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Huddled around a table in the Georgetown University Alumni House, roughly two dozen academics convened last week to address two of the most persistent challenges in higher education: improving student outcomes and lowering the cost of a bachelor’s degree. Their proposed solution is an unconventional one—to create a three-year bachelor’s program equivalent to a four-year college degree.
Unlike the other three-year options that exist on the market, their proposal isn’t focused on accelerating bachelor’s degree programs but rather redesigning them to fit within three years. That means cutting off chunks of credits and building a tightly packaged curriculum with all the essentials. While the standard bachelor’s program is 120 credit hours, their proposals require 90 to 100 credits.
“The four-year degree isn’t working for a lot of people,” Lori Carrell, the chancellor of the University of Minnesota at Rochester, told her colleagues around the table, noting higher education’s high cost and low degree attainment, which has “squandered human potential at times.”
Carrell was flanked by Robert Zemsky, an elder statesman of higher education, author and longtime professor at the University of Pennsylvania, which has named a medal for innovation in his honor. Zemsky, who has long pursued the idea of a three-year degree, held court at Georgetown alongside Carrell with representatives from a dozen colleges in attendance.
“There is plenty of time in three years to do almost anything you want to do,” Zemsky told the group’s members, all of whom are working on three-year-degree pilot programs at their institutions.
For Zemsky, the idea has been in motion for well over a decade. In 2009, Newsweek featured him in a cover story that explored the idea of a three-year bachelor’s degree. Zemsky argued at the time that a college degree could be “compressed” and simplified. But the idea never took off, Zemsky believes, because accreditors were resistant to a three-year degree.
Now, nearly 15 years later, the idea has fresh momentum. A dozen colleges are pursuing pilot programs, and accreditors are increasingly willing to consider them.
Leveraging their combined connections, Zemsky and Carrell found partners willing to explore the three-year bachelor’s degree and commit to building pilot programs to that end.
The institutions with pilot programs are the American Public University system, Brigham Young University Idaho, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Merrimack College, New England College, Northwood University, Portland State University, the University of Minnesota at Morris, the University of Minnesota at Rochester, the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and Utica University. Together they represent a diverse mix of public and private colleges ranging in geography, demographics and program ambitions.
All 12 pilot programs are in different stages of progress. Some institutions, like Georgetown, are only beginning to explore the idea. Others, like Merrimack College and BYU Idaho, have developed ready-to-launch proposals that they hope their respective accreditors will approve. And other institutions have dropped out along the way, shrinking the pilot pool from 14 to 12.
Zemsky and Carrell did not provide a template for a three-year degree, tasking the participants involved with developing their own programs. Zemsky compared it to a box of Lego bricks, noting that colleges can build what they want, “but you have to put it together in a way that makes sense.”
The colleges involved are exploring different pathways to the idea. Officials at Merrimack College note that the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic prompted faculty members to consider new approaches, which opened the door to pursuing a three-year degree program.
“What attracted us to this was an invitation to try to build something new. And this came in the summer of 2021, so we had gone through a very challenging year where a lot of faculty had been forced to do things that they never would have imagined doing if it hadn’t been for the pandemic,” said Sean Condon, provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Merrimack College.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania decided to explore three-year degrees for an entirely different reason: the loss of faculty members to retrenchments and retirements, said Lori Lombard, a professor and chair of the Department of Communication Disorders, Special Education and Disability Services. Those losses led her to rethink the program’s curriculum.
“We slimmed down our curriculum to what we thought were essentials,” Lombard said, noting that the proposal for her department includes “courses in our curriculum from social sciences and theater” to provide a holistic, multidisciplinary experience packaged in a three-year format. “We took credits away from ourselves and added credits from other disciplines,” Lombard said.
Some institutions suggest cutting electives. The American Public University system, which enrolls a large population of adult learners, is proposing a 90-credit-hour bachelor’s of science in cybersecurity that would eliminate 30 hours of electives while retaining general education courses.
At BYU Idaho, which also enrolls a high number of adult learners, the focus is on building a “nested certificate structure,” according to a summary of the plan, which would offer three certificates plus general education courses that would add up to a total of 90 credit hours for a bachelor’s degree. As with APU, electives would be axed to shorten the degree program.
Neither institution has made a formal proposal to its respective accreditor yet.
But some colleges have taken their plans for a three-year degree to their accrediting body. In March, New England College proposed a 100-credit bachelor’s degree in criminal justice to the New England Commission of Higher Education, which requires 120 credit hours for a bachelor’s degree but may consider exceptions as part of its Policy on Innovation. Ultimately, however, NECHE denied New England College’s request on the grounds that “graduates of 100-credit baccalaureate programs would not receive equivalent benefit” to those pursuing a 120-credit degree, according to a summary of the proposal shared with Inside Higher Ed.
New England College may bring a revised proposal to NECHE in the future, the summary notes.
Though NECHE dealt a blow to the three-year bachelor’s degree—and has yet to approve a single such program—the commission remains open to the idea.
“The requests before the Commission under its Policy on Innovation to award a baccalaureate degree with fewer than 120 hours has been and will continue to be given extensive and serious attention by the Commission. We applaud all our institutions for their innovative thinking and practices in service to their students,” NECHE president Larry Schall said by email.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges has a similar 120-credit hour requirement, though none of the institutions in the pilot programs are accredited through SACSCOC. But if a college were to pursue such an idea, SACSCOC would consider it.
President Belle Whelan said by email that SACSCOC “would consider approving a three-year degree” depending “on the justification provided” and what might be excluded from the program.
The Higher Learning Commission also told Inside Higher Ed that it would be willing to consider a three-year degree, though colleges would need to provide a justification.
Some accreditors, such as the WASC Senior College and University Commission and the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, do not have minimum credit policies, meaning there are fewer obstacles for a three-year, 90-credit degree.
“When I’ve spoken to Robert Zemsky and Lori Carrell about this initiative, I have emphasized that the exciting opportunity is not to essentially repack the same pieces into a smaller suitcase, but to fundamentally rethink the capacities and coherence we expect of the bachelor’s degree,” Jamienne Studley, president of WSCUC, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “As an accreditor WSCUC would consider it our responsibility, even privilege, to work with institutions to evaluate whether their reconceived program met our standards for quality and student success.”
Sonny Ramaswamy, president of NWCCU, said that while his organization has not received a proposal from BYU Idaho yet, he expects it will soon. In considering a three-year bachelor’s degree, he said it’s vital that students “demonstrate the same learning outcomes as a student getting a four-year degree.” He added that the conversations he’s had around the possibility of launching a three-year degree have been “exciting” and that NWCCU looks forward to receiving the proposal.
But even if accreditors are willing to sign off on a three-year degree, state lawmakers also have to be convinced. Some states, including California and Pennsylvania, have laws requiring a minimum of 120 credit hours for a bachelor’s degree, which would require changes to open the door to a three-year degree and a reduced load culminating in a baccalaureate.
Beyond accreditation and state law, there’s also the matter of how tradition has shaped the bachelor’s degree in a sector that is notoriously slow to change, even as employers and students demand more from colleges.
“The 120-hour degree is codified by tradition. That’s all it is. It’s really not even based on strong learning science—it’s just been adopted, like many things in this country, and codified. And it’s now created a wonderful amount of chaos,” said Merrimack College president Chris Hopey.
He also compared conversations around three-year bachelor’s degrees to discussions about online education 20 years ago. And just as those who were slow to adapt to online programs are playing catch up, so too will those who resist three-year degree programs, he said, suggesting a lack of imagination for the higher education community even as the status quo remains mired in degree-completion challenges and ever-climbing costs. Though he said it may take 10 to 15 years for the three-year-degree idea to become popular, many colleges will not survive over that timeline.
Zemsky, however, stressed that “weak institutions cannot do this,” noting that the pilot colleges leading the charge are spending their own money without funding from major national sponsors. He discouraged colleges from looking at the three-year degree as their financial salvation, arguing instead that it is simply another option that colleges can offer to consumers to reduce costs. The idea also comes with financial questions, given the loss of a fourth year of tuition, though Zemsky suggests a dip in tuition revenue may be countered by increased enrollment in such programs.
So far, Zemsky and Carrell have been unable to attract major foundation support, which he said is needed for coordinating functions, not program development, since colleges have been spending their own money to advance pilot programs.
“Lori and I have carried this as far as we can,” Zemsky said. “What we need for this to work is a paid-for infrastructure. And the only game in town to do that, I fear, is a foundation.”
Another potential obstacle to the three-year bachelor’s degree is perception. While participants note student feedback has been enthusiastic, questions linger about transfer pathways given the tight focus of the programs as well as how three-year degrees might be viewed by graduate programs. Though those questions are yet to be answered, Boyd Baggett, director of institutional effectiveness and accreditation at BYU Idaho, said he’s had promising conversations with officials in a dozen graduate programs who said they would recognize a three-year degree.
Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges & Universities, expressed cautious optimism about the idea, noting the importance of innovation and exploring new models amid national concerns about the value of higher education while also raising concerns about what might be lost as institutions trim credits, particularly electives.
“The first thing that comes to mind is if it’s a proposal to reduce, does that mean a reduction in general education or the liberal arts and sciences at a time when that type of education is more critical than ever for addressing the wicked problems and grand challenges of which COVID-19 was emblematic?” Pasquerella said. “I also think about our employer surveys, where employers consistently make clear their desire that students have more than narrow disciplinary training, and broad training in the liberal arts and sciences that allows them to integrate what they’ve learned in different disciplines to address the unscripted problems of the future.”
As the Georgetown sessions—sponsored by Strada Education Foundation—drew to a close, Zemsky laid out the needs and ambitions for the three-year bachelor’s degree proposal. Though a dozen institutions are already pursuing the idea, he hopes that 500 will be on board within the next five years. Carrell has also discussed the idea with lawmakers to garner support and said she is hearing bipartisan interest. A book promoting the idea of the three-year bachelor’s degree is also in the works, likely to be published next year.
Now Zemsky and Carrell are trying not to lose the momentum around the idea, which they see not as replacing the four-year degree but rather providing consumers with another option.
Though the proposal had excitement in 2009 that faded away, Zemsky remains undeterred.
In 2020, before the three-year bachelor’s degree advanced to the stage of pilot programs, Zemsky told this reporter he was just “throwing pebbles into the pond. And there are some ripples.” Now, with 12 institutions pursuing pilot programs and accreditors willing to consider a three-year bachelor’s degree, it seems the idea is making waves.
While this academic year saw the largest one-year increase in full-time faculty members’ average salaries in over three decades, that still wasn’t enough to stop their real wages from falling due to inflation, the American Association of University Professors noted Thursday alongside its latest salary survey data.
They are preliminary data for the 2022–23 academic year; AAUP plans to release the final data in July. You can see trend data at this link.
According to the preliminary data, the 6.5 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers was enough to turn the 4.1 percent average salary increase into a 2.4 percent drop in real wages—the third consecutive year of real-wage declines for all full-time faculty.
The decline last year was worse, when a 7 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index—the fastest inflation since 1981—dropped real wages 5 percent, per the AAUP. The organization said that was the largest real-wage decrease on record since it began tracking in 1972.
For this year’s survey, nearly 900 U.S. colleges and universities provided data for about 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty members, the AAUP said. Over 500 institutions also provided data on senior administrators, it said.
Glenn Colby, the organization’s senior researcher, said the regular changes between the preliminary and final data amount to “nothing that moves the overall findings.”
