often broken trajectories, their doubts and questions, and their sense of educational disorientation?
We can ask a simple question: “How did you get here?” Note that this is an active learning exercise that faculty members in all types of disciplines can use early on as part of classroom introductions and then throughout the semester. The question lends itself to the work of creating complex educational narratives, because it asks several questions at once.
How Did You Get Here Today?
This seemingly mundane question makes students’ commutes to classes part of their educational journeys. It prompts students to think about their lived experiences of getting an education, which requires getting to an education. Drawing on the work of disability rights scholars, we know that overlapping systems need to function in tandem in order for many students to get here.
For example, public transportation systems such as New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, must be working if our commuter students are to have any hope of getting to and then navigating public higher education systems like CUNY. Disabled students may also rely on working elevators or reliable paratransit, neither of which have a great track record.
When transportation fails or is delayed, educational progress can also stall. Making these kinds of connections between students’ experiences gives them a manageable way to begin to answer and conceptualize the larger question of “How did you get here?” It also provides an opportunity to work toward an anti-ableist pedagogy that recognizes our shared needs and invites conversation about the barriers present in the systems we depend on. When educational narratives become material histories of access and resource distribution, students learn to entangle the individual and the systemic in order to resist the allure of triumphalist student (and teacher) success stories.
How Did You Get Here, Into This Class?
This question asks students to narrate the process of class scheduling as part of their educational journeys. How did your class schedule get determined? Was the process transparent or opaque? Did you follow your work schedule or a formal degree plan? Did you consult an adviser or peers? Getting into a particular class is a question of systems, bureaucracies and the availability—or not—of information.
Unfortunately, this scheduling thread of the narrative can often seem like the major plot line of the college story, as though enrolling in the courses one needs to graduate is the most important graduation requirement. Certainly, understanding how to navigate one’s degree path is crucial to student progress. But the process of figuring out which classes will count and, in turn, advance one most quickly and cost-effectively toward graduation—a primary concern of poor and working-class students—ought not be the drama that our students report it to be in their educational narratives. Their negative, stressful experiences of course selection could be avoided with more robust advising, greater student-to-student engagement and improved technology.
Asking this second version of the question “How did you get here?” thus reveals two important findings. First, students retain quite vividly their feelings of frustration about how—or whether—they got into a class. Educational narratives take such affective experiences seriously, incorporating them as key data points.
And second, the question reveals that students are highly attuned to the work of avoiding classes that seem to obscure the path to graduation, classes such as queer studies or disability studies, our two areas of expertise. Educational narratives thus reveal the power of the recognizable and the normative to curtail discovery and the surprise of learning. Recovering the possibility of discovery and surprise can become a previously unthought educational goal for students who develop narratives of their journeys.
How Did You Get Here, to College—and This College?
This is the most straightforward formulation of the question—and the hardest to answer. It asks students, and also professors, to explicitly integrate the here of college with the there of their lives. That integration is, of course, the entire goal of education.
The goal is neither to “go away” to college (the traditional, residential college narrative) nor to “get through” college to earn a degree (the transactional, social mobility narrative). The goal, rather, is to integrate and sustain one’s education for life: on the job, at home, in the community. Such big questions often produce big question marks as answers. “I’m not completely sure how I got here,” many students say. To which the exercise of writing their educational narrative helps provide an answer: “OK, but try to tell us. Start with question No. 1: How did you get here today?”
A Continual Redrafting
These three questions produce a first draft of an educational narrative, a form of authorship that each student pieces together from sometimes disconnected or disorienting educational experiences. Yet educational narratives require revision as a class progresses, not least because in a peer-to-peer, active learning classroom, students have the pedagogical orientation and tools to produce a shared educational narrative. Students in one of our classes reflected this shift to collective narrativization and knowledge production:
“Sharing our personal stories of how we got to CSI with each other made us realize that not many of us planned to come here. A common denominator for why we ended up here was financial reasons and convenience. Many of us have jobs and some have children. Now that we are here we realize that CSI has great opportunities and programs, but it is very underfunded.”
