Last spring, for research I was doing on college admissions, I spent time in high-school counseling offices as seniors streamed through to announce where they had been accepted to college. Even when the news was good, the students’ voices often betrayed a tinge of disappointment. They had gotten in, but now they were facing the reality of how to pay for college.
What surprised me was that even in wealthy schools, I heard students tell counselors that their parents might be able to pay the full tuition bill but they didn’t want to. That the conversation about college affordability has crept into those neighborhoods, too, should ring a warning bell for higher-education leaders. Today, less than 28 percent of first-year students didn’t receive aid from their institutions; in 2006-7, about 39 percent didn’t.
The upward trend in the number of students looking for financial assistance has occurred in an economy that’s been in expansion mode for 11 years. Late last month, the U.S. Commerce Department reported that the economy might finally be slowing down.
The financial model that colleges have relied on since the baby boomers were in college, and then duct-taped together for much of the last decade, is fraying. I don’t agree with the doomsday scenarios predicting hundreds of colleges will go out of business. At the same time, the financial realities for many institutions clearly indicate they need to quickly rethink their market, their strategy, and maybe even their mission.
They need to better understand the students they can and should serve in the future. Too many campuses are trying to chase the kinds of traditional-age students they recruited a decade ago: affluent, well-prepared high-school graduates — of all racial and ethnic backgrounds — whose parents attended college. They think if they reach just a bit further into California, Texas, or Florida, they’ll find them.
But historically, students have attended college within 100 miles of their homes. There’s no reason to think this generation is planning to act any differently. Even selective colleges have limited applicant pools available to them. When Human Capital Research Corporation, an admissions-consulting firm, analyzed 130,000 applications to a name-brand college over the span of a decade, it found that just 18 percent of high schools were responsible for 75 percent of applications and 79 percent of admitted students.
Instead of thinking in terms of students — whom they often perceive as young and full-time — institutions should consider the requirements of different segments of learners. That could mean building flexible academic calendars, like the ones at Arizona State University, where learners can mix and match 15-week courses with ones that last seven and a half weeks each, and also combine both online and face-to-face classes in a given semester. At the University of Central Florida, about 75 percent of undergraduates take at least one online class even as they are enrolled in courses on the Orlando campus.
Colleges should also better connect their academic offerings to the rapidly changing world of work. After all, the chance to get “a better job” is the No. 1 reason students go to college now — and has been since the Great Recession. Institutions can help in small ways by expanding the number of campus jobs that go to traditional undergraduates instead of to full-time employees, and making the work more relevant by helping students translate their skills to the workplace.
The bigger move on this front, one that would bring in much needed revenue, is to partner with local and regional employers to provide education programs to their workers. In a tight labor market, employers are increasingly connecting with specific sets of universities to spend tuition benefits rather than write a blank check to workers like they did in the past. Just one indicator of the potential of this strategy: Guild Education, which works with companies to help their employees go to college at the University of Arizona, Purdue Global, and the University of Denver, among others, is now valued at $1 billion.
But colleges shouldn’t just offer their lineup of legacy degrees to these learners along with their more traditional students. Basically all new jobs today require some sort of education after high school, according to the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce. That offers opportunities for colleges to create new kinds of microcredentials that stack on top of one another. We need to think of learning as continual rather than episodic — not as something we do only when we stop doing something else.
Take Des Moines Area Community College as an example. It has expanded its noncredit programs to get new classes up and running more quickly than in the past, and teach students just enough to start a career. The goal isn’t to give students everything they need to know for a job, but enough to get them started with a local employer. Taking just a few such classes is both less expensive and more manageable than pursuing a traditional degree.
Yes, such strategies closely tie higher education to the work force. But that doesn’t mean colleges must give up on providing a broad liberal education. Indeed, few college degrees provide all the skills needed for a job. Instead we are seeing more hybrid jobs, where students need a mix of the liberal arts and specific hard skills, such as business analytics and graphic design — something that Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University, has called hybridized education. Every student who graduates from college with a degree these days should also leave with some sort of skills-based credential.
Of course, many colleges — especially struggling ones — can’t put these strategies in place on their own. Partnerships and networks among institutions are more critical than ever before. One model can be found at Dominican University of California, which joined Make School, a San Francisco-based coding boot camp, to offer computer-science courses and a minor at Dominican. To build a computer-science program at Dominican would have taken years and a million dollars, President Mary B. Marcy told me. Now basic data and coding skills will be common throughout the curriculum.
While the risks of the decade ahead are significant for higher education, so too are the opportunities. Even as colleges struggle to recruit a few million 18-year-olds to their campuses each year, America offers a much larger potential higher-education market of 95 million adults. Clearly, many institutions need to move in a different direction to remain relevant — and in business.