He said, “Typically, maybe 20 or so institutions submit data late to us and we add those, and then maybe another 20 make some corrections because some of the data is estimates that people come up with” and later find the actual values.
According to the AAUP data, the average full-time full professor makes $149,600 (these averages include all kinds of institutions except associate’s degree–focused institutions that lack standard faculty ranks).
The average for these full-time full professors at public colleges and universities was $140,400, while it was $188,400 at private, nonprofit, non–religiously affiliated institutions.
The average full-time assistant professor makes about $88,600. The average for the public variety was $87,300, while the average for the private, nonprofit, non–religiously affiliated kind was $100,600.
Salaries averaged much lower for full-time, generally non-tenure-track faculty members: $73,000 for lecturers and $66,300 for instructors. Colby cautioned that sometimes institutions offer tenure to lecturers or use the term “instructor” nontraditionally. He also noted visiting faculty are counted as instructors in the data.
The data also show significant gender disparities: male full-time faculty averaged $117,800 compared to $96,900 for female full-time faculty.
Looking again just at full-time full professors, men averaged $156,800 while women averaged $136,500. There were far more male full professors than female.
The male-female gap persisted, but was much narrower, among the lower faculty ranks.
For example, male assistant professors averaged $93,000, compared to $84,800 for female assistant professors. Closest to gender parity were instructors: $68,800 for men, $64,500 for women.
The data aren’t broken down by race.
Beyond full-timers, AAUP says its annual “Faculty Compensation Survey is the largest source of data on part-time adjunct faculty members and draws attention to the appallingly low rates of pay and benefits offered to them at many institutions.”
These part-time data are reported from a smaller set of institutions, 352, and they are from last academic year instead of this one, “to enable institutions to report data for an entire academic year,” the AAUP says. They show part-timers only averaged $3,900 for each standard course section (generally three credit hours) they taught.
Colby said 48 percent of faculty nationwide are part-timers.
“It’s hard to eke out a living doing that,” he said.
The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources has reached broadly similar conclusions about the pay trend this academic year.
“Median pay for employees across the higher education workforce increased substantially from 2021–22,” the association said on its website. “Raises were the largest seen in the past seven years, and all position types experienced an increase of at least 1.11 percentage points compared to the previous year.”
But, it said, “Tenure-track and non-tenure-track teaching faculty continued to receive the smallest pay increases,” and “This year, pay increases for all employee categories again fell markedly short of the persistently high inflation rate, even though these are the largest increases seen in the past seven years.”
“Across higher ed, employees are still being paid less than they were in 2019–20 in inflation-adjusted dollars,” the association said. “Tenure-track faculty salary increases have not kept pace with inflation for any year depicted (i.e., from 2016–17 through 2022–23), and non-tenure-track salary increases last met or exceeded inflation in 2016–17, so full-time faculty in general continue to be paid less every year in inflation-adjusted dollars. High inflation has only exacerbated the gaps in pay increases faculty experience in relation to other higher ed employees.”
Many students think more flexibility on classroom deadlines, attendance and participation would boost their academic success, a recent Student Voice survey found. About a quarter of students also see strict attendance or participation requirements and unrealistic deadlines as actively impeding their success. But how do students define flexibility? In a new Student Voice pulse survey out today from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse, nearly three in four students say that deadlines should be flexible when there are extenuating circumstances. Nearly half of students say that deadlines should be more flexible in general.
At the same time, half of students say they rely on deadlines to stay motivated and on track, and few think that deadlines should be eliminated altogether.
The survey of 1,250 four- and two-year college students at 55 institutions, fielded in March, also found that one in four students thinks class participation shouldn’t count toward a final grade. And nearly a third of students think that class attendance shouldn’t be tracked or count in grading.
Here are five takeaways about deadlines and flexibility:
How do students define flexibility regarding class attendance? Three takeaways:
Asked how participation in courses involving class discussions should factor into final grades, one in four students says that participation shouldn’t count at all for in-person courses. Similar to the responses on attendance, students graduating this year are more likely to say participation shouldn’t matter than are freshmen (31 percent versus 18 percent).
A third of students—the largest share—say that participation for in-person classes with discussions should be 5 to 10 percent of the final grade.
Another quarter of students say participation should count for 15 to 20 percent, with students at private institutions more likely to say this than those at publics (32 percent versus 24 percent).
Just 8 percent of students say class participation should count for 25 to 30 percent. Bigger class credit options were even less popular.
Students’ responses regarding participation in online courses were nearly identical to those for in-person classes.
Procrastination: Frode Svartdal, a psychologist at the Arctic University of Norway, has researched how academic environments foster procrastination and recommends against long deadlines for college students. “A student high in self-regulation (and low in procrastination) would probably accept flexibility because they know they can handle deadlines and attendance, but they would also accept a stricter regime because such a regime aligns with their own work habits,” he tells Inside Higher Ed. “However, students low in self-control would most probably prefer flexibility because of the opportunity to procrastinate, and chances are high that they would dislike a stricter regime.”
While the Student Voice pulse survey didn’t ask about procrastination explicitly, students who rely on deadlines to stay motivated are much likelier than students who don’t to: 1) prefer that professors break down big tasks into smaller deadlines throughout the term, 2) disagree that deadlines should be eliminated and 3) prefer flexible deadlines for emergencies over generally flexible deadlines.
Returning to Svartdal’s hypothesis, if students who rely on deadlines for motivation are more likely to be procrastinators, then these students seem interested in interim deadlines that help them work toward long-term goals, with flexibility reserved more for emergencies than general use. And if students who don’t rely on deadlines are less likely be procrastinators, they appear less interested in a strict deadline regime.
Structure vs. flexibility: Melissa Hills, an associate professor of biological sciences at MacEwan University in Canada who has written about how some flexibility around deadlines helps students manage their workloads, says both students and faculty members need structure. “However, sometimes life happens, workloads become unmanageable and a little flexibility can benefit student learning experiences.”
Building flexibility into course structure via transparent, accessible policies empowers students “to be self-directed learners and respects the inequitable barriers many face.” Hills adds that students should not have to make special requests or disclose personal information to use such policies. And faculty members developing these policies also must acknowledge “that we have structure imposed on us by term schedules, faculty workloads, institutional policies and more.”
Examples of flexible deadline policies include a no-questions-asked 48-hour extension and a one-time “free pass,” Hills says, noting that her own research demonstrates students use such policies sparingly. (Another strategy for helping students manage deadlines is the comprehensive syllabus, used by academic coaches at Wake Forest University.)
Similarly, Hills says that attendance policies should strike a balance between structure and flexibility, “where we ensure that students are achieving learning outcomes but respect that sometimes life happens.” Students must attend “most labs” if they’re to acquire the skills they need to be successful in subsequent courses, “and our policies have to reflect that.” Again, there is “no perfect solution, but some flexibility can and should be accommodated, and that flexibility should be accessible to all students.”
Meaningful participation: Regarding input during class, Hills cautions that any participation grade policies should reflect how different students engage in learning in different ways, with an emphasis on student “choice and flexibility in how they choose to participate.”
William S. Altman, a professor of psychology at Broome Community College of the State University of New York, says that whether class participation should be graded “depends on your objectives” as an instructor.
“Why would you want participation? What are you going to get from it? If you want groups to work together, then participation becomes important. If it’s just a way of taking attendance, then find another way to take attendance.”
Echoing Hills’s emphasis on transparency, Altman advises, “Whatever you choose, make sure your students understand why it’s there. Because if they understand why it’s there, they will participate if that’s what you want.”
And like Hills, Altman doesn’t necessarily require students to participate in group discussions. Instead, he asks students to complete quick written assignments at the beginning and end of class. The former ask students to respond to a quote or idea related to course content, and the latter serve as a memory-consolidation exercise as to what students learned or still have questions about from the class period.
These assignments only count for 5 percent or less of students’ grades, Altman says, but they’re significant nonetheless: “We have jumping-off points for the next class, as well. But the whole idea is, the more engaged the mind is, the better able it is to learn.”
Read more from the Student Voice survey on academic life, including how students view professor teaching style as a barrier to their success.
The Biden administration would prohibit blanket bans that “categorically” bar transgender students from participating in the sport consistent with their gender identity under a proposed amendment to federal civil rights law.
The amendment to the regulations for Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 would require schools, colleges and universities to set sport-specific criteria that take into account “important educational objectives” as well as the level of competition and education level of those involved if the institution is applying sex-related rules that would limit or deny a transgender student’s ability to participate on a team consistent with their gender identity.
“Some objectives, such as the disapproval of transgender students or desire to harm a particular student, would not qualify as important educational objectives,” a senior department official whom the department asked not to be identified said in a call with reporters.
The proposed rule comes as transgender rights have become a lightning rod in American politics; a wave of states has banned transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports at the K-12 and postsecondary level. The Associated Press reports that 20 states have adopted restrictions on transgender athletes. Lawmakers also have passed bills that would govern which bathrooms transgender people can use and their access to gender-affirming care. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday to leave in place an injunction against West Virginia that blocks the state from enforcing its ban on transgender student athletes at the college level as well as in middle and high schools.
The Biden administration’s rule means that colleges and universities will risk their federal funding if they follow state laws that ban participation in athletics by transgender students. Lawsuits challenging the rule are likely.
“Federal civil rights law is the law of the land, and we would be eager to ensure its full satisfaction in every school community around the country,” the senior department official said, adding that she’s confident in the department’s legal position.
The institutions’ adopted criteria also need to minimize harm to transgender students who are not able to participate. Institutions could lose their access to federal funds if they don’t comply with the proposed regulation, which is not yet final. The department will take public comments on the amendment before finalizing the rule.
The Biden administration’s latest proposal builds off its proposed Title IX regulations that expanded protections for transgender students. The administration said last summer it would issue a separate rule governing transgender students’ participation in school sports.
“Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “Being on a sports team is an important part of the school experience for students of all ages.”
Conservatives, Republican lawmakers and Republican attorneys general have criticized the provisions for transgender students in public comments, arguing the regulations could deny female athletes an equal athletic opportunity. House Republicans, led by North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx, who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, have introduced a bill that would make allowing a transgender woman to participate in an athletic program for women or girls a violation of Title IX.
LGBTQ+ advocacy groups praised the administration’s announcement Thursday.
“Transgender youth are an integral part of every school across this country,” said Imani Rupert-Gordon, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “We applaud the Department of Education for recognizing that the law requires that transgender students must be treated fairly and equally and as respected members of their school communities.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization, said the proposed rules “are a slap in the face to female athletes who deserve equal opportunity to compete in their sports.”
“The Department of Education’s rewriting of Title IX degrades women and tells them that their athletic goals and placements do not matter,” ADF senior counsel Christiana Kiefer said in a statement. “When society and the law try to ignore reality, people get hurt. In sports, it’s women and girls who pay the price. Thankfully, a growing number of states are stepping up to protect women’s athletics.”
The proposed regulation would allow schools and colleges to limit the participation of transgender students if they set the required criteria.
“This requirement is consistent with our regulations’ long-standing recognition that schools may deny students opportunities to participate on particular male or female teams based on sex in certain circumstances,” the official said.
Nothing in the proposed rule changes Title IX’s requirements that women and girls be afforded equal athletic opportunity, according to a department fact sheet.
The department said it expected elementary school students to generally be able to participate in the school sports team consistent with their gender identity because it would be difficult for a school to meet the requirements in the proposed amendment.