In that this layered and now collective question “How did I/we get here?” needs to be ongoing, answered and answered again, it captures the necessarily recursive drafting and redrafting process of writing our educational narratives. In this sense, the continuing work of constructing integrated educational narratives produces slow active learning, a long-term project of making sense of education for life: “While we came to this class for many different reasons,” one class wrote in a collective voice, “we hope to take all that we learned here and apply it to our everyday lives and careers.”
Near the end of the semester, we can ask one final question that further shows that active learning is sometimes revealed only slowly, over time, even as active learning also often succeeds through immediate engagement. “To whom did you teach our class?” Notice that it’s now “our” class, not “this” class.
Students react to the question “To whom did you teach our class?” with authority and variety, reflecting their ability to internalize and extend classroom pedagogies. Reversing student and teacher roles, this question elicits responses including, “My peers outside of class,” “coworkers,” “parents and siblings,” “children,” “customers” and our favorite: “my professor.” It often reveals that our disoriented students, who sometimes can’t say quite how or why they got here, have in fact been teachers all along.
Like the best lessons, this is a lesson our students teach us, not the other way around. In writing their extended educational narratives, they show us that they are constantly teaching others in rooms their professors never see. They are actively engaged in the slow, integrative work of moving transformative pedagogy out there, beyond the classroom and walls of the academy and into the rest of their lives. Indeed, an educational narrative that students carry with them into their daily lives, communities and the world is an educational narrative that does not end.
Matt Brim is professor of queer studies in the English department at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Jessica Murray is director of digital communications for transformative learning in the humanities at the City University of New York.
The West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission this month granted reauthorization for every private college in the state to continue to operate and award degrees, except for one: Alderson Broaddus University, MetroNews reported.
The commission delayed a decision on Alderson Broaddus because of concerns about the university’s finances, said Sarah Armstrong Tucker, chancellor of the commission. The commission requested additional information about Alderson Broaddus.
Enrollment at the college is down to about 500 undergraduate and 170 graduate students.
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The university declined to answer specific questions about enrollment or finances.
But it released this statement: “In the general higher education landscape, enrollment numbers have been in decline at most colleges and universities. With a smaller pool of traditional college-aged students, the effects of the pandemic, and an emphasis on technical education, enrollments at four-year institutions have dropped. All colleges and universities, especially private institutions, have been impacted over the last several years.”
A reader wrote in with a thoughtful response to the question of how to structure classes in light of ChatGPT and its variants:
The main attitude here seems to be that academic essay assignments serve the greater good by teaching students how to write documents in formal English. If, in this brave new world, students learn to use this new tool to help them put together documents in the appropriate style with the appropriate content, then we have done our jobs. If you get the right answer using a calculator instead of a slide rule, well, in your eventual engineering career you will have access to a calculator, so off you trot. Who knows? Maybe chat gpt really is taking over the world, and we should be teaching students how to use it effectively, just like we should be teaching them how to use calculators effectively, rather than insisting that they use slide rules. On the other hand, if students use this new tool and the results are bad, as in your vice presidents becoming presidents example, well, they didn’t reach the goal of writing a paper with the appropriate content, did they? Either way, let’s judge outcomes.
This seems to be the direction things are going, at least for the moment. It’s a variation on using canned tomatoes in “homemade” spaghetti sauce. A purist might object that one is building on something already produced, but one person’s sauce will be very different from another’s even if they use the same canned base. Similarly, someone using an AI-generated essay as an outline or a prompt might well take it in an entirely different direction, to say nothing of whether they bother fact-checking. As I taught my students, editing is a skill in itself.
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On the other hand, that position may only be tenable while AI bots are still in the relatively crude, early phase. As they improve, they may get better at sounding human. As that happens, there may be less room for students (or others) to make the output their own. Some professors are already bringing back oral exams as ways to defeat write-o-matic devices. One history professor I know assigns her students to produce podcasts on given topics in lieu of a paper. She reports that they’re more fun to listen to and harder for students to fake.
I’m not a formal scholar of communications, but I’m fascinated by ever-more-complex technology pushing us consistently back toward the oral tradition. A hundred years from now, will formal writing be considered quaint? Perhaps a transitional technology that became irrelevant after the transition? I hope not—there’s something to be said for the sustained focus that writing both generates and demands—but the tendency is clear.
