Category: College Uncovered

  • College Uncovered: The Student Trade Wars

    College Uncovered: The Student Trade Wars

    U.S. universities have long relied on international students, and the big tuition checks they bring, to hit enrollment goals and keep the lights on. But now, just as the number of American college-aged students begins to fall — the trend that higher education experts call the “demographic cliff”— global tensions are making international students think twice about coming to the United States for college.

    In this episode, hosts Kirk Carapezza and Jon Marcus take you inside the world of international admissions. With student visa revocations on the rise and a growing number of detentions tied to student activism, some international families say they are rethinking their U.S. college plans. And that has college leaders sounding the alarm.

    In fact, international student interest was already falling. Now, as the Trump administration ramps up immigration crackdowns on campuses across the country, many worry the U.S. could lose its status as the top destination for global talent. So what happens if international enrollment drops just as domestic numbers dry up?

    The stakes are high, not just for international students and colleges but for what everybody else pays — and for the whole U.S. economy.

    Listen to the whole series

    TRANSCRIPT

    [Jon] This is College Uncovered. I’m Jon Marcus …

    [Kirk] … and I’m Kirk Carapezza.

    [sound of presentation, in Mandarin] 

    [Kirk] That’s Xiaofeng Wan, making his pitch in Mandarin to Chinese students and parents at a high school in Shanghai. Wan used to be an admissions officer at Amherst College in western Massachusetts. Now he’s a private college consultant, guiding Chinese students through the maze that is college admissions in the U.S. 

    [Xiaofeng Wan] So I’ll walk them through the initial high school years before they apply. And then by the time of their college applications, I’ll help them go through the process as well. 

    [Kirk] This is big business for colleges. Like most international students, Chinese families do not qualify for financial aid, and often they pay the full cost. Wan also trains guidance counselors across China, showing them how to support students heading abroad. So he’s got a front-row seat to what Chinese families are thinking right now. 

    [Xiaofeng Wan] They see the United States as a primary study-abroad destination. 

    [Kirk] But Wan says that might be starting to shift. 

    [Xiaofeng Wan] America has an image problem right now, so we will definitely start to see reluctance from families. 

    [Kirk] I caught up with him while he was in Ningbo, a port city known for manufacturing, on the same morning President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods took effect. 

    [sound of news anchor] Across the globe this weekend, world leaders are trying to figure out how to respond to President Trump’s attempt to reshape the global economy by imposing steep tariffs. …

    [Kirk] Just hours later, the Chinese government warned the more than 270,000 Chinese students already studying in the U.S. to think twice about staying. Wan says that kind of message stokes fear that’s been building. House Republicans sent letters to six universities saying America’s student visa system has become a Trojan horse for Beijing, and a lot of Chinese parents worry the U S government doesn’t want their kids. 

    [Xiaofeng Wan] That’s what they’ve been hearing from President Trump, his rhetoric toward Chinese students. And now they’re seeing news about how international student visas are being revoked. 

    [Kirk] This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News … 

    [Jon] … and I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH …

    [Kirk] … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you. 

    This season, we’re staring down the demographic cliff. 

    [Jon] If you’re just joining us, a quick refresher here: The demographic cliff is a steep drop in the number of 18-year-olds. That’s because many Americans stopped having children after the Great Recession of 2008. And now, 18 years later, colleges are feeling the pinch. 

    [Kirk] Yeah, and just when many of them thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, international students are under threat. During President Donald Trump’s first term, we saw visa restrictions and travel bans contribute to a 12 percent drop in new international enrollment. So we’ll ask, could that happen again, just as schools are scrambling to fill empty seats? 

    [Jon] And we’ll explain what all of this means for you, whether you’re an international student or a domestic one, and why you should care. 

    Today on the show: The Student Trade Wars. 

    [Kirk] Since Trump’s return to power, his administration has yanked more than 1,000 student visas, often without explanation. Some students have been detained and faced deportation, fulfilling a pledge he often made on the campaign trail. 

    [Donald Trump] If you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you. You’ll be out of that school. 

    [Kirk] In just a few months, that hardline rhetoric has become policy, putting campuses on edge. ICE agents have detained pro-Palestinian student activists, including Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts. 

    [sound from arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk]

    [Kirk] This video of her arrest has shaken the international campus community and sparked protests across the country. 

    [sound of protesters] Free Rumeysa, free her now! We want justice, you say how? Free Rumeysa, free her now!

    [Kirk] And now many international students won’t even go on the record, too scared the federal government will target them, or that they’ll be doxxed and ostracized online. 

    [Frank Zhao] The biggest difficulty for us is building trust. 

    [Kirk] At Harvard, student journalist Frank Zhao has seen that fear firsthand. He hosts the weekly news podcast for the student newspaper. 

    [sound of podcast] From The Harvard Crimson, I’m Frank Zhao. This is ‘News Talk.’ 

    [Kirk] Zhao isn’t an international student himself, but the Chinese-American junior from Dallas is plugged into the campus, where a quarter of students are international. 

    How would you describe the current climate for international students?

    [Frank Zhao] The overwhelming sentiment is anxiety. There are so many international student group chats where students were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, there are ICE agents on campus.’ And so it’s quite the Armageddon scenario. 

    [Kirk] The Trump administration has demanded Harvard turn over detailed records of all foreign students’ — quote — illegal and violent activities, or lose the right to enroll any international students. Harvard says it has complied but won’t publicly disclose details. 

    The university is suing the administration over this and other demands, but some faculty and students question how hard Harvard is really pushing back. Conservatives, though, defend increased immigration enforcement. 

    [Simon Hankinson] If a student is studying and minding their own business and obeying the rules of the college and of the United States and the state that they live in, they have nothing to worry about. This is a very small number of people that is being looked at for fraud. 

    [Kirk] Simon Hankinson is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He says visa vetting on and off campus is essential for national security after a year of disruptive campus protests. 

    [Simon Hankinson] Maybe your parents are shelling out a lot of money for you to go, or you’re getting a scholarship. Get your education. Make that the priority. Sure, go out and hold a placard if you want to, and do your thing, light a candle, but if your primary focus is protest and vandalism, I think you’re on the wrong type of visa, and we don’t have a visa for that. 