“Participating in school athletics is an important component of education and provides valuable physical, social, academic, and mental health benefits to students,” the fact sheet states. “Younger students, in particular, benefit from the chance to join a team and learn about teamwork, leadership, and physical fitness.”
However, the department expects that sex-related criteria could limit the participate of some transgender students at the high school and college level, “when [the criteria] enable the school to achieve an important educational objective, such as fairness in competition,” per the fact sheet.
The senior department official said other educational objectives could include protecting safety in the sport. The official stressed that the school or institution would have to look at the needs of a sport and the needs for the grade or education level of students.
“I would caution any school about taking something off the shelf without offering that particularized consideration,” the official said.
Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement that the organization was grateful for the department’s actions to protect transgender students.
“NWLC has been fighting for over 50 years to see Title IX fulfill its promise to ensure all students are given equal opportunities and protected from sex discrimination,” Graves said in a statement. “Extremist politicians continue to manufacture panic over trans girls’ inclusion in school and school athletics instead of addressing the real changes and protections girls need in sports, including equal time and resources in school sports or addressing the rampant sexual abuse of student athletes. LGBTQI students deserve to learn and thrive—not be targets for state-sponsored bullying and violence.”
Hannah Nunez’s job at Northern Arizona University requires her to be a few different things at once: an advocate, a compassionate ear, a repository of information about campus resources. As a behavioral health coordinator, part of her role includes screening potential counseling patients. During a roughly 20-minute appointment—either in person or virtually, depending on client preference—students describe the problem they’re facing, and she helps them decide the best course of action, which, she says, isn’t always counseling.
“They might mention they’re struggling academically, and that might be a flag for: we’re going to talk to them about tutoring,” she said.
Some students seem to be looking for someone to talk to, and those are the students Nunez typically refers to counseling. But before she does, she tries to figure out if they have a problem that can be solved instead by accessing any of the other extensive on-campus resources at NAU.
“It can feel really validating for folks to come in with what might be an overwhelming, scary, daunting feel, like there’s not really any hope … and then to walk away with very tangible steps—‘I can join this club, I have an intake appointment,’” she said.
The principle behind such screening processes is much the same as triage in a hospital emergency room, where medical professionals assess the nature and urgency of a patient’s needs.
Though different institutions have different names for the process—triage, screening or “Path to Care,” as Northern Arizona calls it—they all work in a similar manner. Rather than sit through a traditional hourlong intake appointment, each new client who approaches the counseling center is scheduled for a short appointment, which varies in length according to the institution but is typically less than half an hour. (Some universities precede these appointments by asking students to fill out online questionnaires such as a depression screening, for example.)
During the appointment, which is often held over the phone, students provide the triage counselor with the same kind of information they might provide during a full-length intake appointment: demographic details, their reasons for seeking help, their history of mental health treatment, risk factors and more.
The counselors then use that information to determine whether, when and from whom the student should receive counseling, as well as whether they should be directed to any other campus resources—say, a tutoring center if their main source of stress is an upcoming organic chemistry exam. The appointment can also be used to give students additional details about what counseling will entail; at Northern Arizona, that includes information about the cost of an appointment ($25 for an individual session) and how many sessions they are allowed per semester.
Colleges and universities that utilize triage say the goal is to assess students thoroughly, but in less time. One of the challenges of implementing these systems is training counseling center staff in how to complete short, fast-paced evaluations.
“It took a little bit of comfort-building for our staff to realize they could gather all of that information in that short amount of time,” said Natalie Hernandez DePalma, the senior director of counseling and psychological services at Pennsylvania State University, which has included some version of triage in its counseling services since 2009.
Nunez said it can also be challenging to teach new employees about all the campus’s resources, which she mainly knows from working at NAU for about 10 years.
But some institutions that have implemented such triage systems have greatly improved the quality and reach of their mental health care. The counseling center at NAU, a large university with more than 20,000 students on its main campus, introduced a triage process about two years ago and is currently operating with no wait list for the first time in at least 10 years, according to Carl Dindo, director of NAU’s counseling services.
As requests for mental health services have skyrocketed on campuses, triage systems have become a popular tool for managing demand. In 2020, the Center for Collegiate Mental Health’s annual report, which included data from 567 counseling centers, showed that 42 percent utilized some sort of brief screening appointment as their first clinical contact with patients.
Requiring students to undergo a quick assessment before they can sit down with a counselor allows more students to get care—and the right kind of care—more quickly. Additionally, triage appointments sometimes direct students toward resources that the counselors believe will help more than therapy, meaning that students who won’t necessarily benefit from counseling don’t need multiple hourlong sessions to figure that out.
Some college mental health experts say college counseling centers have long promoted themselves as a catch-all resource, overburdening their staffs by drawing students who might be better served elsewhere on campus.
Similarly, Nunez said, students have historically been funneled into counseling because it didn’t occur to staff to direct them elsewhere.
Now screenings make that a fundamental part of the process.
However, centers that use screenings are quick to note that the goal is not to push students away from counseling.
“Most of the students who come that request counseling and want counseling, we connect them just by virtue of the fact that they want it,” said Dindo. “When you have somebody who just got to school and maybe they’re not familiar with what resources exist … I think you have a lot of people sort of telling them maybe what they need or what they think they should access. I think we’ve had a lot of experiences of students coming in saying, ‘My professor told me I should come talk to somebody’ or ‘My mom is concerned about me and she told me I should check out counseling.’ In those instances—both at the Path to Care screening appointment, but also even in counseling—we’ll have really intentional, meaningful conversations around, ‘Well, what do you think you need?’”
Some experts also express concerns about the additional burden that triaging duty places on often-overworked counseling center employees. At both Northern Arizona and Penn State, screening appointments are spread among many staff members; each employee at NAU is required to do about five hours a week of triaging, while each Penn State employee does about two and a half hours. (Triaging at Penn State is completed by counselors, while at NAU it is performed by both counseling services staff and behavioral health team members, who primarily work on the health side of the university's integrated health and mental health system.)
Advocates for mental health triage systems say they also help counselors figure out which patients to prioritize: who would benefit from having a counseling appointment tomorrow and who can wait until next week.
“I’m a student and I call up and I say, ‘I need an appointment,’ and they say, ‘OK, the first available intake or the first time is two weeks down the road.’ Well, if I’m suicidal, if I’m having homicidal thoughts, waiting two weeks is not a good idea at all,” said Marcus Hotaling, director of Union College’s counseling center and president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. “So that’s why a lot of centers now, including our own, have moved to a same-day appointment or same-day triage, so that we can at least get eyes on you.”
Nunez said there are unintended benefits of a shorter screening, as well. Students who are new to therapy often struggle or feel awkward talking about themselves for an hour at a time. Shorter screenings let those nervous students “test the waters a little bit,” hopefully making for a better counseling experience all around.
Marquette University will open its new wellness and recreation center in January 2025, joining a growing number of higher ed institutions that have combined mental and physical health within a single facility. The $80 million project involves renovating the Helfaer Tennis Stadium and Recreation Center, built in the 1970s, for a new, updated version including health resources like counseling services and a medical clinic.
A 2021 study found students returned to campus after remote instruction due to COVID-19 because they could participate safely in recreation center activities, interact with their peers and create a network of friends.
What’s the need: Students at Marquette have expressed a need for expanded recreation and fitness facilities for years, says Lora Strigens, vice president for planning and facilities management at Marquette. The concept for an integrated wellness and recreation center, however, began with the university’s master plan in 2016 and began to make progress as a priority for being a healthy campus grew.
“We recognize—as many institutions do—that caring for the entirety of a student is not just their academic success, but their mind, their body and, for our institution, their spirit,” Strigens says. “I find it hard to separate the idea of students’ success from the idea of wellness, especially post-pandemic.”
In addition to the health and wellness services the new facility will offer, it will be a space for programming to increase community and a sense of belonging, Strigens says.
What it is: The new space will be 180,000 square feet, doubling the wellness, counseling and medical space on campus and increasing fitness and recreation capacity by 25 percent.
A three-story, 30,000-square-foot wellness tower in the facility’s center will house the medical clinic and counseling center, as well as space for the alcohol and drug recovery program, sexual violence prevention programming, and meeting spaces. On the recreation front, the facility will have two multipurpose courts, four tennis courts, four basketball courts, a 25-yard swimming pool, two group fitness studios and a cycling studio.
Marquette authorities chose to renovate the Helfaer center rather than create an entirely new structure.
“In addition to it being really great programmatic projects … it’s also a very interesting building project, I think, keeping the two large volumes of space that house our tennis courts and basketball courts,” Strigens says. “It's a sustainable decision by the university, both financially and environmentally, and then it gives us the opportunity to really create this marquee facility on the site.”
Moving all health and recreation resources into one building also consolidates touch points for students to engage in wellness. “The goal is for us to make it as easy as possible for students to access the services and the support that they need,” Strigens explains.
The top two floors of the wellness center will be known as the Lovell Center for Student Wellbeing, named after Marquette’s president Michael Lovell and his family, due to his commitment to student wellness and mental health.
The facility is funded by donor gifts, the institution and a student wellness fee, which has been in place since 2016.
Feedback and input: When designing the space, the project team received feedback from a variety of stakeholders, including student affairs, the medical clinic, counseling programs, recreation and fitness experts and, of course, students.
The recreation and fitness space, for example, is designed to be used by all students spanning all levels of experience, comfort and engagement. The result is a variety of flexible spaces and different programming.
As the project continues, Marquette will continue to solicit student input on furniture and branding.
“We want them to feel represented in the space, and we want it to feel, as campus is their home away from home, that it’s a space that they feel comfortable and welcome in,” Strigens says.
Does your institution have a new wellness and recreation facility that is contributing to student retention? Tell us about it.
Community college baccalaureate programs in California can help more Black and Latino students earn bachelor’s degrees in a state that badly needs a more educated workforce, according to a new report.
The Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, a research effort examining civil rights and equal opportunity issues affecting racial and ethnic groups, today released the report calling for a “strategic” expansion of baccalaureate programs at community colleges. The researchers who produced the report say the expansion should have a focus on racial equity and labor market needs.
Hispanics make up 38.1 percent of all state residents 25 and older, but among all state residents with a bachelor’s degree, only about 11.5 percent are Hispanic, according to the report. Black residents make up a much smaller share of the state population but have a similar degree gap. Student parents, first-generation college students and adult learners are also among those who might benefit from “accessible and affordable pathways for bachelor’s degrees for place-bound students,” the report states.
State legislation in 2021 authorized the expansion of community college baccalaureate programs, establishing that proposed new programs undergo a review that involves the California State University and the University of California systems. Some recent expansion efforts have met with pushback from CSU faculty members. A CSU faculty leader told Inside Higher Ed he has concerns about using state dollars to bolster baccalaureate programs that might exist elsewhere.
But duplication shouldn’t be an issue, according to the authors of the report.
As an example of “strategic” expansion, they say in the report, “Community colleges might consider offering degrees in fields where there is a clear shortage of bachelor’s degree–educated workers, even if these fields overlap with existing four-year programs (e.g., if local demand for registered nurses outpaces the production of bachelor’s degrees in nursing at the nearest California State University).”
There are currently no community college baccalaureate programs in nursing in the state.
The report says California’s “leading role in higher education has dwindled over time” and that the state’s “college degree production is not keeping pace with employer demand.”
Notable differences exist between students in community college baccalaureate programs compared to state university programs, according to the researchers.