If that’s true, then one task for higher education might be to find ways to encourage deeper thinking other than through writing. Gamification leaps to mind, as do oral exams, projects, and debates. In the Socratic tradition, sustained oral questioning was considered the route to truth. That’s maddeningly hard to do well—witness the number of variations on “it is certainly so, Socrates” in the various Platonic dialogues—but when it works, it’s glorious.
As a fan of Susan Cain’s work, I’m compelled to note that writing as a medium is particularly suited to introverts. Introverts tend to prefer to mull things over before holding forth on them, and writing allows for that. Moving from a writing-centered culture back to one based on oral traditions may amplify the already-too-strong tendency in American culture toward rewarding bluster over substance. But if we can find other ways for smart introverts to make their contributions—and I’m sure that we can—we might be able to avoid inadvertently relegating some of our best minds to the margins.
Yes, of course, results matter. But the process of getting those results is supposed to be educative in itself. The point of assigning a paper isn’t the paper; it’s the struggle the student goes through in writing the paper. Take away the struggle, and you take away the point. Driving the length of a marathon is much easier than running it—I assume—but it isn’t quite the same thing.
Wise and worldly readers, have you found introvert-friendly ways to encourage more reflective participation beyond writing? I’d love to hear (via writing, ironically enough) via email at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com, on Twitter at @deandad or on Mastodon at @deandad at-sign masto (dot) ai.
A George Mason University professor last week lost his court argument that the institution disciplined him for sexual harassment based on anti-male bias.
“The university officials’ statements on which [Todd] Kashdan relies do not plausibly show anti-male bias or demonstrate that anti-male bias was a but-for motivating factor in GMU’s disciplinary actions against him,” wrote Judge Allison Jones Rushing on behalf of the unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
She wrote,
Kashdan has been a psychology professor at GMU for over 15 years and primarily studies sex, human sexuality and cultural norms. In December 2018, four current and former female graduate students accused Kashdan of sexually harassing them. In essence, the complainants alleged that during two graduate courses and in interpersonal interactions in his laboratory, at professional conferences and at student events hosted in his home, Kashdan told them explicit stories about his personal sexual experiences, as well as made explicit remarks and asked intimate questions about their sex lives. One complainant also recounted that Kashdan went to a strip club with her and other graduate students, and another complainant alleged Kashdan hugged her in a manner she believed was inappropriate.
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George Mason’s punishment of Kashdan included a ban on “teaching graduate-level courses, mentoring new graduate students or hiring new graduate students as research assistants, all for a period of roughly two years,” the judge wrote. Kashdan remains a tenured professor.
“I am disheartened by the Fourth Circuit’s decision,” he said. “I filed the lawsuit in response to a lack of due process and false allegations of harassment, to attempt to fix a dysfunctional Title IX process in academia and to protect others facing similar injustices. In my case, the harassment charge focused on group conversations in graduate-level classes and meetings.”
Most states were able to keep financial aid programs at public colleges intact during the pandemic, but they were not able to provide financial aid to undocumented students or make them eligible for in-state tuition.
These are among the findings of two new reports released Thursday by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
Federal pandemic relief funds protected a vast majority of existing state financial aid programs, according to the report. Additionally, 14 states said the funds allowed them to expand existing programs and/or pilot new ones. Only two states, Nevada and Oregon, reported a reduction in financial aid budgets due to the pandemic, Jessica Colorado, a policy analyst at SHEEO and author of one the reports, said in a press release.
The survey results were not as positive when it came to undocumented students. Only about a quarter of states offer in-state tuition to undocumented students in both their two- and four-year institutions, and about half deem undocumented students ineligible for state financial aid, the survey responses showed.
The effects of state financial aid policies on undocumented students often mirror federal policies, but state grant and in-state tuition regulations still “vary widely across the U.S.,” Rachel Burns, who authored the other report and is also a policy analyst at SHEEO, said in the press release.