    [Jon] Higher education is now a global marketplace, and international students have emerged as a key part of the university funding equation. They’re fully baked into the business model as full-pay customers for colleges who subsidize the cost for domestic students. 

    [Kirk] And even before the demographic cliff, the competition for international students was fierce. 

    [Gerardo Blanco] It always has been and sometimes it is intended to be that way, but this is just making it like the Hunger Games 

    [Kirk] That’s Gerardo Blanco, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. He warns tht Trump’s America First approach, combined with federal funding cuts, is putting U.S. colleges at risk of losing a generation of global talent. 

    Is that hyperbole? 

    [Gerardo Blanco] I don’t think it’s hyperbole in any way. 

    [Kirk] Why not? 

    [Gerardo Blanco] The system has been built on the assumption that there wouldn’t be decreases in a dramatic scale to the funding dedicated to research. And therefore they have made some decisions that are somewhat risky. 

    [Kirk] What’s your biggest concern when it comes to international students? 

    [Gerardo Blanco] It’s just the generalized sense of uncertainty. I think there are so many balls up in the air and I think it’s really difficult to even focus our attention. 

    [Kirk] Take the reduction of research funding, for example. It’s affecting many graduate students, especially those who are international and can’t find work in labs. Some schools like Iowa State University, Penn, and West Virginia University are rescinding graduate admissions offers. 

    [Gerardo Blanco] So that’s one squeeze. We also are looking at just the general rhetoric that tends to be negative. 

    [Kirk] And Blanco says that rhetoric matters. One survey at the start of Trump’s second term found that nearly 60 percent of European students were less interested in coming to the U.S. Blanco said, considering the demographic cliff, the timing for all of this uncertainty couldn’t be worse for colleges. 

    [Gerardo Blanco] The clock is ticking and nobody really knows what’s happening. 

    [Kirk] Okay, so, Jon, why should American students and citizens care about all of this? 

    [Jon] Well, international students bring different perspectives and experiences to the classroom. And as we said earlier, they also tend to pay full tuition. So they subsidize tuition that American students pay. 

    But a drop in international student numbers isn’t just a college cash-flow problem. It’s a broader economic one. International students infuse $44 billion into the U.S. economy each year. 

    Here’s Barnet Sherman, a business professor at Boston University. It’s New England’s largest private university, and one in five students there are international. 

    [Barnet Sherman] Look, I just teach business and finance. So if one of my top 10 customers comes to me with $44 billion to spend and creates a lot of American jobs, over 375,000 American jobs, I don’t know about you, but I’m opening up the door and giving them the best treatment I possibly can. 

    [Jon] Here in Massachusetts alone, there are about 80,000 international students contributing $4 billion to the state’s economy each year. That puts the state fourth in the U.S., after California, Texas and New York. So, yeah, this matters. 

    But Sherman says the impact goes far beyond big cities like Boston, New York, and L.A. Take the tiny town of Mankato, Minnesota, for example — population, 45,000. 

    [Barnet Sherman] And they’ve got about 1,700 international students there contributing to the local economy. They’re bringing in literally over $25 million to, you know, a perfectly nice burg. 

    [Jon] In addition to tuition dollars, these students contribute to businesses and local communities that are losing population. 

    [Kirk] And, Jon, if fewer international and domestic students are coming through the pipeline to fill jobs that require college educations, it puts the U.S. at a serious disadvantage, just as other countries are actively recruiting talent and increasing the number of their citizens with degrees. More and more countries are recruiting international students, including Canada, France, Japan, South Korea and Spain, but also countries that hadn’t recruited before, like Poland and Kazakhstan. 

    Right before Trump’s first term, I went to Germany, where the government was offering free language classes to attract international students and scholars, including Americans. Because just like the U.S., Germany is losing population. A demographic cliff has already hit Europe, so it needs immigrants and international students, too. Think of it like this: It’s a global talent draft. All of these students, they’re the trading cards. The collectors are the countries. And the more talent you attract, the more ideas, innovation and business growth you get. 

    [Dorothea Ruland] If you look at Germany, the only resource we do have are human resources, actually. 

    [Kirk] Dorothea Ruland is the former secretary general of the German Academic Exchange Service, which is in charge of Germany’s international push. When I visited Bonn, we had coffee at her headquarters. 

    [Dorothea Ruland] We depend on innovation, on inventions, of course, and where do they come from? From institutions of higher education or from research institutions. 

    [Kirk] Ruland told me nearly half of foreign students earning degrees in Germany stick around. And not just for the short-term. About half of them stay for at least a decade. In the U.S., most international graduates leave and take their talent back home, often because of scarce visas available for skilled workers. 

    Do you see Germany competing with American universities? 

    [Dorothea Ruland] Yes, I would say so. You know, we are doing marketing worldwide because we are part of this world and we cannot neglect these trends going on. So of course we are competitors. 

    [Kirk] But she also made it clear the student trade war isn’t just about competition. It’s about collaboration. 

    [Dorothea Ruland] If you look at the global challenges everybody’s talking about, questions of climate change, energy, water, high tech, whatever, this cannot be solved by one institution or one country. So you have to have big international networks. 

    [Kirk] Since my visit, though, isolationism has been creeping in, not only in Germany, but Hungary and Russia, and obviously here in the U.S., too. Some professors and students have pointed to recent issues with visas and detainments without due process and accused the Trump administration of taking an authoritarian approach. 

    [sound of protest]

    [Kirk] Outside Harvard’s Memorial Church in Cambridge, more than 100 students and faculty recently held signs and waved American flags, cheering the university for standing up to the White House and calling on Harvard to do more to protect their civil rights. Among other things, they spoke out about visa revocations. It is incredibly scary here. 

    Leo Gerdén is a senior from Sweden. He says the administration is trying to divide the campus community. 

    [Leo Gerdén] At first I was very anxious about speaking up. They want us to point fingers to each other and say, you know, deport them, don’t deport us. And you know, it’s classic authoritarian playbook. 

    [Jon] Trump supporters? Well, they see it very differently. 

    [Simon Hankinson] I would call that ridiculous. I mean, that’s an insane argument to make. 