The report cites previous research findings that community college students as more likely to be working adults with families and “place-bound” to the area where they live, and it asserts that in states such as Florida—where community college baccalaureate programs are more common—allowing “program overlap between the community college and state university system” results in “little competition for students between sectors.”
Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, an education professor at UCLA and co-author of the report, said that when it comes to hearing points raised by CSU faculty members, “I think that there’s a space to listen and document concerns. But when it comes to approving these programs, I think there has to be use of evidence. Like I said, we have data and evidence that points to the fact that we’re not serving the same students. That’s a very important point that we wanted to make in this report.”
The report describes how Florida community colleges are part of the Florida College System, while public universities are part of the State University System, and approximately 60 percent of the Florida College System bachelor’s programs were also offered by the State University System, according to 2015 data, “yet the SUS has not experienced any notable enrollment declines in these areas.”
Florida and Washington are two states that have authorized community college baccalaureate programs for the longest amount of time, the report states, so data from those states are often studied given the history and size of the programs.
The report includes some data on students in existing California community college baccalaureate programs but notes that “the existing data infrastructure consists of parallel data systems that can differ in how they count/report students and how they measure progress and outcomes.” The authors call for improved data collection.
The report’s authors also note an equity gap between the number of Latino students attending community college and the number transferring to four-year institutions. Among community college students, “while Latina/o/x students represent 51 percent of all students who declared a degree/transfer goal, they represent 35 percent among those who successfully transfer within four years.”
Thomas Norman, a professor of management at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and vice chair of CSU’s Academic Senate, has questions about the costs associated with adding baccalaureate programs at community colleges.
“Oftentimes, people look at the amounts students pay. But that’s not really the cost that we should be looking at from the state perspective,” Norman said, describing concerns about how state dollars might be needed to pay for costs associated with creating programs similar to those already at universities.
He also emphasized California State University system’s commitment to equity, which he said includes addressing the needs of nontraditional students.
Daisy Gonzales, interim chancellor of the California Community Colleges system, praised the report’s recommendations.
“This UCLA report shows us what the legislature and our Board of Governors saw in the potential to expand California Community College bachelor’s degree program with the passage of AB 927,” she said in a statement, referring to the 2021 law that allows up to 30 additional community colleges to add baccalaureate programs each academic year. “By expanding community college bachelor’s degree programs, we can close equity gaps, address workforce demands and lead social mobility at scale for Californians.”
While the affordability of community college baccalaureate programs makes them attractive to students, Rios-Aguilar said students also have existing obligations that prevent them from being able to commute to four-year colleges that may be farther away from their homes.
“I think the value proposition from these programs is that you can stay local. In some cases, students are attending part-time so they can continue working,” Rios-Aguilar said.
Ivy Love, a senior policy analyst with New America, a liberal Washington think tank, said her research has found that Florida residents see a big boost in earnings if they complete a community college baccalaureate program. Considering all areas of study, those with a baccalaureate degree earned about $10,000 more than those with just an associate degree, Love said. Her research found “a pretty racially and ethnically diverse group of students who graduate from these programs in Florida,” adding that about half are age 30 or older.
While many more of these programs exist in Florida—the report counted over 150 in Florida compared to 15 in California—Love said those enrolled still make up a small percentage of all community college students in Florida.
Deborah Floyd, a professor of higher education leadership at Florida Atlantic University, said in an email that the “strongest advocates” for expanding community college baccalaureate programs are “often employers within communities,” including, for example, school boards seeking teachers and hospitals or health-care facilities seeking workers.
“Businesses with a need for educated leaders and managers often advocate for these degrees,” Floyd said.
DENVER—As snow fell from gray skies on Tuesday, higher education professionals, publishers, librarians, information technologists, government researchers and others met this week for the Coalition for Networked Information spring membership meeting. There, attendees gathered to discuss the use of information technology to advance scholarship and education.
Ithaka S+R shared results from its triennial survey published last week, which sought to capture college library deans’ and directors’ perspectives three years into the pandemic.
But Ioana Hulbert, Ithaka S+R researcher and survey author, confided to a packed ballroom that she had been anxious during the survey’s administration in the fall of 2022—mostly because of question 17.
“Without fail, almost every library director stopped on this question for multiple days,” Hulbert said about the prompt that asked respondents how they would handle budget cuts. “I just sat there hoping they would come back and finish the survey.”
Many of the survey results resonated with librarians present at the Denver meeting. Over meals and in hallways, they discussed an evolving library landscape in which print resources have been demoted, staffing shortages feel urgent and pandemic-era students struggle to engage with libraries.
Question 17, which was new this cycle, asked respondents to indicate the top three areas where they would implement cuts if a 10 percent budget reduction were necessary. This question and another that had been asked in this and earlier cycles concerning how respondents would allocate a 10 percent budget increase sought to highlight librarians’ lowest and highest priorities.
Much to Hulbert’s relief, 612 librarians completed the survey, including the vexing question 17. Still, Hulbert said she learned a lesson.
“It’s going to be the last question in the next cycle.”
When the results were tallied, the librarians’ lowest priorities were print resources. More than half of respondents (54 percent) would cut the print monograph budget, and nearly half (45 percent) would cut print journal subscriptions. In the event of a budget increase, the librarians would prioritize staffing. More than half (56 percent) would direct additional funds toward new or redefined positions, and about two out of five (41 percent) would prioritize employee salary increases.
Budget cuts—real or imagined—are not the only challenge. Fewer than one in five librarians at baccalaureate-level colleges (18 percent) agreed that their library has a well-developed strategy for redressing the influence of disinformation and misinformation. Librarians at master’s-granting colleges and doctoral universities felt similarly dispirited (13 percent and 20 percent, respectively).
“Is the ‘well-developed strategy’ portion of the question really driving the response?” Hulbert said. “Maybe that’s too high of a bar to say that you have an explicit, documented strategy somewhere.”
Nonetheless, the finding stood in stark contrast to the overwhelming majority of librarian respondents (98 percent) who indicated that helping students develop research, critical analysis and information literacy skills is a priority. This near consensus is set against the backdrop of a rise in disinformation during the pandemic.
In recent years, students appear to have shifted the ways in which they engage with the library and librarians.
“We’re teaching this generation of post-pandemic, traumatized students who don’t have confidence in information,” said Christina Trunnell, assistant dean of the library at Montana State University. “Our core foundational information literacy programs that we teach don’t reach those students anymore.”
During the early pandemic lockdowns, Montana State students made abundant use of virtual chat reference services, Trunnell said. But that use plummeted more than 60 percent during each of the last two years. Meanwhile, this academic year, demand for one-on-one consultations has skyrocketed.
“We haven’t had time to assess this new cadre of students,” Trunnell said, adding that many college libraries are short-staffed. “How do students look up information? How do they understand it? Until we have time to assess those needs and assess those patterns, we’re behind the game.”
But assessing current students’ needs and offering one-on-one consultations places additional demands on library staff. At the same time, library deans and directors are struggling to retain and hire staff, according to the Ithaka survey. One in five of the librarian respondents (20 percent) is already outsourcing some skills. A similar percentage expects to reduce staff in access and technical services, metadata, and cataloging in the next five years. Technology and programming roles are the most challenging to recruit and retain, according to the survey.
Something’s got to give.
Meanwhile, students who attended high school during the pandemic may have underdeveloped library and literacy skills, according to some of the librarians in Denver.
“There’s a real disconnect in students even knowing what a library does,” Michael Vandenburg, dean of the libraries at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, said. “That may have something to do with how students experienced high school research during COVID lockdowns, but it also may reflect the defunding of libraries in secondary schools.”
Pandemic-era high school students working on research projects may not have had abundant opportunities to engage with high school librarians, Vandenburg offered as an example. Many college libraries offer orientation programs that help students understand the library’s resources. But such programming often competes for attention with offerings from other campus offices.
“Information literacy has to be baked into their coursework,” Vandenburg suggested. Some faculty need minimal help with such efforts, while others require extensive assistance over time, he said.
In a library landscape where budgets are strapped and librarians struggle to reach students, artificial intelligence might offer some efficiencies, according to Elias Tzoc, associate dean for teaching, learning and research at Clemson University.
“I know that’s part of the misinformation issue,” Tzoc said. “But when we use it in the right way, it can help scale this and other library services as well.”
The Texas Supreme Court has ruled 6 to 2 that the University of Texas and the Texas State University systems can revoke degrees that graduates received through academic misconduct.
“The only difference between expelling a current student for academic misconduct and revoking the degree of a former student for the exact same academic misconduct is one of timing,” Debra Lehrmann, the court’s senior justice, wrote on the majority’s behalf. “That distinction is immaterial to the issue presented and erroneously hinges the university’s bare authority to address its students’ academic misconduct on when that misconduct is discovered.”
Two graduates, referred to by the initials K.E. and S.O. in the ruling, sued the universities after their advisers reported that the graduates earned their doctorates through fraud in their dissertations and the universities attempted to revoke their degrees. The advisers said they learned about the alleged fraud while working with the graduates after they graduated, the ruling says—S.O.’s adviser retracted his own article that had used S.O.’s data after another graduate student’s experiments indicated some of the data were inaccurate.
K.E.’s adviser “found inconsistencies in K.E.’s dissertation research data that led the adviser to believe K.E. had manipulated the data,” while S.O.’s adviser “brought a complaint against her for academic misconduct relating to some of the data reported in her dissertation,” the ruling says.
“Indeed, if timing were as significant as K.E. and S.O. suggest, we struggle to determine when a university passes the point of no return,” Lehrmann wrote in the ruling dated March 31 but released Wednesday. “Is it at the graduation ceremony? When the diploma memorializing the conferral of the degree is printed? When the last box is checked on an administrative form indicating that all requirements have been satisfied? When a doctoral student completes the defense of her dissertation?”
”A degree is not merely a piece of paper; it is a ‘university’s certification to the world at large of the recipient’s educational achievement and fulfillment of the institution’s standards,’” she wrote, quoting a previous opinion.
Lehrmann wrote that “the university officials do not claim, and for good reason, that they may take such action against K.E., S.O., or any other former student based on conduct occurring after a degree is conferred. Instead, they argue that they may rescind a degree upon determining that it was not earned—and thus should not have been awarded—in the first place.”
She wrote, “While precedent on the specific issue presented is nonexistent in Texas and sparse elsewhere, courts applying similarly worded grants of (state legislative or state constitutional) authority (in other states) have uniformly determined that public universities have degree-revocation power.” She noted Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia.
Justice Jimmy Blacklock wrote a dissent, which was joined by Justice John Phillip Devine.
“Many will be surprised to learn from the court’s decision that they hold their college degrees not permanently, as their own property, but contingently, only so long as their alma maters continue to believe they should have received them,” Blacklock wrote. “I would have thought that after I graduated and left the University of Texas, the school retained no authority whatsoever over me or my property. I can find no such power over the rights of graduates mentioned in the voluminous Texas statutes governing universities. Universities certainly have abundant statutory authority to manage their own internal affairs, but they have no power to manage the affairs of their graduates. If the Legislature wanted state universities to possess the extraordinary power to unilaterally adjudicate the rights of graduates, surely it would say so. It has not.”
David Sergi, an attorney for S.O., said his client would appeal.
“We agree with the dissent,” said Sergi. “We think the decision is flawed and we will be filing a motion for rehearing because, you know, the court has turned your degree into a revocable license.”
Neither S.O. nor K.E. currently has a revoked degree, but the university systems could now move forward using the Supreme Court’s authority. The university systems declined to comment on the ruling Wednesday.