Higher education’s accreditation system violates the Constitution, Florida governor Ron DeSantis alleges in a new federal lawsuit against the Biden administration that’s aiming to strip accreditors of their authority.
“I will not allow Joe Biden’s Department of Education to defund America’s #1 higher education system all because we refuse to bow to unaccountable accreditors who think they should run Florida’s public universities,” DeSantis said in a statement.
Colleges and universities have to be accredited by an Education Department–recognized accreditor in order to receive federal student aid, according to U.S. law. In recent years, some institutional accreditors have spoken against state lawmakers’ efforts to reshape higher education and have become the target of criticism.
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“Accreditation standards are not advisory or optional,” the complaint says. “Rather, all postsecondary institutions must be accredited by a recognized accrediting agency to be eligible for any federal funding programs for higher education. Making matters worse, colleges and universities cannot freely choose their masters, as federal law requires them to show ‘reasonable cause’ to change accreditors.”
DeSantis has long focused on accreditation as a problem, and former president Trump has picked up on that line of criticism as part of his 2024 presidential campaign. Other conservative groups are also starting to focus on the role of accreditors.
“Governor DeSantis is now bringing his culture wars, like book bans, to the long-standing system that helps ensure students receive a quality college education,” the White House said in a statement. “This administration won’t allow it. We’re committed to ensuring all students receive a high-quality education, and will fight this latest effort by opponents to get in the way of that.”
Florida passed a law last year that required state colleges and universities to change accrediting agencies every 10 years. The complaint argues that the Education Department has issued guidance over the last year to make it more difficult for a Florida college or university to switch accreditors. The state wants a federal judge to at least toss out the guidance.
“Governor DeSantis and I believe a high-quality education should be held to the highest standards,” said Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, in a news release. “The University of Central Florida’s goal to become a preeminent university and join the American Association of Universities is better supported by joining The Higher Learning Commission.”
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges is currently the accreditor for Florida institutions.
Taking active, predictive and creative measures to track student progress can positively impact student success.
Blue Planet Studio/iStock/Getty Images Plus
This spring, Major League Baseball banned the defensive shift, a tactic that lets teams respond instantly to batters’ tendencies by loading up one side of the infield to prevent hits. It’s a change that’s seeking to respond to a greater issue in the game—how to sort through an enormous trove of baseball data to gain a competitive edge.
Until recently, baseball traditionally has been ruled by so-called counting statistics. Players who led the league in home runs and strikeouts were seen as stars. But building analytics muscle has allowed teams to compile and analyze enormous amounts of data. Sophisticated calculations have created a wealth of situational information that helps managers decide which players to play and what adjustments to make.
Known as sabermetrics or “moneyball”—a term that comes from a book and movie of that name—empirical statistical modeling gives a much more complete and accurate picture of in-game success in baseball. It’s data that can be used in real time to affect the outcome of a single moment or even an entire game. This type of data has changed baseball—but is still too often missing from higher education.
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That’s because higher ed professionals measure student success with traditional counting statistics such as persistence and completion rates. These cumulative metrics are usually examined long after the end of the academic year and offer little chance to improve a learner’s likelihood of staying in school and graduating.
Higher education needs its own version of moneyball—a set of active, predictive and creative measures that can be deployed to improve student outcomes and fulfill their promise of student success. Postsecondary institutions must be able to collect and instantaneously analyze student progress data and have intentional plans for adjusting in the moment to the needs of their learners.
Every institutional leader would agree that going from matriculation to completion is critical, yet there are data indicating that colleges are moving in the opposite direction. A recent Ad Astra report reveals that college students took nearly 15 percent fewer credit hours in the fall 2021 semester than they did just two years earlier. Full-time students at the nation’s four-year public institutions are taking an average of 14.75 credit hours each semester. That means the typical student won’t be able to graduate in four years and will have to spend more time and money to finish a degree.
A Complete College America policy brief published in 2022 shows that the credential attainment of part-time learners lags far behind that of their full-time counterparts. Most institutions are ill equipped to serve part-time students, who make up 40 percent of the nation’s college enrollment. That presents significant equity challenges because part-time students are disproportionately students of color, ages 25 and older, and community college students.
