Dive Brief:
- The balancing act between increasing selectivity to promote academic prestige, a need to balance the books and consider revenue needs, and the constant pull to provide higher levels of merit aid are defining university admissions offices — and many are not getting it right.
- Institutions are scrambling to find ways to market themselves to students in an increasingly crowded market with a smaller, changing feeder population, according to a recent article in The Atlantic.
- Traditional practices of buying lists from testing companies fly in the face of diversity requirements, and increasing budget pressure leaves institutions seeking students whose families can at least afford to foot some of the bill. Aid award letters are sent too late in the college search process, which means many low-income students are discouraged from even applying to top schools, thanks to sticker shock.
Dive Insight:
Much of the traditional higher education enterprise was founded to provide an education to the children of affluent white dignitaries and socialites, and despite acknowledgements of the economic imperative to provide an education to the greatest number of students possible, the industry as a whole has struggled to update its mission. As the number of students from that original feeder population dwindles, and as today's feeder students are increasingly older, increasingly of color and increasingly needing to work alongside their studies to cover the cost, the outreach strategies and services offered on many campuses have remained largely stagnant.
Part of this is because, as APLU President Peter McPherson recently pointed out, these students are more difficult and more costly to educate, and institutions are dealing with decades of budget cuts at the federal and state levels. But the other part is because the national mindset has not really evolved to consider the changing face of the country, and thus the mindset on campus is not evolving to best consider how to serve them.
To better serve adult learners, institutions must offer online courses and flexible advisement and faculty office hours, which could work to the benefit of both the students and the professors, who are increasingly juggling courseloads at multiple institutions. To best serve students of color, there must be a culture on campus that says they are truly welcome and wanted there, and to best serve low-income students, there must be an increased investment in financial aid and academic tutors and counselors who can help students fill in gaps they may have from high school. Institutions that figure out how to provide all of these things will flourish in the coming decades, while those that continue to admit students without having the proper systems of support in place to ensure their graduation will not.