The Supreme Court majority did say graduates must be afforded due process in degree-revocation proceedings.
“Frankly, I think we’d win in the disciplinary hearing,” Sergi said of possible future action by the University of Texas. “My client has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.”
Colorado could soon pass a law that would effectively allow public colleges and universities to admit more out-of-state students—if they also recruit more high-achieving state residents.
Colorado law currently allows no more than 45 percent of each public institution’s incoming freshmen to come from out of state. House Bill 96—passed by both the House and Senate and now awaiting the governor’s signature—won’t literally increase that cap, but it would raise the limit on the number of in-state students who, by virtue of their status as “Colorado Scholars,” can be counted twice in institutions’ residency calculations, thereby making room for more out-of-state students.
The Colorado Scholars Program applies to state residents who qualify for a specific merit scholarship of $2,500—and who, crucially, count as two in-state students in the calculations that determine whether institutions are in compliance with the nonresident limit. Right now, only 8 percent of Colorado Scholars admitted in any incoming class can double count toward the in-state resident number; the new bill would nearly double that, to 15 percent, creating more space for out-of-state students than admitting in-state students who didn’t qualify for the program would.
Angie Paccione, executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education (DHE), said the bill is about more than increasing tuition revenue for schools with high out-of-state demand; it’s also intended to keep Colorado’s best and brightest high school students from leaving. In 2020, nearly a quarter of the state’s high school graduates who went on to pursue a degree did so out of state—5 percent more than in 2009, according to data from the Colorado DHE.
Raising the cap on scholars program recipients, Paccione hopes, will incentivize institutions to aggressively recruit more high-achieving Colorado residents in order to raise the threshold for out-of-state students.
“It’s a war for enrollment right now, and we want to put an end to the brain drain we’re seeing,” Paccione said. “We’ve seen in-state enrollment decline, and we’re trying to shore it up … This is one way to do that.”
Tom Harnisch, vice president for government relations at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), said Colorado’s efforts to make more room for nonresidents at public institutions follows a general trend, especially in states facing demographic declines that also have high demand from out-of-state applicants, like Wisconsin and North Carolina.
“There are very few states with caps on out-of-state students, and in those states there has been a movement to try and loosen them,” he said. “It’s really an issue in states with popular, well-known public flagships” like the University of Colorado at Boulder—which is pushing up against its state-imposed limits. The university’s newest incoming freshman class was made up of 42 percent out-of-state students, just three percentage points below the cap.
The bill would apply to all Colorado public institutions, but experts say it would only be meaningful for two: Boulder, the state’s public flagship, and the Colorado School of Mines.
Boulder, an R-1 institution located in prime skiing country, has “always been a destination for students from other states,” Harnisch said. Mines, a small but elite engineering university, boasts some of the top energy programs in the country; enrollment there has increased by almost 40 percent since 2010, according to Colorado DHE data.
In total, only 18 percent of undergraduate students attending four-year public universities in Colorado are nonresidents; at Boulder and Mines, they make up over 35 percent of the student population, according to DHE data.
And that number is growing, particularly at Boulder. The new bill would give the institution some breathing room.
“We’ve been calling it the CU bill, because it’s really about Boulder,” Paccione said. “We don’t want CU to become primarily nonresident; it used to be primarily Colorado students, and that’s been changing. But they’re also the only ones with a significant waiting list of out-of-state students, and that’s money sitting on the table right now that could really benefit the institution.”
Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, also boasts a sizable proportion of out-of-state students—about 27 percent in 2021—but for now the bill wouldn’t have much impact there. That’s because Boulder and Mines are two of only three schools that enrolled any Colorado Scholars at all since 2019; the other is Metropolitan State University of Denver, which saw its last class of Scholars graduate in 2021.
Ken McConnellogue, vice president of communications for the University of Colorado (CU) system—of which Boulder is the flagship—told Inside Higher Ed that “the number of nonresident students is not projected to grow but remain in line with the prior year incoming class.”
Cecelia Orphan, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Denver, said even if that were true, the bill would set Boulder up for future expansion of its nonresident student body—and potentially bring it one step closer to securing an end to the state-imposed cap on out-of-state students. She sees House Bill 96 as an incremental victory in a pitched battle between the CU system and state lawmakers reluctant to look like they’re rolling out the welcome mat for out-of-state students at the expense of Colorado taxpayers.
“The Legislature has really held this line that you can only have a certain number of out-of-state students … but Boulder has a strong lobbying presence in the state and has been pushing for that to be removed,” Orphan said. “I’m guessing they got creative and are trying to work a different angle. It’s certainly a more politically palatable approach than just raising the cap.”
Paccione acknowledged that the solution is confusing, further complicating a calculus that effectively obfuscates the true ratio of in-state to out-of-state students. If the bill is signed, Paccione admitted that it could even lead to a situation at institutions like Boulder where out-of-state students outnumber residents in real numbers but still technically fall below the 45 percent threshold.
Double counting Colorado Scholars isn’t the only wrench in the works of the state’s residency numbers. There is also a provision currently in effect that excludes all international students from being counted as part of the out-of-state population—an exemption that could significantly skew data at institutions with international appeal like Boulder and Mines. Another addendum—a provision allowing institutions to count Peace Corps volunteers as in-state students even if they’re nonresidents—was introduced in the new bill.
Harnisch said Colorado is fairly unique in its student residency calculations; he couldn’t think of another state that double counted students for any reason when collecting data.
Michael Vente, director of research for the Colorado DHE, said these special calculations make collecting and tweaking the state’s residency data “one of the most complex” parts of his job.
“We’re doing our best to just follow and interpret the statutes as they’ve been written,” he said. “It can get very complicated based on the carve outs, exceptions and double counting.”
Orphan said the slow but sure push for more out-of-state students is part of a years-long balancing act, wherein Colorado’s higher ed institutions try to offset a lack of public funding by seeking revenue from external sources even as they try to provide more public services to residents.
Out of all 50 states, Colorado provides the second-lowest amount of financial support to public higher education, according to the latest SHEEO data.
“Colorado is a state of Faustian bargains in policy and funding for higher ed,” Orphan said. “What that bargain could mean is, eventually, Colorado residents might have to compete with out-of-state students for spots at our best colleges.”
Paccione said the new bill wouldn’t push out residents.
“This doesn’t mean less room for in-state students,” she said. “Out-of-state students pay a sizable amount of tuition. What that does is that extra tuition helps to fund the in-state students.”
But some are concerned that by trading out-of-state slots for merit scholarship recipients—instead of for students who qualify for Pell Grants or significant financial aid—the state is prioritizing not necessarily the best Colorado students, but the most privileged.
“Merit-based scholarships do typically go to wealthier students, so a lot of these merit-based programs are seen as perpetuating privilege,” Harnisch said. “A lot of people think a better use of taxpayer money would be to focus on need-based aid to bring in students who wouldn’t otherwise go to college.”
Orphan is one of those people. She said that Colorado’s focus shouldn’t be on allowing institutions like Boulder to usher in more out-of-state students, but on making public college more accessible to the state’s marginalized and underserved, who she says have been systemically left behind.
“If we were doing a great job of recruiting Colorado students, making sure they’re prepared through their K-12 education, making college affordable and really had tapped the in-state market dry, then I’d say yes, it’s time to turn to out-of-state applicants,” Orphan said. “But that is not the case.”
James Walsh, an education major at the University of South Carolina at Aiken who’s been recognized for his ability to creatively teach middle schoolers math, has some strong opinions about college teaching: “The notion that everyone learns the same way is ridiculous, but professors tend to stick to what they know and what they have always done.”
Outside of the education program at USC Aiken, nearly all of Walsh’s professors lecture nearly all the time, he says. With one exception—a professor of biology who facilitated lively lab discussions prompted by images—Walsh, a senior, can’t name a single professor who’s used “different teaching styles to engage us as learners.”
Lectures are a “great tool for college courses, but they are just used way too often,” he says. And while the idea that “learning can be fun is thrown out the window once in college,” it can be “just as exciting for us.”
Walsh’s credentials aside, it apparently doesn’t take a teacher in training to critique faculty teaching styles, or to want more from the college classroom experience: more than half of respondents to the recent Inside Higher Ed/College Pulse survey of 3,004 students at 128 four- and two-year institutions say teaching style has made it hard to succeed in a class since starting college.
This makes a “teaching style that didn’t work for me” the No. 1 barrier to academic success cited by students in the survey over all. The share of students who say this is even larger for key subgroups, including those with learning disabilities or related conditions.
Relatedly, half of students want professors to experiment with different teaching styles. This was the No. 2 response to a separate survey question about which faculty actions students believe would promote their academic success. Only more flexible deadlines was more popular.
Beyond deadlines, some 44 percent of students say they want greater flexibility when it comes to class attendance and participation. This was the No. 3 faculty action students say would promote their academic success.
Students see both internal classroom dynamics and external factors as getting in the way of their success.
One in four students cite strict attendance or participation requirements as a barrier to success. The same goes for unrealistic deadlines. One in five students cite a professor whose office hours conflict with their schedule, an online course they would have preferred to take in person or inaccessible course materials.
Although sense of belonging is increasingly part of student success discussions, this issue fell lower on the list of barriers noted by survey respondents. Sixteen percent of students say they’ve been negatively affected by the feeling that they don’t belong in their academic program. Among students with learning disabilities or similar conditions, it’s 22 percent.
Relatedly, 14 percent of students over all say their success has been impeded by feeling like they don’t belong at their institution (not just their academic program). That increases for LGBTQIA+ students (19 percent) and Black students (18 percent).
Amy Salazar, associate vice provost for student success at Sam Houston State University, says that even though belonging ranks lower than some other barriers, it remains “troubling to me given that this lack of belonging is reported as more significant for our most marginalized student populations.”
There’s still work to be done to create classroom environments “where every student feels as though they belong and is affirmed in their ability to be successful,” she adds.
Regarding students’ other concerns, Salazar recalls the work of psychologist Ella R. Kahu of Massey University in New Zealand on framing student engagement, which asserts that “lifeload” is a critical factor. (What is lifeload? Kahu described it in one 2013 paper as “the sum of all the pressures a student has in their life,” including college but also employment, finances, family needs and health, among other dynamics.)
That instruction- and classwork-related barriers barely outrank school-life balance and mental health “reminds us that our students are carrying a lot into the classroom, and that is impacting their ability to be successful,” Salazar says. “All of these point back to a generation of students who are coming to college less academically prepared given pandemic learning loss, with more financial concerns and higher rates of mental health needs.”
The next step? “For us as higher education institutions to adapt to the students we have today and not the students we were in prior decades. Our understanding of the college experience has to adapt to the students entering our campuses now that are coming with radically different lived experiences than we had.”
When asked to reflect on what educators could do to help them be more successful, Student Voice respondents zeroed in on flexibility, variety, clarity and affinity.
One-quarter of respondents say they want their professors to offer some class sessions online, even for in-person courses. And about one in five students say professors could boost their academic success by being more accessible outside of class hours, by including wellness resources in syllabi or discussing them in class, and by including academic support resources in syllabi.
Few students—less than one in 10—want professors to set higher expectations for them and their peers, with 12 percent of male students and 5 percent of women saying this.
Louis Deslauriers, director of science teaching and learning at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and senior preceptor in physics, has found that even when students say they prefer learning from lectures over active learning methods, they’ve learned significantly more in the active learning classroom. (This is consistent with many other studies finding that students learn more in class when they’re required to engage with the material via individual or group activities.) Of the Student Voice findings, Deslauriers says he can make some educated guesses about what’s driving certain responses.