To see trends as they develop, institutional leaders should:
Use active measurements to augment existing data so they can understand what’s working and implement change at the learner level. They should focus on using data around course schedules and productive credit hours—classes that count toward an intended credential—to compare a learner’s actual progress toward a degree with their expected progress. When the metrics reveal students who aren’t making timely progress toward graduation, institutions can adjust course offerings quickly to improve student retention and degree completions.
A new Ad Astra research project that examined degree progress and completion data from four-year regional public institutions contains some promising findings. One university found that having students take one extra course per term that counts toward their degree increased graduation rates by 11 percent and retained students on average for 22 more credit hours.
Commit to new advanced planning frameworks so institutions are prepared to address trends as they develop. This planning starts with insights that enable institutions to identify opportunities for accelerating student progress and predict the efficacy of those interventions on retention and graduation rates. By adopting predictive metrics, administrators will be able to determine the effectiveness of their forecasts and take further action to address any gaps that remain.
Envision an ideal world where they have access to all relevant data and more precise measurements on which to base decisions. This creative mind-set encourages the identification of measures that align with an institution’s mission, measure progress on reform efforts that prioritize equitable student attainment and strive for a deep understanding of student success—much like the moneyball strategy that values a broader range of player skills that can be counted and rated. Adopting a sabermetrics approach enables institutions to measure exactly what matters so they can do more to help students achieve their full potential.
Postsecondary institutions will never be called on to decide whether to intentionally walk a hot hitter. But they do have access to significant amounts of data that can help more students graduate on time and reach their personal and career goals.
Higher education should augment existing statistics with new metrics that more objectively understand what works for their learners. A moneyball approach doesn’t change the goal of the game—institutions should still be measured by completion—but it creates more room for strategies that will make more learners into winners.
Sarah Collins is president of Ad Astra, a data-informed solutions provider, and Charles Ansell is vice president for research, policy and advocacy at Complete College America.
Legislators in Idaho are questioning a plan by the University of Idaho to create a nonprofit organization to manage the assets of the University of Phoenix, KTVB7 News reported.
“We see that this transaction has potential, but we also see that it has risk. And as elected representatives, we on this committee specifically have the duty of fiscal oversight of the taxpayers’ money,” said Representative Wendy Horman.
Horman is one of the leaders on Idaho’s budgeting committee, which met Friday to ask questions of the University of Idaho and board leaders.
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“We want to trust, but we must verify. And if we can’t verify, we can’t trust,” Horman said. “So, we want to ensure that this deal is constitutional, legal, financially sound and that Idaho taxpayers will not pay the price if the deal does go awry.”
A major concern is the nondisclosure agreements signed by those who were aware the deal was under consideration.
“I fully recognize that the way this transaction was conducted was not ideal and probably was not my preference. But as those of you who work in business know, sometimes we have to play the cards that were dealt and make compromises to reach agreements to get done,” said Scott Green, the university’s president. “This transaction came to us very recently. We quickly identified the transaction and we put together a team of the best and brightest experts out there.”
The College Board is defending its approach to Advanced Placement psychology, including teaching about gay issues, to Florida officials.
The Florida Department of Education Office of Articulation has requested that the College Board audit and potentially modify AP courses relative to the new Florida laws that restrict classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity.
The College Board released a letter Thursday that it sent to Florida:
“[College Board] will not modify our courses to accommodate restrictions on teaching essential, college-level topics. Doing so would break the fundamental promise of AP: colleges wouldn’t broadly accept that course for credit and that course wouldn’t prepare students for careers in the discipline.The learning objective within AP Psychology that covers gender and sexual orientation has specifically been raised by some Florida districts relative to these recent regulations. That learning objective must remain a required topic, just as it has been in Florida for many years. As with all AP courses, required topics must be included for a course to be designated as AP.”
“Understanding human sexuality is fundamental to psychology, and an Advanced Placement course that excludes the decades of science studying sexual orientation and gender identity would deprive students of knowledge they will need to succeed in their studies, in high school and beyond,” said Arthur C. Evans Jr., the organization’s CEO. “We applaud the College Board for standing up to the state of Florida and its unconscionable demand to censor an educational curriculum and test that were designed by college faculty and experienced AP teachers who ensure that the course and exam reflect the state of the science and college-level expectations.”