    [Jon] Simon Hankinson is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Border Security and Immigration. We heard from him at the top of this episode, and we should also add he’s a career foreign service officer. 

    [Simon Hankinson] So I’ve certainly interviewed tens of thousands of these applicants, including thousands of students. 

    [Jon] Hankinson acknowledges the uptick in visa revocations lately, but says it’s still a tiny number compared to the one million international students in the U.S. 

    [Simon Hankinson] But just looking at the scale of it all, it is more than we’ve seen in the past, because, generally speaking, this wasn’t something that the government devoted a lot of resources to. But it was always a power that they had. 

    [Jon] And he’s not buying the narrative that these changes and the crackdowns on visas will scare off students from coming to the U.S. 

    [Simon Hankinson] Are people not going to go to Harvard because, you know, they’re afraid that they’re going to get hassled. No. Try going to Russia or China and speaking your mind. Good luck with that. 

    [Jon] Hankinson also argues some universities — especially ones with a high percentage of international students, like Columbia, NYU, Northeastern, and Boston University — they have a financial incentive for complaining. 

    [Simon Hankinson] It’s a strong constituency that they want to keep happy and they want to keep the money flowing. So they want to make this as big an issue as possible. They want to cry panic. 

    [Jon] So, Kirk, colleges signal all the time that they’re open to international students. Just listen to some of these welcome videos. 

    [sound of international recruiting videos] 

    [Jon] But parents like Claire from Beijing don’t feel like their kids are welcome. 

    [Claire] I think the government is really hostile right now. 

    [Jon] Claire asked us to withhold her full name, worried it could affect her son, who’s already studying here. She also has a daughter in high school who was thinking about college in the U.S., but now they’re rethinking her plans and looking at schools in the UK, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong. 

    [Claire] You know, we have to consider all the possibilities, obviously in a trade war, you know, like, because next year, when my child has to go to college, you know, Trump is still the president. 

    [Kirk] Claire says she still believes in the power of an American education, so it’s really hard for her to just write it off completely. 

    [Jon] Okay. So, Kirk, we’ve tackled a lot in this episode. Bottom line, do you think American colleges will still be able to recruit and enroll enough international students to help offset this looming shortage we’ve been talking about in the number of 18-year-olds? 

    [Kirk] Well, it’s not looking great for colleges. International enrollment, as we said, dropped 12 percent during Trump’s first term, and now we’re heading toward a 15 percent drop in the number of 18-year-olds by 2039. That’s a big gap to fill, and the reality is the current climate would have to shift dramatically and quickly for the U.S. to stay competitive. 

    International students are essential for filling seats and making budgets, especially in regions like New England and the Midwest, where the demographic cliff isn’t coming — it’s already here. A college consultant once told me, if your campus isn’t near an international airport, the clock is ticking on your institution. And that was before America developed this reputation as an unwelcoming place. 

    [Jon] So what do you think you’ll be watching as we continue to cover this issue? 

    [Kirk] Yeah, for me, one of the biggest questions is how colleges handle what I see as a major communication and messaging problem. Administrators and faculty haven’t done a great job telling the full story of what U.S. universities actually do, or why international mobility benefits the country as a whole. 

    [Jon] This is College Uncovered. I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report … 

    [Kirk] … and I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH News. 

    [Jon] This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

    [Kirk] … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jonathan A. Davis. 

    Our executive editor is Jenifer McKim. 

    Our fact checker is Ryan Alderman.

    GBH’s Robert Goulston contributed reporting to this episode. 

    [Jon] Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. 

    All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT.

    Mei He  is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins. 

    [Kirk] College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation. It’s a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. 

    Thanks so much for listening. 

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • College Uncovered: The Missing Men

    College Uncovered: The Missing Men

    Something has been happening on college campuses that’s as surprising as it is dramatic: The number of women enrolled has overtaken the number of men.

    Women now outnumber men by about 60 percent to 40 percent, and that gaps keep getting wider. And men who do enroll are also more likely to drop out.

    There are a lot of reasons for this. Boys get lower grades than girls, on average, in elementary and middle schools. They’re more likely to be held back or face disciplinary actions. They’re less likely to graduate from high school. And more men than women go into the skilled trades, instead of getting college degrees.

    Among the results: Universities and colleges now tip the scales for men in admission to try to keep the genders even.

    But as things keep falling out of balance, there are impacts on the financial success for men and on economic growth for everybody.

    We’ll hear from men and women students about what that’s like right now, and from colleges about what they’re trying to do about it.

    Listen to the whole series

    TRANSCRIPT

    [Kirk] This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza …

    [Jon] …and I’m Jon Marcus.

    [sound of referee] Climbers ready? Contestants ready? One, two, go!

    [Jon] This is the sound of one of the most unusual extracurricular activities at the University of Montana: running up a fallen tree with careful footwork, and neatly sawing off the end of it.

    [sound of club member] So really what we’re trying to do is keep the tradition of antique logger sports alive by bringing in new generations to doing activities that they did hundreds of years ago. I mean, we’re using cross-cut saws that they used to cut down giant redwoods.

    [Jon] That might seem like a throwback, but the University of Montana Woodsmen team has an important new purpose. Promoting programs such as forestry has become part of the university’s new strategy to attract an increasingly important type of student.

    [Kelly Nolin] There are definitely some efforts that are happening at the institution to help men find their community and to find a space.

    [Jon] That’s Kelly Nolin. She’s director of admissions at the University of Montana.

    [Kelly Nolin] Our gender split is about 42 percent male, 56 percent female. So it’s definitely widening, and it’s clearly a concern for a variety of reasons. And so that’s why we decided to look into opportunities to recruit more male students.

    [Jon] What Nolan says she’s trying to solve is a really big problem that most people don’t know is even happening: The proportion of men who are going to college is falling way behind the proportion of women who are going.

    Nationwide, women now outnumber men by about 60 percent to 40 percent, and that gap keeps getting wider. Far more young women than young men who graduate from high school are going to college, and men who do enroll are also more likely to drop out.

