Posts Categorized: Admissions

Remote Courses Do Not Make an Online College

Remote learning was a key component of college strategies for addressing the COVID-19 crisis across the country. More than 1,100 colleges went entirely remote by March 2020, according to the education consultancy Entangled Solutions. The College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College indicated that 44% of institutions had developed fully (or primarily) remote instruction by September 2020. This mas...

Racial “Reckoning” (Via Zoom)

Even in this time when people presume to be having a “racial reckoning,” signs of enduring racial inequity pop up everywhere. From nagging disparities in health—Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) die at higher rates than other groups from COVID-19 and are underrepresented in medical research (except in vile experiments such as the Tuskegee study) … to the steep declines in Black...

Colleges May Have Survived COVID … But Surviving Post-COVID May Prove More Difficult

Colleges and universities were hit hard by the COVID crisis. The American Council on Education (ACE) estimated a total impact of $120 billion in a recent letter to legislators. That number reflects both direct expenses and lost revenues. It is easy to identify the direct expenses associated with testing, cleaning, PPE, remote learning technology and improved ventilation systems. But the lost reven...

Why Civic Education Is Key to Protecting Democracy

In an era of rising authoritarianism, civic education and political literacy, especially for future voters, is key ... American democracy just survived a near-death experience during the slow-motion coup that was the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency. It culminated in his rejecting his electoral loss and pressuring officials and political allies to back his claims that the election was ...

Roots of the Current Crises (Hate to Say I Told You So)

Something inside me keeps saying: I told you something like this would happen. After 50 years studying opportunity for higher education, I am somewhat comfortable (and very uncomfortable too) saying the issues I have sought to address and warned about underlie the current political chaos. Our failures to address them (and I include higher education centrally in "our") have boiled over: 1) Incom...

Revisiting the U.S. Market for International Students

In the past few months, a plethora of reports have documented the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global business, and these are generally not something to be happy about. As expected, the international education sector has not been spared. Because of border closures and stringent travel protocols implemented by many countries, international enrollment numbers have plummeted considerably. Th...

A New Plan for Faculty Diversity … and Other Winter Wonders from the NEJHE Beat

Faculty diversity. In the early 1990s, NEBHE, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) collaborated to develop the first Compact for Faculty Diversity. Formally launched in 1994, with support from the Ford Foundation and Pew Charitable Trust, the compact focused on five key strategies: motivating states and universities to inc...

A Year after Prepping for a Hypothetical Recession, Higher Ed Leaders Confront a Real Pandemic and Enrollment Pressures

In October 2019, NEBHE called together a group of economists and higher education leaders for a meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to discuss the future of higher education (Preparing for Another Recession?). No one suspected that just months later, a global pandemic would turn the world upside down. Today, the same challenges highlighted at the meeting persist. The pandemic has only am...

Higher Education Must Do Its Part to Bend the Arc

America is undergoing a reckoning as the pain, suffering and setbacks caused by years of systemic racism is coming into full view. This heightened awareness around racism, sparked by death and injustice, must result in the development of real pathways to eliminate systemic racism, or it will be a lost opportunity for our generation to do our part in—to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr....

From the NEJHE Beat … Semi-Locked Down But Not Out

The NEJHE beat is semi-locked down, but not out. A little of what we’ve been following … Counting heads. New enrollment figures show higher education reeling under the weight of COVID-19 and a faltering economy on top of preexisting challenges such as worries that college may not be worth the price. A month into the fall 2020 semester, undergraduate enrollment nationally was down 4% from la...