Average annual spending on college course materials fell to a decade low of $285 in the 2022–23 academic year, Student Watch found, according to a press release from the Association of American Publishers.
That marks a 57 percent decline since 2012–13.
“We’ve noticed a really consistent decrease in student course material spending over time,” said Lacey Wallace, research analyst for the National Association of College Stores, which produced the Student Watch report. “As the space shifts to digital, costs do decrease. A lot of inclusive-access programs are digital first.”
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Inclusive access is a course material model designed to deliver to students all relevant course resources—including textbooks and digital materials—at the lowest market rate by the first day of classes.
The AAP cited a similar report from Student Monitor in May, which found that average student spending on course materials had dropped to $333—a 41 percent decrease from a decade ago.
House Republicans’ latest plan to improve the student loan system focuses on helping defaulted borrowers get back on track and adjusting income-driven repayment plans.
North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx, the Republican who chairs the House education committee, sponsored the Federal Assistance to Initiate Repayment (FAIR) Act along with Utah representative Burgess Owens and Michigan representative Lisa McClain, both Republicans.
The act would create one income-driven repayment plan, prevent excessive interest from accruing for distressed borrowers, end time-based forgiveness, require the department to provide more guidance to loan servicers and allow borrowers in default to enroll in an affordable repayment plan, according to a fact sheet.
“The FAIR Act is a fiscally responsible, targeted response to the chaos caused by Biden’s student loan scam,” Foxx and the other co-sponsors said in a joint statement. “This Republican solution takes important steps to fix the broken student loan system, provide borrowers with clear guidance on repayment, and protect taxpayers from the economic fallout caused by the administration’s radical free college agenda.”
The FAIR Act is the latest proposal from congressional Republicans aimed at showing a different path forward to address the student debt crisis. Senate Republicans introduced their proposal earlier this week.
“The president’s radical guidance and reckless executive orders have left schools, servicers, and students uncertain about the future,” the joint statement says. “The pandemic is over, and borrowers need concrete guidance on a pathway forward to repayment.”
In fall 2012, Unity College had fewer than 600 students. Now, a decade and a name change later, Unity Environmental University counts more than 7,500 students. Administrators attribute the explosive enrollment growth to a hard online pivot centered on high-demand environmental programs.
Unity began rethinking its offerings in 2012, leading to the launch of its first fully online program in 2016. Since then, the college has welcomed a larger class each year, with an estimated 95 percent of students taking courses online.
The Pivot
Unity’s online expansion began in 2016, with a master’s of professional science in sustainable natural resource management and sustainability science. Twenty students enrolled and completed their coursework entirely online. The college later added additional master’s programs and undergraduate programs with a focus on the environment.
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In 2018, a couple of years into its experiment, Unity had 71 online students and around 700 on campus. But since then, Unity’s enrollment has spiked, which President Melik Peter Khoury attributes to growing interest in its environmental programs at a time when “the climate crisis continues to accelerate,” he said.
Unity first began exploring online programs back in 2012, when officials took a hard look at the college’s offerings. The review forced them to rethink the institution’s organizational structure, course delivery, tuition costs and academic calendar.
“What we realized is our mission as an environmental institution and our curriculum was very relevant for the 21st century, but we really only served one audience well, which was residential, coming-of-age high school graduates in a very traditional approach,” Khoury said.
Administrators soon recognized there were many students who were place-bound or had time constraints, including adult learners unable to attend due to distance or the demands of work and family. While interest in environmental studies was growing, such programs were often inaccessible to far-flung students outside central Maine, where the college was founded in 1965 as the Unity Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Thirty-nine students enrolled in its first class.
In 2017—between Unity’s launch of online graduate programs and its expansion into online undergraduate offerings—the college restructured its organizational and financial model to introduce what it calls Sustainable Education Business Units—“SEBU” for short. So far, four such units have been established: one for purely online programs, one for hybrid learning and one focused on generating auxiliary revenues; the fourth SEBU is the Technical Institute for Environmental Professions, which adopts the community college model to offer associate degrees and certificates. It will deliver a mix of online and in-person programs when it opens this fall.