    We’ll tell you how this might actually be creating an advantage for men in the admissions process, and even how it affects even the dating scene on campuses — which, let’s face it, is a big part of college to a lot of students.

    Take it from Amber Turner. She’s a freshman at Nova Southeastern University in South Florida, which is now more than 70 percent women.

    [Amber Turner] It’s a lot more women than men and the men usually have a lot more options, whereas the women have disgusting options because there aren’t many of them. I have a boyfriend, personally, but I saw with my friends that it’s kind of like nobody here for them.

    [Jon] But fewer men in college has really serious implications for not only colleges that need to fill seats — or, for that matter, students frustrated by the dating pool. It affects the prospects of financial success for men, and of economic growth for everybody.

    This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report — a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Jon Marcus of The Hechinger Report …

    [Kirk] … and I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH …

    [Jon] … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.

    Today on the podcast: ‘The Missing Men.’

    [Kirk] This season, we’ve been talking about the demographic cliff. That’s the decline that’s starting in the number of 18-year-olds, and how it will affect colleges and the economy.

    Now here’s a related milestone you might not have heard about. The number of college-educated women in the workforce has for the first time overtaken the number college-educated men. That’s because more women than men have been going to college.

    There are a lot of reasons for this. Boys in elementary and middle school get lower grades than girls. They’re more likely to be held back or face disciplinary action. And they’re less likely to graduate from high school. Jon, you and I have talked to high school senior boys about all of this.

    [Jon] Right, Kirk, and a lot of them were worried that they don’t have the confidence to tackle college.

    [Abdukadir Abdullahi] I feel like there’s more distractions for guys to get, like, the best grades because every school, like, the guy is always the class clown, and stuff like that.

    [Jon] That’s Abdukadir Abdullahi. He’s the son of a single father and just didn’t see himself in college. Neither did Pedro Hidalgo, even though he actually wanted to go.

    [Pedro Hidalgo] College was something I always wanted to reach and I always wanted to be accepted to, but I never had that belief within myself that I could do it.

    [Jon] Men are more likely than women to go into the skilled trades, which is faster and cheaper than paying for what seems to them to be an endless and expensive stretch of time in college. That’s what Abdullahi was planning to do.

    [Kirk] Back when you thought college wasn’t for you, what was the alternative? You were planning to just go straight to work or join the military or did you have an alternative plan?

    [Abdukadir Abdullahi] I was going to, like, be a plumber or something like that, like where you could have to go to school, but you could make a decent amount of money.

    [Kirk] In the end, he and the rest of these guys did end up going to college. But a lot of other high school boys feel like they need to get jobs right away, especially if they come from families that need help with their finances.

    Here’s Hidalgo’s classmate, Debrin Adon. His parents immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic.

    [Debrin Adon] I’m not going to speak for every man, but at least for young men like my classmates and I, we’re more focused on like money, you know? Like, getting money — getting that paycheck.

    [Kirk] That’s right. So a lot of them get jobs right out of high school and then they buy a car and maybe get married and by that point, it’s almost certain that they’ll never go to college.

    This is Kellie Becker. She’s the college counselor at the school where Abdullahi went.

    [Kellie Becker] A lot of young men are working. They’re working for their families. Like, they’re the man of the house. They are providing their entire family with one paycheck and they get a little taste of that where they, some of them, have to do it or some of them want to do it because they’re getting that money.

    [Kirk] These are just a few of the reasons we’ve ended up here. Fifty years ago, the gender divide was exactly the reverse, and there were far more men than women in college. Since then, there’s been a lot of work to encourage women to get degrees. But much less of that kind of thing is targeted at men. Women also disproportionately work in fields that require degrees, such as social work and teaching. And we’ve already heard how boys don’t do as well as girls in lower grades, how young men feel responsible for helping their families right out of high school and how many of them go into the trades. The decline is even steeper for Black men. Their numbers went way down during the pandemic. Even at historically Black colleges, Black men now make up only about a quarter of the students.

    [Michael Sinclair] Money is one of the main factors. A lot of our young men are looking for opportunities to earn a living, but they need the money now.

    [Kirk] That’s Michael Sinclair. He’s an associate professor at Morgan State University, and he points out that this becomes a vicious cycle.

    [Michael Sinclair] There’s a statement that my father once told me: You can’t be what you can’t see. And if you’re not seeing Black men on college campuses, a lot of young people don’t think that that’s for them.

    [Kirk] This mismatch between men and women is starting to create an odd divide on many college campuses.

    [Jon] Exactly, Kirk. I visited another big university, the University of Vermont. It’s already 64 percent female. I went to the student union, where Melinda Wetzel told me what it was like to be a woman student there.

    [Melinda Wetzel] Oh, yeah, I do have one small class that there is only one guy. I do undergraduate research and when I’m in the medical building, I feel like I hardly ever see men. I feel I’m walking around and it’s just, like, a bunch of ladies.

    [Jon] This extends to areas on campus you might not expect.

    [Melinda Wetzel] I was at the gym the other day and, like, if you think about going to a gym, you think of, like, oh, no, like, there’s going to be a lot of scary guys there. I looked around and I actually pointed out to my friend, like, ‘Whoa, look at all the girls here. This is great.’

    [Jon] Now, some men on campus also think it’s great that there are more women.

    [Pete Azan] So in our class we have, like, 83 girls and like 30 guys. They told us that like the first day of school. So we were all shocked.

    [Jon] Pete Azan is studying dental medicine down at Nova Southeastern. More women than men are going into dentistry these days, too — not only there, but nationwide. He’s okay with that, though.

    [Pete Azan] I love it. I go to class every day the happiest man, because I get to be around beautiful women all day.

    [Jon] And however you might feel about that, there’s another potential advantage for men to this little-noticed trend:

    [Kirk] To keep the gender mix more evenly balanced, a lot of universities are making it easier for men to get in. That’s become especially important as they start to topple over that demographic cliff that’s coming, in the number of students of any gender.

    Sourav Guha used to work in university admissions. He saw how men got an edge so colleges could keep the genders balanced. Now Guha is executive director of the Consortium on Higher Achievement and Success. It supports students who are already enrolled in college.

