Higher Education Enrollment Growth Briefing
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This is your final Enrollment Growth Briefing from Helix Education. I’m Eric Olsen. And I’m so excited to share that Helix Education is now a part of RNL, the leading provider of higher education enrollment management, student success, and fundraising solutions. We’ve loved learning with you over these past 1,100 episodes. 1,100. Oh my goodness. What a crazy number. These daily enrollment growth devotionals have been such an amazing reminder to me of all of the innovation and passion happening all across the country. Thank you for listening, and thank you for your role in being those people, building such beautiful experiences for our students. So find me on LinkedIn (@ericolsencreative) and drop me a line to say hello if you’ve enjoyed the show. And then head on over to RNL.com. They have an amazing resources section with great blogs, webinars, and interviews. So while this show may be ending, the learning won’t stop. And may you forever continue to fight the good enrollment growth fight at your institution.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with COVID funds from the American Rescue Plan helping keep higher ed’s finances afloat during the down enrollment years of the pandemic, 65% of Chief Business Officers believe their institutions will be financially stable over the next decade.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, in 2021, only 51% of students attending law school online rated their programs as either “excellent” or “good”. Just one year later, this number has jumped to 72%, narrowing the gap between in-person satisfaction, currently at 78%, up from 76% over the same time period.
Reported by EdSurge, new virtual reality games suggest that we’re only scratching the surface as to what immersive education will allow us to teach. For instance, Shakespeare-VR out of Carnegie Mellon University is based out of the premise that Shakespeare is meant to be performed, and merely reading the lines in a classroom doesn’t fully help students understand the art form of Shakespeare’s work.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, as our institutions start paying more attention to our personal carbon footprint, there is an ethical case to be made for the benefits of online education. In fact, The University of Michigan Dearborn reported a $570,000 cost savings from utilities during the first year of the pandemic alone.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new study from the Student Experience Project showed that students’ self-assessment of their learning experience rose 10.5% when in classrooms where faculty had been trained to help promote social belonging in the classroom.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the next generation of this concept has begun, with the acquisition of University of Antelope Island in California, whose physical campus will be digitally replicated to become a metaversity for their online student population.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Utahns Against Hunger surveyed nearly 5,700 students for this report, which also shows that this food insecurity disproportionately affected students of color, with nearly half experiencing food insecurity.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with half of all confirmed monkeypox cases in the U.S. having been reported in the past two weeks, it is becoming increasingly likely that our institutions will have to deal with both Monkeypox and COVID protocols when students return this fall.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with tenure-track faculty options falling dramatically across the board, Brandeis is evolving their curriculum to make sure their graduates have solid postdoctoral opportunity pathways. This includes funding both on- and off-campus internships to help students diversify their experiences.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while Bowdoin College was one of the first to adopt test-optional admissions back in 1969, it is now one of the first to provide a need-blind admissions process to international students. A 57.4% return on their endowment investments in 2021, bringing their total endowment to $2.72 billion dollars, may have been a driving force behind this decision.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a Bay View Analytics survey shows that 22% of courses in Spring 2022 required the use of open educational resources while only 33% of faculty now believe that “students learn better from print materials”.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, as Congress is determining whether or not to allow Pell Grants to cover short-term academic programs, specifically those that lead to a postsecondary credential, online-only programs are currently absent from consideration.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a common explanation here is that the rise in Asian-American discrimination during COVID has made these students more hesitant to join our academic communities. Although, while a whopping 59% of this population chooses 2-year institutions in California, their enrollment numbers at four-year institutions remains largely unchanged.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while saying you’re open to remote work is one thing, actually being able to hire employees from all 50 states is a much heavier tax and accounting lift.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a number of colleges are experimenting with direct admit admissions policies, including a broad program in Minnesota where 50 high schools will be participating in a direct admit system in partnership with 40 colleges who can set up their own GPA qualifier at which any participating students will be directly admitted into the respective institutions.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, RealPage analytics data shows that new student housing planned builds look to be down about 50% this fall compared to the pace seen back in the 2010s. While slow enrollment growth has slowed the need for net-new housing, the problem is that alternative off-campus housing rents have skyrocketed over the past couple years with the change in the housing market.
Reported by Edsurge, Coursera’s large student base makes A/B testing extraordinarily interesting to learn quickly from at a high level of statistically significant confidence. New research shows that one of the more interesting A/B testing success stories is in regards to prompting.
Reported by EdSurge, Meta (Facebook), is currently running television ads promising the future of education in a virtual, immersive environment. The question is, why?
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while more than half of respondents to an NPR and Ipsos poll suggested support for President Biden’s partial debt forgiveness plan, a full 82% believe the focus should be on making college more affordable, not merely subsidizing its debt at the end of the line. But what would this look like?
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, these institutions, including Columbia University, will be unlisted in the 2022 rankings for accusations of misreporting data. This comes recently after a business school dean at Temple University was sentenced to 14 months in prison for similarly falsifying data submitted to U.S. News.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the birth rate decline since the 2008 recession is going to start showing up in our 2025 entering classes. But will this 15% decline be an inevitability for all institutions, or hit some harder than others? Specifically in Connecticut, where population growth already ranked 48th out of 50 states, institutions like Western Connecticut State University are using big data modeling to find new pockets of students their prior enrollment marketing targeting would have ignored.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while Purdue cites technical constraints with its new financial processing vendor as the reason for the pause of their Back a Boiler ISA program, pausing may suggest internal dissatisfaction with the program to date.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the whole “you know potential employers can see that, right?” prompt that we give our students to help them understand the reputational downside of being too “authentic” on your social media platforms? It might not be a problem any more. Companies like Filtari promise to scan and suggest the removal of any problematic content that might red-flag employers during the hiring process.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, if you take the 40-year high inflation rate into account, our effective wages for full-time faculty dropped 5% this year. The problem? Most institutions don’t have the means or the stomach to dole out 5% raise increases across the board. Of course by not doing so, they run the risk of their most talented employees to try and find greener pastures. That’s why Carnegie Mellon University is offering a short-term measure to eligible employees in a one-time $1,500 stipend.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new Coursera report that tracks skills proficiency by country shows that U.S. tech skills dropped from 69% to 43% year-over-year.
Reported by The Hechinger Report, with so many employers beginning to quietly remove the bachelor’s degree requirement from their job listings, this begs the question if we’ll start to see a different kind of flipped learning in higher ed.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a recent study from The Brookings Institution suggests that increased high school graduation rates during the pandemic may have been a result of decreased academic standards during that same time frame. Schools were rightfully being more patient and more understanding of their students during a very difficult time.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, designed to double the number of engineering graduates coming out of the state and meet Maine’s growing STEM workforce requirements, the Maine College of Engineering, Computing, and Information Science will consolidate the system’s existing STEM programs under this one statewide institution.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, New York state is one for instance which requires master’s degrees for their teachers. But that means many if not most teachers are entering their careers with a higher level of debt than their entire annual salary.