Unity’s website notes that its four SEBUs “utilize centralized shared services but operate independently from one another,” allowing them greater flexibility to adapt to immediate needs.
The college also invested $3 million in hardware and software to launch online programs. Faculty members were crucial in developing online classes and allowing Unity to keep instructional design in-house rather than tapping an online program manager, which would eat into revenues.
“Everything we have done we have done with our own faculty and staff,” Khoury said.
And as enrollment has grown, so, too, have investments in staff and faculty to build online capacity. But that growth has come with some points of tension—including when the college laid off about 30 percent of staff after if went fully online during the coronavirus pandemic, which officials said caused a revenue shortfall of around $12 million or more.
At the time of those layoffs in 2020, Khoury argued that breaking free from a fixed campus was exactly the “type of innovation needed to succeed in today’s economic and educational environment.” By doing so, Unity was better able to meet students “where they are,” he said. College officials envisioned a future untethered from a campus-based instructional model.
Since then, Unity has pressed hard into the online world, even with a curriculum focused on environmental topics. Khoury said Unity has partnered with local zoos, aquariums and national parks to help deliver hands-on course content to students across the U.S. Many of those students are already in the workforce; the average age of Unity’s online students hovers around 29.
College officials have also focused on increasing accessibility, flexibility and affordability.
Beyond launching a variety of online programs, the college has slashed undergraduate tuition from an average of $28,000 in 2018 to $13,000 today. Unity has also ditched the semester model, repackaging courses into eight five-week terms at the bachelor’s level and five eight-week terms for master’s students. Unity will also be experimenting with two-week terms when it welcomes the first cohort to its new Technical Institute for Environmental Professions SEBU.
An Uncommon Success Story
Online education experts say Unity’s enrollment boom is a rarity in a crowded online marketplace where many colleges play but few emerge as big-time winners. They note that it’s hard to stand out in a sector dominated by a handful of big institutions, including the University of Phoenix, Southern New Hampshire University, Liberty University and Arizona State University.
“I think there’s a tendency to underestimate the competitiveness of the market,” said Megan Adams, managing director of strategic advisory services at the consulting firm EAB. She added that many colleges also underestimate the infrastructure and expertise needed to compete in the digital realm, which can make it difficult for them to succeed.
Then there are the up-front costs.
“It’s not inexpensive to launch online programs, and it can take a while to break even,” she said.
Sean Gallagher, executive director of the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy at Northeastern University, noted that online enrollment is booming—as is competition among the institutions that cater to it.
“Generally speaking, online continues to outpace the in-person enrollment trend. But what’s changed, especially in the last few years, is that it’s much more competitive,” Gallagher said.
Finding a niche can be especially helpful to such institutions since the national reach of online programs lends itself to expansion opportunities. In Unity’s case, that niche is environmental programs, which Gallagher noted the college has done a good job of promoting nationally.
Unity’s hard online pivot comes as numerous small, private colleges across the U.S. are struggling. Looking at Unity’s neighbors in the Northeast—which have traditionally focused on residential experiences, as Unity previously did—many colleges have closed due to declining enrollment. And amid difficult economic headwinds, experts expect more colleges to close in the future.
Khoury doesn’t believe that Unity’s online pivot has saved it from succumbing to such a fate, but he suspects that if it hadn’t made the shift, it would—like many of its neighbors—be struggling to make ends meet.
“I think that we would have been like every other struggling college looking to make cuts to survive, dipping into our endowment and asking people to do more with less,” Khoury said.
He added that Unity wasn’t at the point where it was overleveraged or facing a structural deficit. Oftentimes, he argued, colleges wait until it’s too late to make major changes. And if there’s a lesson to be learned from Unity’s success, he suggested that it’s thinking ahead before times are dire and not waiting for a financial crisis to compel a change of course.
“I think many leaders wait until there is an exigency before they start to make these changes,” he said.
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