    [Sourav Guha] I’d put it this way: There were a lot of high school girls who, in terms of credentials, looked as good as or better than some of the boys we admitted, but the girls ended up either wait-listed or rejected. It’s not that the students we were taking were not qualified or capable of being there, but certainly they had credentials, like, maybe a lower GPA, sort of different classes, different levels of high school achievement.

    [Kirk] So listen to what he’s saying there, Jon. At some schools, the odds that men will get in are now better than the odds that women will.

    [Jon] Right, Kirk. And it’s absolutely true. We looked it up. A lot of prestigious universities are accepting more of their male applicants than their female applicants. Boston University, Brown, Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, the University of Miami, the University of Southern California — all of them took at least slightly more male than female applicants.

    [Kirk] Now, that might keep the genders balanced for a while at those selective colleges and universities, even if it is at the expense of women who apply to them. But the problem isn’t going away, and some experts are warning that the repercussions are significant.

    [Jon] Right, Kirk. Richard Reeves researched this phenomenon of men not going to college and became so alarmed about it that he founded an organization to study and address it, the American Institute for Boys and Men.

    [Richard Reeves] Now, there are lots of good organizations ringing the alarm bells when there are gaps facing women and girls, and that is great, and they do a great job of it. But it hasn’t really been anyone’s job to wake up every day and ring the alarm bell around declining male enrollment in colleges.

    [Jon] Reeves says this should matter to everyone.

    [Richard Reeves] We’re leaving too much male talent on the table as a result of the failure of our education system to serve men as well as women. And as a result, those men are not doing as well in the economy as they could. That’s bad for the economy. It’s also bad for the women that they will end up with. And so this is, in the end, bad for everybody.

    [Jon] Colleges are trying lots of things to appeal to men. The University of Vermont has started running an entrepreneurship competition for high school students. It’s open to anyone, but more boys than girls have entered. That’s what the university expected, based on focus groups that showed that men liked entrepreneurship programs. The grand prize is a full-tuition scholarship.

    Like a lot of schools, Vermont is also using its athletic programs to attract men.

    Now, you’d think more women getting college degrees would be translating into higher pay and more promotions. But while there may be more of them in college, the degrees they tend to get are often in lower-paying fields. Men still outnumber women in disciplines such as engineering and business, which have a bigger payoff.

    Sourav Guha explains.

    [Sourav Guha] If you look at the top two fields for women, it’s still nursing and teaching. You know, for men, it’s software development. So women are going to college and the economic returns they’re getting from college are not the same that men are getting.

    [Kirk] But Richard Reeves says men who don’t get degrees at all will generally be worse off.

    [Richard Reeves] One of the myths that is really important to nail here is the idea that, well, men don’t need college degrees because there are lots of jobs — well-paid, good jobs that men can go and do even if they don’t have higher educations. That is not true anymore.

    [Kirk] However they’re approaching it, and for whatever reasons, colleges are laser-focused on this issue. As we’ve been saying all this season, they need all the students they can get right now.

    [Jon] Yeah, Kirk, and Reeves is worried about a new reason men are finding to not go to college: politics.

    [Kirk] Right. As colleges continue to be targets in the culture wars, Reeves says some men consider them not only woke, but anti-male.

    [Richard Reeves] I’m worried that not only does higher education seem like it’s more female and coded a bit more female, but also coded left, progressive and maybe even somewhat intolerant toward men, and particularly perhaps conservative men from, say, rural areas, right? I think if you want to find someone who’s pretty skeptical about higher education, it may well be a conservative white guy living in a rural area. And turns out that is one of the groups that we’re really seeing a big decline in enrollment.

    [Jon] This concern isn’t lost on colleges. We already heard from University of Montana admissions director Kelly Nolin. Among the ways her university has tried to win back men is by inviting conservative speakers such as Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

    [Charlie Kirk] And I’m going to make a case, and I don’t know if it’ll be persuasive to do, why I think DEI is unbiblical. …

    [Kelly Nolin] And regardless of how you feel about his political views, it was an important moment for people in our state to see that as a liberal arts college, we were willing and able to bring a conservative person to campus, but also somebody who appeals to a lot of men. And so just sharing those different perspectives, trying to break some of the stereotypes of how people in our state or maybe outside of our state view us, that’s some of work that we’re doing right now.

    [Jon] That’s on top of pushing its forestry school and that Woodsmen Club and other things, based on what it learned from focus groups of male students.

    [Kelly Nolin] They really felt, in their experience, that we needed to focus more on the attractive nature of our location. So some of the activities that are available to students very easily — things like fly-fishing, hiking, skiing, hunting — those were important to these students. And they weren’t things that we were really highlighting in our brochures.

    [Jon] Kirk, you and I got to go to the University of Montana on assignment, and it is a really beautiful natural setting, although, as I recall, I beat you to the top of Mount Sentinel when we hiked it.

    [Kirk] I was taking in the scenery, Jon. But, yes, those are the kinds of things the university is now using to market itself to men.

    [Kelly Nolin] We sent an email with a link to our wild sustenance class, which is a class about hunting that really focuses on not just the mechanics of hunting, but the conservation purpose behind hunting that could appeal to a wide range of people from a wide variety of political affiliations.

    [Kirk] Yeah, Jon, and just as an aside, that email had an unexpected effect.

    [Kelly Nolin] I will tell you that somebody saw that ad and they came to visit. And when they were asked why they were looking at the University of Montana for college — they were from Virginia — they said they wanted to come someplace where they had rugged men.

    [Kirk] She’s laughing because that person was a woman.

    [Jon] Right. But colleges are taking this deadly seriously. As we’ll continue to discuss this season, they are facing down that demographic cliff and every student counts.

    This is College Uncovered. I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report.

    [Kirk] And I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH. This episode was produced and written by Jon Marcus …

    [Jon] … and Kirk Carapezza.

    If you want to see whether a college accepts more male than female applicants, we’ve linked in the show notes to the federal government website where you can find that.

    [Kirk] We had help on this episode from Liam Elder-Connors of Vermont Public and reporter Yvonne Zum Tobel in South Florida. Our sound of the Woodsmen Club came from the University of Montana student newspaper.