On teaching-style concerns, for example, Deslauriers says students might have become “more discerning about effective pedagogies during the pandemic.” Why? It’s hard to forget “the experience of enduring a 90-minute online traditional lecture.”
That students are concerned about flexibility with deadlines and attendance also makes sense, as “many students today juggle multiple responsibilities,” he adds.
The Student Voice survey also asked students about their experiences with grading and with asking professors for accommodations that aren’t required (think: a deadline extension for a personal emergency). Some key takeaways:
Among students who’ve asked for discretionary accommodations (n=2,196), just over half say the response or responses were positive. A slightly smaller share says reactions were mixed. Just 5 percent report negative reactions only.
Some 12 percent of students taking online courses only report negative reactions, however.
Asked in the survey to share an example of a faculty action that made them feel like they had a better chance of succeeding in a class, students tend to recall actions that illuminate other data points. These include deadline extensions for personal issues, large workloads or mistakes, and professors reaching out or making themselves unusually available to struggling students.
One respondent at Lansing Community College remembers how a professor even gave out his personal cellphone number for after-hours help, and that this made the difference between the student staying enrolled and dropping out.
Here are some additional examples of helpful faculty actions students have experienced:
“One time, I got confused with a deadline and thought an assignment was due at 10 p.m. instead of 10 a.m.,” wrote a student from Louisiana State University. “I raced after my professor, told them about the situation and how I had so much on my plate at the time (school, club, research, grad apps, etc.). They let me turn in the assignment late without penalty and were very understanding. That gesture alone made me more motivated to attend class and do well in the course. I got 10 times more engaged in the material and did extremely well in the class.”
“Not giving multiple assignments during exam week,” says a University of Houston student. “Another good thing that I had a professor do was that they stated that the first midterm could only help your grade. If you scored well, it would be helpful, if you didn’t score well, it wouldn’t hurt your grade. This way I was more enthusiastic and actually learned things instead of being only focused on my grade.”
At Drexel University, a student recalls a professor reaching out when an assignment didn’t get handed in.
“I explained that I was simply behind and not deserving of an extension. My professor said that next time, I should reach out beforehand (not just to her, but to other professors as well) because the professors in my university are generally nice people. This has made me reassured in her class and feel more comfortable with asking questions and requesting extensions.”
Sara Brownell, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University whose research focuses on inclusive learning environments in the natural sciences, says that some of the anecdotes stand out because they’re “just examples of instructors being compassionate and caring. Students deserve that and instructors can bolster student learning by showing that compassion and caring.”
At the same time, such examples raise potential questions about how students’ needs and expectations may conflict with faculty members’ own needs and expectations in this new era of teaching and learning. (And it’s worth highlighting that not all such actions are desirable to all students. Kathryn Lakin, a sophomore majoring in English at Boston University, who was not part of the survey, tells Inside Higher Ed she’s glad that having a professor’s cellphone number proved helpful to someone else, but that “I am very much against the idea of constant availability. I think being constantly available by phone eliminates important boundaries and creates a work-all-the-time culture we should try to avoid,” in the interest of both student and faculty mental health.)
Scott Freeman, a teaching professor emeritus of biology at the University of Washington who has found that active learning increases student performance across demographics and especially among historically minoritized students, says that individual outreach to students proves especially “tricky” in the kinds of high-enrollment courses he taught. Moreover, he says, “we’re trying to prepare students to be competent professionals and contribute to the to the world. If you work for a company, there may not be a lot of flexible deadlines.”
In any case, he says, “I would love to see more work on all that—when is it positive and supports better student outcomes?”
What would you like to hear more about from this survey? Share your reactions and questions here.
Connecticut College president Katherine Bergeron is stepping down in the wake of student protests and widespread calls for her resignation over missteps on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Bergeron made the announcement Friday morning, writing in a statement that she would formally step down "at the end of the current semester.” Students, faculty and staff have called for Bergeron’s ouster for weeks; students occupied the administrative building last month after Rodmon King, the dean of institutional equity and inclusion, resigned after objecting to the college’s decision to hold a fundraiser at Florida’s Everglades Club, which has long been accused of discriminating against Black and Jewish people.
In his resignation letter, King blasted the president for bullying and creating a “toxic administrative culture of fear and intimidation.”
Bergeron did not address the specifics of the controversy in her resignation announcement.
“Certainly, the road has not always been easy. It never is, when the work is so important and the goals so ambitious. The past several weeks have proven particularly challenging, and as president, I fully accept my share of responsibility for the circumstances that have led us to this moment,” she wrote in an emailed statement to the campus community Friday morning. “For the past nine and a half years, I have devoted myself to advancing educational excellence and equity at this College. I care deeply—and I always have—for the success of our faculty, the well-being of our staff, and above all, the intellectual, social, and professional development of our students. My decision to leave at this moment is for the good of all these things.”
Bergeron continued, “For my part, I have thought hard about the events of the past weeks, and I know I will continue to learn from them. I hope it is possible for everyone to do the same, for there are many lessons here. It is only through careful, honest discernment that a community can grow towards peace, wisdom, and justice. That is my wish for Conn.”
The Connecticut College Board of Trustees also issued a statement Friday, praising Bergeron’s work over nearly a decade at the institution and pointing to her track record in curriculum development, strategic planning, fundraising and establishing the Division of Institutional Equity and Inclusion, whose dean ultimately played a role in ending her presidency.
“Over the last several weeks our focus has been drawn to areas in which the College can better execute its mission, including the area of equity, inclusion, and full participation. Constructive dialogue among students, staff, faculty administrators, and trustees has already begun to clarify an approach to the next phase of work we need to do to improve the Conn College experience for everyone,” board chair Debo P. Adegbile wrote in a statement sent to the campus community Friday. “The Board remains committed to providing additional resources to advance campus DIEI work, and to assess ways to support the community more broadly as plans come into sharper focus. Our College is at its finest, after all, when students, staff, faculty, administrators, and trustees work together to deliver an exceptional educational experience for all.”
Parchment, a leading digital transcript sharing company, expanded into new territory this week by acquiring Quottly, a company that sells software for course and program sharing, managing dual enrollment, and automating and streamlining transfer agreements.
Leaders of the companies say combining their operations—transcript exchanging and credit transfer—can help institutions better handle the many moving parts of the transfer process and make students’ transition from one institution to another more efficient. Some higher ed experts see the move as a response to demand for a more comprehensive transfer management platform when some universities are using multiple, disparate digital tools to shepherd students through an already complex process.
Transfer students, on average, lose 43 percent of their credits, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found in a 2017 report. Meanwhile, fewer than a quarter of colleges and universities share transcripts with each other electronically, according to a 2021 report by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO). Only about half of colleges and universities nationwide have automated articulation rules governing which course credits count and are automatically applied.
“If you’ve attended multiple colleges and maybe took some dual-enrollment courses in high school or AP courses, to get your records together to make them available to the college to which you’re transferring—and for them to be able to take the time to key punch all of the course information, all of the credits and grades, and run it through the evaluation system—is a big point of friction,” said Matthew Pittinsky, CEO of Parchment. “The other is the evaluation of courses and the management of equivalencies”—which classes at one institution count for credit toward a specific degree at another.
Pittinsky said transferring credits is the most common reason students request digital transcripts through Parchment. He sees the acquisition as a way to tap into an “underserved technology market” at a time when college leaders are “looking to make transfer a bigger part of their enrollment strategy” in response to pandemic enrollment declines.
Both platforms will still be available separately, but “they’ll have better connections between them, and they’ll have additional capabilities because of the overall capabilities of the combined organization,” he added.
Alicia Policinski, CEO and co-founder at Quottly, said the acquisition also brings a more “seamless student experience and a seamless administrator experience” to a wider network of college and university systems and their students. The platform automates the course evaluation and approval process for administrators, and students have a dashboard where they can search shared and transferable courses between institutions. She said the wider the network of colleges using the platform becomes, the more useful it is.
Parchment is a juggernaut in its niche of the ed-tech world, serving about 2,800 colleges and universities in the U.S. and more than 100 higher ed institutions abroad, according to its website. Quottly is a much smaller but growing operation, working with over 220 colleges and universities, including the Montana University System, the University System of Maryland and California Virtual Campus.
Policinski said she wishes the institutions she attended had access to this software when she was a transfer student.
“I ended up taking an extra year of school because I miscounted one course,” she said. “Tuition wasn’t cheap. It was a very expensive error on my part.”
Sarah Zauner, executive director of the Ada Center, which advises higher ed institutions on decisions about technology, said colleges badly need “viable technology tools that comprehensively support student transfer,” given the maze of piecemeal options currently available to handle different parts of the process.
“Right now, most colleges and universities use a combination of a degree audit, degree planner, a separate transfer database, the websites of other institutions, often a digital credential service like Parchment, and possibly a transfer workflow tool to help students navigate pathways across institutions,” she said in an email. “Nearly everyone at an institution would tell you these disconnected software tools reinforce student confusion (and costly mistakes) on the path to transfer.”
She believes the acquisition is a “signal that the private sector is realizing there is unmet need in the field for a more holistic approach to helping institutions (and students) with a better approach to designing pathways across institutions.”
While that’s “good news,” she added that technology can only do so much when institution-level transfer policies remain convoluted and decentralized. Often faculty members are evaluating courses, academic advisers are guiding students and administrators are making the higher-level policy decisions. Meanwhile, students, not knowing where to go for information, turn to the internet.
“The challenge here is you’re dealing with a lot of messy policies and practices, and technology can kind of ratify those and codify that messiness, but it can’t fix it,” she said.
John Fink, senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, agreed these tools are useful, “but it really comes down to how they’re implemented.” They can offer major “efficiency gains,” but they’re not a panacea.
“What’s hard, and what I don’t think there’s a technological fix for, is the process of colleges working with students early on, even as a part of recruitment, to think and plan and explore what they’re interested and know which courses best align to those goals so students aren’t just taking courses that will be accepted at a university, for instance, but they’re taking the right courses,” he said. “It requires advising, program alignment, more human-process sorts of things.”
Policinski said technology can’t replace improving institutional and state transfer policies, but it can help.
She noted that Quottly’s platform makes it easier for academic advisers to efficiently and accurately guide students, and students can track how the courses they’ve taken, or will take, at one institution count toward a specific degree program at another.
“What we found is that the technology needs to work in support of these policy improvements that states are enacting,” such as instituting statewide guaranteed transfer pathways, she said. “We’re able to really program the good policy work that’s being done into the software for the benefit of students, as well as administrators.”
Pittinsky said transfer policy solutions only work if universities have the technology to implement them. Notably, colleges can’t give “consistent” or “timely” answers to students about what course credits count without a centralized database of which courses are equivalent to each other between institutions.
“We could walk through each of the areas where I think most people would say transfer should just work better, and there is a technology component,” he said.
He sees the offerings of Parchment and Quottly as an example.
Combining tools for transcript exchange and “taking the data that are inside of transcripts and helping students more successfully transfer and … get to their degree faster and at a lower cost,” he said, “we just think is a really exciting combination.”
The University of South Dakota’s TRIO Student Support Services is like all other federally funded TRIO SSS programs in that it serves low-income, first-generation or disabled students. Similarly, it offers tutoring and assistance with choosing courses, applying for financial aid, building financial literacy and applying to graduate programs. But an innovative first-year experience program is central to USD’s TRIO approach.