    This episode was edited by Jonathan A. Davis. Our executive editor is Jennifer McKim. Our fact-checker is Ryan Alderman.

    [Jon] Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT.

    Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robbins.

    [Kirk] College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation. It’s produced by GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX.

    Thanks so much for listening.

    More information about the topics covered in this episode:

    To see the acceptance rates of men vs. women applicants at any college or university, go here, enter the name of the institution, and click on ADMISSIONS.

    Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

    Source link

  • College Uncovered: Tag, You’re In!

    College Uncovered: Tag, You’re In!

    What if colleges started applying to you instead of the other way around?

    The anxiety-inducing college admissions game is changing. With declining birth rates and growing skepticism about the value of a degree, higher education is facing an enrollment cliff, set to hit hard in 2026. That’s 18 years after the Great Recession, when many American families stopped having babies.

    As competition for students intensifies, more states desperate for workforce talent and schools dependent on tuition dollars are turning to direct admission – a system in which students receive college acceptance offers and scholarships before they even apply.

    Marykate Agnes was directly admitted to Western New England University, and also got a significant amount of financial aid. Credit: Kirk Carapezza

    In this episode, hosts Kirk Carapezza and Jon Marcus break down how we even got to the point at which the traditional college admission process required students to spend time and money with no guarantee of success. And they ask whether direct admission is the solution colleges and students need, or a Band-Aid on a bigger enrollment crisis. 

    Listen to the whole series

    TRANSCRIPT

    [Jon] This is College Uncovered. I’m Jon Marcus.

    [Kirk] And I’m Kirk Carapezza.

    In the basement of the Student Center at Western New England University in Springfield, Massachusetts, students play pool and ping pong. At a table in the back, Ndilei Lukulay is taking a break from her studies. She tells me her mother came to the U.S. from Sierra Leone. Growing up in Springfield, Lukulay felt nervous about applying to college.

    [Ndilei Lukulay] I was definitely feeling the pressure of being that my mom is an immigrant. She’s very big on going to college and making sure that you get a good career and complete all your studies and so I didn’t know where to start and I was very stressed out about the whole thing.

    [Kirk] Then this university in her hometown emailed to say she was admitted and would get a scholarship and she hadn’t even applied. So she was skeptical.

    [Ndilei Lukulay] I was, like, is this a scam? Is this real?

    [Kirk] It was real. Western New England, a private university with about 2,000 students, offered to admit her and more than 2,000 other students before they even applied. The university tells me the goal is to make college more accessible to low-income students, like Lukulay, who make up about a third of the school’s population.

    This is called direct admission, and we’re seeing a lot more schools doing this as they confront a steep decline in the number of 18-year-olds, something economists call the demographic cliff. That’s going to mean a lot fewer college students — or potential customers.

    [Jon] And, Kirk, schools in areas of the country like western Massachusetts are the hardest hit.

    Here’s how it works. The college tells students they’d get in based on a handful of criteria, like their GPA or intended major. For students like Ndilei Lukulay, that means getting to skip writing essays, going to interviews, and getting letters of recommendation.

    [Ndilei Lukulay] I think I received direct admissions offers from about 12 to 15 schools and I was actually very shocked. I just never heard anything about it and I’m like, is that easy?

    [Jon] This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Jon Marcus with the Hechinger Report. …

    [Kirk] … and I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH …

    [Jon] … in collaboration with the Hechinger Report, is here to show you.

    In this season, we’re standing on the precipice of the demographic cliff and exploring the changing higher education landscape. And one of the major changes is how people are getting into college. Applying to schools is really stressful. But what if all that went away and colleges applied to you?

    Today on the show” Tag, You’re In!”

    [Kirk] Direct admission is now used by hundreds of schools across the country. And more than a dozen state systems do this, too, including Oregon, Minnesota, and Connecticut. Idaho was the first state to create a direct admissions program.

    [Jennifer Delaney] In Idaho, it was actually the president of the flagship who tried to apply to his own college and found it really hard.

    [Kirk] Jennifer Delaney teaches higher ed policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and she studied the direct admissions program in Idaho, where every public institution in the state participates, as well as two private colleges.

    [Jennifer Delaney] It was about how do we simplify, how do think about increasing, as a state, overall college enrollment. So every kid in a public high school in Idaho gets a letter. You’re either in everywhere in the state if your GPA is high enough, or you’re into all the open-access institutions, which is every community college plus two public four-years.

    [Jon] This is a major shift, Kirk, in how colleges do business. For students, it helps ease the stress of the college search by letting them know they’re in before they even apply. For colleges desperate for students, it’s a way to fill their classroom.

    [Kirk] Yeah, and for states, Jon, it’s a way to keep talent close to home and develop a more educated workforce. Susan Makowski is director of admission at Rider University in New Jersey. We heard from her in our first episode this season.

    [Susan Makowski] The cliff is coming, so we just will have less students.

    [Kirk] At a college fair in Edison, New Jersey, she told me Rider was already admitting nearly 80 percent of those who applied when it decided to offer direct admission to students who’ve uploaded their applications through the Common App. That’s a single application accepted by more than 1,000 schools. So somebody applying to the University of Michigan suddenly gets accepted to other schools, like Rider.

    [Susan Makowski] These direct admission programs run the gamut of different ways that a student gets admitted. I may alert them that they look like a great fit for Rider, but they still need to decide — do they feel that way? Whereas the other options, really, I think, sometimes worry students. Like, is this real?

    [Jon] Interesting. But does direct admission really help colleges like Rider boost enrollment? And what if a college tags you? We’ll have more on that in a moment, so stay tuned.

    But first, how did we get to this point where the college admissions process requires students to spend a ton of time and money with no guarantee of success? And how did the whole process become so anxiety-inducing?

    [Kirk] Well, Jon, it wasn’t always this way.

    [Archival newsreel sound] There were a group of congressmen with long memories who were in the last war. They knew that when a man gets out of the Army or Navy or Marines, he’s worried most about a job, an education, and a home. And that’s why Congress, led by the president, passed the law, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I. Bill of Rights.

    [Kirk] Some quick history. After World War II, most of the students applying to college applied to a single school. And by the 1970s, it was maybe two schools. Today, one in three students applies to seven or more places. That shift has created a lot of uncertainty for colleges hoping to fill their seats and a lot anxiety for students and their families. To get a sense of why colleges push this system, I reached out to a long-time admissions insider.

    [John Burdick] My name is John Burdick. I was, until 2023, the vice provost for enrollment at Cornell University in New York.

    [Kirk] Burdick was in the game for nearly four decades. Since he left Cornell, he’s been working on international college access in Africa. So technically he’s still in the game. I asked him what drove us here?

    [John Burdick] This is basically just a classic arms race. The more rejection letters we can send, the more prestige we have, the more likely people will be willing to spend money on our services. And then students follow along behind that by a year or so and say, ‘I don’t know that I’m going to get in there or the other nine, 10, 19 prestigious places that I am applying to. So I better apply to all of them.’

    [Kirk] Burdick says everybody in the game has a perverse incentive — students to increase the number of applications they send, and colleges to increase the number of applications they get.

    [John Burdick] Now the Ivies will by and large say, ‘Oh, we don’t want more applications. We’re already only admitting 5 percent and it’s terrible and we’d just as soon not see applications.’ They’re lying through their teeth. They would freak out if they suddenly weren’t among the most selective universities on the planet.

    [Kirk] And on this planet, most colleges — 80% — admit more than half the students who apply. Still, selective or elite college admission drives the national narrative.

    Jon, you’ve reported on the fact that it’s getting easier to get into college and with the demographic cliff coming it’ll only get easier at certain schools, right?

    [Jon] Yeah, not at Princeton and Yale, but despite public perception, and for the first time in decades, acceptance rates at most colleges and universities are going up.

    [Kirk] Where are acceptance rates going up the most?

    [Jon] Well, Bucknell, George Washington, Marquette, Oberlin, Gonzaga, Brigham Young — the list goes on and on. These universities want you to think it’s impossible, or at least hard, to get in. But the fact is, on average, universities are admitting a larger proportion of their applicants than they did 20 years ago. In fact, the median acceptance rate at four-year universities was about 8 percentage points higher in 2022 than it was in 2012.

    [Kirk] Many students think it’s increasingly hard to get into college, and they see the whole process as a mystery. Even as you gather up your transcripts and test scores and then add some final touches on your personal essays, the question remains: Exactly what happens after your application goes out into the unknown? At the college fair in New Jersey, I asked high school juniors Masiambou Saysay and Harmony Roundtree what they think happens behind closed doors.

    [Masiambou Saysay] They just have a lot of applications, they’re like, declined, oh yeah, I don’t know.

    [Harmony Roundtree] I feel like a big pile of letters being stacked on top of each other and you just gotta pick, yeah.

    [Kirk] And what do you think it looks like?

    [Harmony Roundtree] Hmm. Like, a million emails and then, like, three different computers

    [Kirk] I got a glimpse into one of those computers and the black box that is the admissions process — the mystery of who gets in, the secrets of what really matters. After I reached out to a bunch of schools, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester agreed to give me access and a behind-the-scenes look at the admissions processes. Full disclosure, Jon, I’m a graduate of Holy Cross.

    [Jon] Oh, really, Kirk? You never mention it. So the only school that would let you in is the only school that would allow you to observe the process?

    [Kirk] That’s pretty much how this went down. The college let me sit in on one early decision committee meeting. Behind closed doors, inside a tiny conference room, I saw how the process historically went down.

    [Woman’s voice] Nice program, good testing.

    [Man’s voice] Yeah, a lot to like.

    [Woman’s voice] People like him?

    [Kirk] What’s most surprising is how quickly the committee reviews the candidates, spending about two minutes on each before deciding whether to accept, hold, or deny. To speed things along, the committee uses a lot of jargon, like LBB — that’s ‘late blooming boy’ — and RJ for ‘rejection.’

    [Woman’s voice] Academically has everything. I wonder if a counselor call might be enlightening.

    [Woman’s voice] I mean, honestly, it sounds like maybe he could work on it or be cognizant of it. I mean I don’t know, and he’s strong academically, I think he’s okay.

    [Man’s voice] I think his classmates would bring him down to reality.

    [Jon] Kirk, that’s just one small private college. So to get a broader sense of the admissions landscape and how it’s changing, we reached out to Jeff Selingo.

    [Kirk] Yes, Selingo teaches higher ed leadership at Arizona State University, and he’s author of the book Who Gets In and Why. For his research, he spent a year inside three college admissions offices at Emory in Atlanta, Davidson in North Carolina, and the University of Washington in Seattle. So I asked him, how did he end up at those schools?

    [Jeff Selingo] In some ways, it’s a lot like admissions. I approached 24 schools and asked them to get inside their admissions process. And most said no. And only three said yes. So it’s kind of like I applied to 24 schools. I only got into three.

    [Kirk] And what do you think people imagine it’s like inside a college admissions office and what’s it actually like?

    [Jeff Selingo] First of all, I think they think that the admissions officers are spending a lot more time with college applications than they really are. Emory had something like 40,000 applications. And so as a result, they’re like looking at these applications sometimes in just a couple of minutes. Probably the most they would take with an application might be 12 or 13 minutes. And meanwhile, you know, these kids are putting their heart and soul into it for years.

    [Kirk] Selingo says the biggest change in the college admissions game is the lack of signals around what it takes to get in. Schools that used to require test scores, for example, have gone test-optional since the pandemic.

    [Jeff Selingo] You know, some colleges have gone back, But that lack of a signal, like, if I got a 1400 or 1300 on the SAT, I kind of knew where that would place me in a class and I would not even apply to most of these schools. But now with test optional, it gave me the opportunity to potentially apply and get in. And so every year now you see just increasing number of applications again to these highly selective schools. And then you hear stories, ‘Oh, I didn’t, you, know, my kid didn’t get in or my cousin didn’t get in,’ and so the following year, kids get really nervous. And what do they do? They apply to not only those same set of schools, but then they apply to five more at the same time. And so you just see this vicious circle that just keeps going around and around again, particularly around these top schools.

    [Kirk] How do you think the demographic cliff and the shortage of 18-year-olds will change this game?