Impact on persistence: Beyond the basic TRIO requirements, USD’s SSS program offers an original first-year experience, which staff members say contributes to program participants’ high persistence rate. How high? Ninety-four percent, compared to 69 percent for USD students with similar backgrounds who are not enrolled in TRIO. Staff members also say TRIO program participants’ good academic standing rate is 96 percent, compared to an institutional baseline of 82 percent.
“TRIO SSS is a federal program, so many projects exist nationwide,” explains Dallas Doane, USD’s TRIO SSS director. “Our first-year experience program really is unique, though. It gives us a common intellectual experience and academic component in providing our services. Additionally, we know for the students we serve—first-generation, income-eligible and students with disabilities—that feeling a sense of belonging can make or break their persistence.”
The federally funded TRIO program, which offers programs beyond Student Support Services, considers itself the originator of the first-generation concept. In a 2021 interview published in the Journal of First-Generation Student Success, council president Maureen Hoyler and Arnold Mitchem, president emeritus, say that the term has its roots in the 1980 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
Ahead of that legislation, Mitchem says, TRIO educators were asked to put together recommendations, including TRIO eligibility criteria. Income alone proved problematic given differing costs of living across the country, they say, and educators rejected the loaded terms “culturally disadvantaged” or “rurally isolated.” “First-generation” was suggested, and it stuck. Hoyler adds, “The term was introduced to promote change and to produce equity and to produce a recognition of individuals’ potential that may not have had their potential recognized without the term.”
What the experience includes: Supports for this population of students cover a number of areas within the first year.
The need: Kimberly Jones, executive vice president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, says research shows that “for all students, regardless of what income you’re coming from, the first few weeks of your experiences of undergraduate are determinative of whether you're going to sink or swim. And so TRIO especially makes it a priority to grab ahold of those young people, and sometimes not-so-young people, early.”
Jones’s favored analogy for TRIO? “You can give a 16-year-old a pair of car keys, but if you don’t give them driving lessons, they’re not going anywhere,” she says. So by supporting new college students “intentionally, aggressively and early on, we’re helping give them the tools to succeed.”
Another benefit of TRIO is community. Jones explains, “For students, especially if you're first gen, no one else in your family can tell you what it's like to be on a college campus and talk to professors, or about the syllabus and the registrar’s office. So TRIO gives you a community that’s going through that experience with you. It gives you a home base on campus where you can just go and feel safe for a minute.”
Jones adds that because the federal guidelines for a what a TRIO program must include are somewhat limited, it becomes “incumbent upon the project directors and their staff to be innovative.”
Does your campus have an innovative approach to federally funded TRIO programs? A notable first-year experience program? Tell us about it.
Attracting students to various institutional resources remains a challenge for all higher education professionals. Muhlenberg College’s career center dug through the data to understand which of its students were not visiting the office or attending its programs and adjusted accordingly.
“Data is driving 100 percent of the decisions we’re making, and it’s really opening up our eyes to gaps that we didn’t know … existed,” says Sean Schofield, executive director of career services at Muhlenberg.
What happened: When Schofield began in his role in May 2021, he first turned to the data.
The career center collects all kinds of information from its Handshake platform, including student demographics, major interests, career goals, event or workshop participation, and appointments booked with the center. Surveys, focus groups and interviews also add data to the reports from Handshake.
In addition, the center surveys recent alumni to understand their initial postgraduate plans, what Schofield calls their “first destination,” and any experiential learning completed during their undergraduate careers.
Muhlenberg’s career center was reaching 62 to 72 percent of its student population annually at the end of the 2021 academic year.
“My first question I asked when the team told me that was, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic. Is it always the same, like 30 percent or so that we don’t hit?’” Schofield says. He wanted to understand who was being missed and if there was any connection in who those students were.
Schofield and his team realized in their data analysis that students in performance arts majors and those planning on attending graduate school were less likely than their peers to visit the career center or complete their first-destination survey.
The solution: As a result, Muhlenberg’s career center staff focused their attention on these groups and how they could enhance outreach and relationships.
For performing arts students, the career center established a career coach who would liaise between the departments and increased collaboration with those faculty members. Muhlenberg’s campus is divided by a road, Chew Street, that separates most academic facilities and administrative services from the theater, center for the arts and rehearsal house, so the career center’s goal was to “Cross Chew Street,” Schofield explains.
Similarly, the Graduate School Preparatory Program had a new dedicated staff member to support students as they applied for programs and considered options in continuing their education.
Both career coaches had personal and professional experience in their related fields, Schofield says, making them the perfect fit for the roles and able to gain the trust of faculty and students in their fields.
More broadly, the career center changed the language and phrasing on its website to be more inclusive for students and their postgraduate experiences. Instead of marketing a list of employers a student could work with, the center emphasized stories and diverse outcomes following graduation.
“We not only tell stories of professional advancement in full-time work but highlight our support structure for students who are applying to graduate and professional schools,” Schofield says.
The center also re-evaluated its experiential learning opportunities, and the allocated funding for those programs, to expand its supports for underserviced students.
Other uses for data: Besides assisting the center in reaching students, the focus on data is contributing to building relationships with faculty.
“One of the things that initially I did was to go around to faculty and introduce [myself] and say, ‘Hey, what data can we provide you?’” Schofield explains.
By working with data, the career center is also reconstructing its services more broadly. When hiring new team members, for example, Schofield is intentional in selecting personnel who are comfortable with and have a high aptitude for data synthesis and reporting. Schofield has hired five new faces to his team, strengthening the career center’s data strategies.
“Whatever we do, we want to be able to count in some way,” Schofield says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean with numbers, but we have to be able to count it, and what we’re counting has to be learning.”
Rather than evaluating participation or utilization, the career center re-established programs to target specific learning outcomes for every year a student is enrolled at the college, creating a phased approach to career development and readiness that it calls the Muhlenberg Action Plan, or MAP for short.
Do you have a data success tip that might help others encourage student success? Tell us about it.
House Republicans who want to stop President Biden’s student loan policies used a hearing Thursday to outline why they think those policies are harmful to the economy and what changes they would prefer.
Utah representative Burgess Owens, a Republican who chairs the House Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee, focused his first hearing of the new Congress on examining the implications of the Biden administration’s student loan policies for students and taxpayers. The hearing showed the divides between Republicans and Democrats on the subcommittee on student loan issues and higher education more broadly.
“The Biden administration proposal is a patchwork attempt to fix a structural problem that will only make worse the issues of rising prices and low-quality educations—it is one that leaves students worse than if they had never enrolled in the first place,” Owens said.
He added that the hearing also would “present an alternative vision that will lower college costs, limit excessive borrowing, and ensure students and taxpayers get a return on their investment in postsecondary education.”
A key part of that vision appears to be some risk-sharing provision that would require colleges and universities to be financially liable for student loans in the event that a borrower doesn’t repay their loan, according to the queries at the hearing. Higher education associations have historically opposed risk-sharing measures.
Owens said the colleges that have “no skin in the game” are the only ones that benefit from the student debt crisis.
“They push out programs that mean absolutely nothing for the children that come through,” he said. “Children come out in debt and hating their country and not understanding the free market system or loving the process that gave them the opportunities they had. We’ve heard a lot of attacks on for-profits. It’s not for-profits that got us into the problem today. We need to have solutions. We’re at a point now where we need innovative disruptions.”
The Biden administration has embarked on a wide-ranging plan to shore up the federal loan system, which includes closing loopholes, changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, new borrower defense to repayment regulations and a new income-driven repayment plan. The centerpiece of the student loan policies is the one-time student loan forgiveness, which is currently being challenged by six states and a pair of Texas residents in the Supreme Court. A decision in that case on the legality of the plan is expected later this spring.
The three witnesses called by Republicans said the Biden administration’s policies, which include a pause on student loan payments that’s been in place since March 2020 and one-time forgiveness of up to $20,000 for eligible Americans, would stoke inflation, increase the cost of college and lead to more borrowing among students and worse outcomes.
“At best it’s a temporary Band-Aid,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “It’s more likely to worsen structural problems.”
Adam Looney, an economist who leads the Marriner S. Eccles Institute for Economics and Quantitative Analysis at the University of Utah, said other changes were needed to address the fundamental problems that caused the student loan crisis.
“Useless degree programs and exorbitant costs can’t be solved by encouraging students to take out loans,” he said.
Carlo Salerno, education economist and an independent consultant, said there’s “no reason to think the costs won’t continue to rise without checks or guardrails,” when asked about the effect the student loan policies could have on the average cost of postsecondary education.
Sameer Gadkaree, president of the Institute for College Access and Success and the witness called by Democrats on the committee, outlined how the administration’s policies would support borrowers and called on Congress to lower college costs and double the maximum Pell Grant award so students wouldn’t have to borrow money to attend college.
“The administration’s student loan actions help address the most serious consequences of rising student debt,” he said.
Student borrower advocacy groups criticized the hearing for failing to include the voices of borrowers.
Republican representatives used their time, generally, to criticize the administration’s plans, signal support for risk-sharing and ask about inflation and outcomes. In one exchange, Wisconsin representative Glenn Grothman, a Republican, said the Pell Grant’s current eligibility criteria are “a slap in the face to middle-class America” and the program is “inexcusable.”
Democratic lawmakers voiced their support for the Biden administration’s policies, drew attention to the drop in state funding for public colleges and universities, and highlighted the decline in the Pell Grant’s value, which covers less than about 30 percent of the cost to attend a four-year public college, on average.
Florida representative Frederica Wilson, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, said the criticism of the debt-relief plan reflects a double standard “that speaks volumes to our values.” She compared the debt-relief plan to bailouts of corporations and the auto industry.
“When we decided to bail out the students, all hell breaks loose and the whining turns to outrage,” she said.
She pointed to the recently introduced Lowering Obstacles to Achievement Now (LOAN) Act as a blueprint for how Democrats would address the issues in the student loan system and lower the cost of college. That act would authorize a doubling of the maximum Pell Grant award, make loans less expensive and lower interest rates.
In her closing remarks, she said that she looked forward to working with Owens to help students.
“We are just beginning,” she said.
Messina’s Hotel Riviera, which has seen better days, is now part of Italy’s bid to brace against domestic demographic decline by attracting more international students. The hotel is now university-owned thanks to the nation’s slice of E.U. pandemic recovery funding.
“About 10 years ago, universities began to feel the impact of shrinking domestic student populations, constant brain drain and diminishing funding for core programs,” Salvatore Cuzzocrea, rector of the University of Messina and president of the Conference of Italian University Rectors, told Times Higher Education.
“Until then, the only real influx of international students came from privileged backgrounds, who came to study Italian art, language and culture,” he said.
Thanks to more than 12 million euros ($12.9 million) in public funding, the Hotel Riviera is now university property and set for a total revamp into a hall of residence. Together with the nearby Hotel Liberty, which has been leased to the university for 15 years, there will be space for an extra 408 beds for out-of-town students—both international students and those coming from other parts of Italy.
Sixty-five percent of the funding comes from Italy’s share of the E.U.’s post-pandemic recovery fund. More widely, the government has set aside €960 million (more than $1 billion) from those E.U. funds, 40 percent of which is intentionally set apart for southern regions, to triple the number of beds available for out-of-town students, bringing the total nationwide from 40,000 to 105,000 by 2026.
Messina’s international student population has “skyrocketed” from just 55 in 2018–19 to more than 900 in 2022–23, and they come from more than 70 countries, Cuzzocrea said.
Pizza-chewing internationals are a welcome sight around town for the rector, but they are also a necessity in a sector bracing itself for demographic decline. A February analysis by the consultancy Talents Venture said the forthcoming fall in the number of 18- to 21-year-olds and a northward drift within Italy in those remaining “constitutes one of the most serious threats to the sustainability of the Italian university system.”
The consultants found that 18 percent of courses had fewer than 20 first-year students last year, with student-linked funding set to fall by more than €600 million ($647 million) between 2020 and 2040, based on population projections. Talents Venture chief executive Pier Giorgio Bianchi said the 15 worst-affected campuses were all in Italy’s south.
While southern universities face the most fearful projections, beds for out-of-town students are a prerequisite for growth at many institutions, with those in the north facing steeper costs.
The University of Milan is spending €20 million ($21.5 million) on purpose-built accommodation for 258 students, with half the funding coming from E.U. recovery funds. Both Italian out-of-towners and international students will have to apply for a bed in the means-tested rooms, which cost €250 ($270) a month.
“In Milan you can’t find a single room for less than €500 or €600. These are new buildings, single rooms, in a good place,” said Marina Brambilla, deputy rector for education and student services at Milan.
“Students need accommodation—this is the first need, and Milan is very, very expensive. Without more accommodation we will have problems,” she said. “Particularly when students come from outside Europe, they want a campus—they don’t want to look on their own for an apartment.”
Nearly two-thirds of people who have never enrolled in higher education cite emotional stress as a key deterrent, a new report from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation finds.
It is the fourth most commonly cited reason after the cost of higher education (81 percent), inflation (77 percent) and work conflicts (69 percent). More people cited stress than a lack of interest in pursuing a degree (58 percent), feeling unprepared (54 percent), not seeing the value of higher education (51 percent) and childcare responsibilities (44 percent), among other factors.
Emotional stress is a more significant factor for women; 71 percent said it influenced their decision not to enroll, compared to 57 percent of men. Among people between 18 and 24, 77 percent cited stress, putting it on a par with concerns about inflation and their work schedules. By comparison, 60 percent of those 25 and older named stress.
More than half of respondents—55 percent—also cited their personal mental health as an important reason why they’ve never enrolled in higher education.
“I think this just shows that they have multiple responsibilities,” said Courtney Brown, the lead researcher on the report and vice president of impact and planning at Lumina Foundation. “They have to work. They have families. All of those things—they feel stressed out and so busy and the idea of then enrolling in college or a credentialing program on top of that is overwhelming.”
The report, entitled “Stressed Out and Stopping Out: The Mental Health Crisis in Higher Education,” utilized data from a survey of 12,015 individuals, including current students, students who had enrolled but then withdrew from a college or university, and those who had never attended. It is the last in a series of three studies first launched during the COVID-19 pandemic to analyze why students might be considering stopping out of college and determine how big a role the pandemic played in that decision.
“The frequency with which adults aged 18 to 24 who have never enrolled in college say emotional stress is an important reason for not doing so suggests the rising incidence of mental health issues among this age cohort may be a factor in their declining overall enrollment rates. Further research that includes adolescents’ experiences with mental health issues as a potential influence on their decision to pursue postsecondary education may lead to a better understanding of the problem,” the report states.
(In previous editions of the study, emotional stress and personal mental health were not included as potential reasons for choosing not to attend an institution of higher education. The top factor last year was the same as this year: cost.)
The report comes at a time when universities and colleges are facing increasingly severe mental health crises on campus and searching for ways to accommodate student needs for on-campus mental health services. To that end, researchers said advertising the resources they provide might help institutions win over individuals who cite stress as a deterrent to attending college.
“Colleges can start to promote the services they have,” said Brown. “Some of them have on-site clinics and counseling services, and sometimes that’s good for prospective students to know: ‘I will get these services as part of being a student.’ Talking about serving the whole student and putting the student first is really important to these [potential] students.”
The report also solidified a worrying trend: that students are increasingly entertaining the idea of dropping or stopping out. Last fall 41 percent of students reported that they had considered withdrawing for at least one semester, compared to 37 percent last year and 34 percent the year before.
Emotional stress remains a significant reason students consider stopping out, the report found. Fifty-five percent of those who have thought about leaving school in the past six months cited stress as a reason, though that number is lower than the 63 percent who cited it last year.
While the report shows that most students are no longer thinking about stopping out as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers believe the residual effects of the pandemic—including a sense of isolation and the challenges of online instruction—continue to impact individuals’ plans to withdraw or not enroll in higher education at all.
“When asked what emotional stress means to them, many students said that coursework can be overwhelming,” the report said, “particularly if combined with work and caregiving responsibilities or issues in their personal relationships. Some mentioned depression and anxiety specifically. Others said concerns about the ability to pay for college brought on emotional stress.”
Some experts believe this shows that the after-effects of COVID-19 are still impacting students, many of whom began their college career during the pandemic.
“The personal stressors that emerged during COVID didn’t disappear the day we got back to campus,” said Zoe Ragouzeos, senior associate vice president of mental health and sexual misconduct support at New York University. “Campuses nationally saw that students had not worked the muscle of interacting with each other face-to-face, so when they got back to campus … it continued to be stressful. I think that’s getting better, but it will take some time.”
This is not the first survey indicating that mental health struggles correlate with a student’s likelihood of leaving college. A study released earlier this year by Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health, focused on students who withdrew from their institution while receiving care from the campus counseling center, showed that those who reported social anxiety, depression, financial stress and academic distress—as well as students who were identified by their therapists as having mental health struggles—dropped out at higher rates than the student population at large.
Michelle Dimino, deputy director of education for the think tank Third Way, emphasized that the study underscores a trend that was evident long before the pandemic.
“It’s unfortunately not surprising to see these findings about the huge impact mental health is having on student persistence and enrollment—a mental health crisis in higher education has been building since long before the pandemic, and today’s students are balancing a ton of personal stressors and often working, parenting, and caregiving while enrolled in school. Mental health affects how students cope with challenges and navigate their studies, and providing robust, accessible mental and emotional health supports is essential for colleges to meet the needs of their student bodies,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Doing that well can be expensive, but more colleges seem to be recognizing that campus mental health services are a necessity, not a luxury.”
Last month, “After nearly two years of my resistance,” wrote a University of Houston Downtown professor, his department published an “anti-racist statement” on its website.
Adam Ellwanger, a tenured English professor, wrote this on Campus Reform, a conservative website where he’s a higher education fellow. By Monday, as Campus Reform and Fox News previously reported, the antiracist statement was gone.
“I resisted such a statement largely because I am not a leftist and I know that the anti-racists’ claims about society are false,” Ellwanger wrote in Campus Reform.
That sentence in his column links to a racist column—and not a type of racism that requires understanding current antiracism discourse or diversity, equity and inclusion or debates over recent definitions of racism. The column advances the argument that Black people are intellectually inferior to whites.
“I’m not really interested in getting bogged down in arguments about why this or that is or isn’t racist,” Ellwanger told Inside Higher Ed in an email Wednesday. His university’s student body in the fall was 19 percent Black and 55 percent Hispanic, according to the university’s website.
“Given the left-wing slant of Inside Higher Ed, I don’t really trust that my comments on this matter would be faithfully or positively represented,” he wrote, declining an interview.
Campus Reform didn’t respond to questions about whether Ellwanger or a Campus Reform editor inserted the link.
The column Ellwanger linked to, by John Staddon, a James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University , is titled, “Kendi’s Fallacy and Its Consequences” and subtitled, “Are humans really all the same?”
“On average, short people tend to have lower IQs than tall people,” Staddon writes for the Claremont Institute’s American Mind. “Nobody really knows why this is the case, nor has it caused any social problems—‘tall’ and ‘short’ people don’t usually identify themselves by their height so the average IQ difference goes unremarked. On the other hand, as demonstrated by [The Bell Curve author] Charles Murray, skin color and IQ are also correlated: people who are black tend to have lower IQs than whites or Asians. That might not be a problem either except that IQ is also correlated with some significant outcomes like wealth and health. Causality is always difficult to determine, but there is no doubt that high-IQ individuals tend to be richer and higher-status than the not so smart.
“One would suppose that the difference in average social status between whites and Asians compared to blacks would have generated research that could provide other explanations for this phenomenon,” Staddon writes. “For example, in addition to IQ differences, differences in childhood environment, education, culture and biology, etc. Perhaps some talents are complementary: are people bad at math and logic better at art, writing or speaking, for example? Did [Black Canadian jazz pianist] Oscar Peterson have a high IQ? Who cares, he was a brilliant musician.”
Staddon then criticizes Ibram X. Kendi, a Boston University professor and author of How to Be an Antiracist, for being, in that book, “interested in none of these questions, because he has a single answer to all of them: Racism is the cause of all black-white disparities.”
“Moral equality does not translate into equality in other dimensions such as ability, cultural background, interests or other traits that influence one’s prospect of success,” Staddon writes. “Kendi’s claim that all individuals, hence all groups, are equal in these characteristics is an untruth … Obviously, black-white wealth differences depend on several things: yes, racist policies but also behavioral and biological differences between groups.
“Kendi is willing to accept that blacks are generally darker than whites but says nothing about other biological differences such as their susceptibility to sickle-cell anemia,” Staddon writes. “People and hence groups are different. Many of these differences are irrelevant to social factors like wealth and criminality. Others are not.
“The book repeatedly claims that all racial groups are really the same,” Staddon writes. “Not just morally and legally the same but the same in every dimension—history, culture, strength, beauty, talents, interests and abilities—which is nonsense but allows him to blame all existing differences on ‘racist policies.’”
“Please try to look at facts as true or false and don’t give them a moral value,” Staddon told Inside Higher Ed, referring to average IQ disparities among self-identified groups. Other professors have disputed such IQ arguments and their use in the public sphere.
As for Ellwanger, his column didn’t state that the English Department’s “anti-racist statement” was part of hiring, promotion, continued employment or posttenure review criteria. But he expressed concern that it could affect such things.
“Although the attempts to attach left-ideological activism to tenure and promotion may have stalled, the activists haven’t given up: they’ve just begun to pursue their goals by different means,” he wrote. “Anti-racism statements are a covert way to justify lowering dissenting professors’ annual scores in the existing categories of teaching, scholarship and service, which could ultimately assist in purging the faculty of political dissidents.
“Given that the department has now stated openly that the promotion of these values should be manifested in ‘our work as teachers and scholars,’ how might this effect [sic] my annual evaluation scores in the categories of teaching and scholarship?” he wrote.
“Although the rubrics that officially determine annual evaluation scores within the categories of teaching, scholarship and service don’t (yet) reference the anti-racism statement, I doubt this would prevent activist faculty from taking it into account in my performance review,” he wrote. “The anti-racism statement—on my campus and others—is a covert, cowardly measure used to accomplish this punishment until a formal mechanism can be added to policy.”
Dagmar Scharold, the Houston Downtown English department chair, deferred comment to a spokeswoman for the university. That spokeswoman sent an emailed statement.
“The University of Houston Downtown (UHD) is committed to fostering a learning environment where free inquiry and expression are encouraged,” she wrote. “The university believes that the content of its website should only be related to UHD’s mission and vision and provide information for students and the general public on its academic programming, services and university operations. Furthermore, UHD’s faculty hiring and promotion practices are based solely on merit.”
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