    [Jeff Selingo] I think the competition for student is going to intensify. And so you’re seeing that already. You see programs like direct admission, where students are getting accepted to colleges without even applying. You’re going to see a lot more marketing to students even earlier than they do now, in terms of buying their names and sending them information. The other thing, though, is on the financial aid side. I think the discounts and the merit aid that [colleges] are going to give, I think they’re just going to lean even more into that. And you’re just going to see more and more money flowing to students to try to persuade them to come to school X instead of school Y.

    [Kirk] How else are these colleges handling these seismic shifts, and what’s the tone inside of the admissions office now? Is there a sense of desperation?

    [Jeff Selingo] It’s interesting around enrollment. Even though we’ve known this cliff has been coming forever, admissions is really, like, especially at most of these schools that are tuition dependent and are really enrollment driven, it’s about butts in seats tomorrow, not a year from now. So, I mean, they’re kind of short sighted. They haven’t been doing very much to prepare for this. No, they haven’t, because they basically think ‘I just need to, I need to make this class for next year. I need to come in on budget. I need to. Make enrollment.’ They’re not really worried about two years down the road.

    [Kirk] You mentioned direct admission. What do you make of this trend, and do you think we’ll see more schools and states adopt it?

    [Jeff Selingo]  Oh, I think you will, because there’s something in admissions where everybody kind of follows the leader. I’m a little skeptical of direct admission. Well, what happens when more and more schools adopt direct admissions and suddenly, now, Kirk, you’re getting, instead of, like, one or two direct admissions offers, now you’re get eight or nine, right? Like, how does that really help you, at the end of the day, make a decision, or from the college’s point of view, know who’s really interested and who’s coming?

    [Jon] So Jeff Selingo is pretty skeptical of direct admission. But does it help colleges boost enrollment?

    [Kirk] Well, sometimes, says Jennifer Delaney. She’s the researcher we heard at the top of this episode who looked at the first-in-the-nation program in Idaho.

    [Jennifer Delaney] It’s not always able to move the needle on the enrollment side of things.

    [Kirk] Delaney’s research found direct admission helped to increase full-time undergrad enrollment by at least 4 percent, and it boosted in-state enrollment by at least 8 percent.

    [Jennifer Delaney] Having a bird in the hand in Idaho meant that you stayed in Idaho for school, and you didn’t go out of state.

    [Kirk] And what about low-income students?

    [Jennifer Delaney] Admission isn’t enough. You’ve got to be admitted and be able to pay for it.

    [Kirk] And that’s why more schools are adding direct financial aid offers up front, too.

    [Jon] Kirk, to compete, more and more community and four-year colleges are offering — quote, unquote — free tuition. We have a whole episode about that called “The Real Cost of Free.” You can find it in our second season.

    At Western New England University, Marykate Agnes says she accepted the direct admission offer, but not before she reached out to increase her financial aid award. Agnes was admitted through direct admission, and she also received generous financial

    [Marykate Agnes] I got the $32,000 scholarship, then I got another $2,000 for early action, and then I asked for more money and I got it. So I think I’m paying around $10,000. I think that it’s just an awesome thing, and it takes stress off of the students.

    [Jon] Agnes says she doesn’t worry about attending a less selective school.

    [Marykate Agnes] I don’t think it reflects the value of the education at all. I mean, at the end of the semester, I have more work than my friends at more selective schools do, and it’s harder, more rigorous, and the professors are absolutely amazing, and it is so personable. And I think that’s what you’re not getting at the more selective schools.

    [Kirk] All of this change is putting pressure on colleges to develop a strategy. That’s where people like Kathy Ruby come in. She works with colleges to shape financial aid strategies to help them compete with other schools for students.

    [Kathy Ruby] It’s a competitive market, and it’s going to get more competitive depending on where you are and the type of institution you are. I think not all institutions will experience the cliff in the same way.

    [Kirk] Ruby says families are more cost-conscious than ever. Students and parents are more averse to debt, so schools are trying to make themselves seem cheaper. The goal is to attract middle-income families who don’t qualify for federal and state but also don’t have the means to pay the full price.

    [Kathy Ruby] Certainly institutions are starting to focus on what can we do for those middle students, because that also can often be a good place to build. But it can be more expensive for the institution, because there’s no federal dollars to help.

    [Kirk] Schools are focusing on scholarships that are offered up front and meet more students’ financial needs. Ruby’s advice to students and families? Shape a college list with your reach, target and safety schools, but also understand what that means for you.

    [Kathy Ruby] Because if you’re a very bright student and your likely schools might be actually still pretty selective and not offer much in the way of merit aid, you have to do your homework on understanding what the college actually offers. Use their website, use their net price calculator, talk to people.

    [Jon] And, as we always say on this podcast, ask questions and understand what your financial aid package might look like, even if you can’t get an exact figure.

    [Kirk] The reality is there are tons of solid schools and programs out there. So try not to worry so much about that bumper sticker on the back of your neighbor’s SUV. And remember, getting into those bumper-sticker schools is often not about you. It’s about the college’s agenda. Factors like building a class, budgets and yield. You know, whether a student will even enroll if they’re accepted. Students and parents have a lot to gain if they change their perspective on what really qualifies as a quote,unquote good college.

    [Jon] That’s right, Kirk. It’s easy to think a degree from a selective institution is the best insurance policy you can buy for your kid’s future. And if they’re not accepted, they’ll end up on the wrong side of this country’s economic divide.

    But as we approach the demographic cliff, in many ways, that is simply not true. For many students, it’s a buyer’s market now.

    [Kirk] This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH. …

    [Jon] … and I’m Jon Marcus from the Hechinger Report.

    [Kirk] This episode was produced and written by Jon Marcus …

    [Jon] … and Kirk Carapezza, and it was edited by Jonathan A. Davis.

    Our executive editor is Jennifer McKim.

    [Kirk] Our fact checker is Ryan Alderman.

    Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

    All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT.

    The demographic cliff was set to sound for us by James Trayford of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in England.

    Mei He is our project manager. And head of GBH Podcasts is Devin Maverick Robbins.

    [Jon] College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation. It’s produced by GBH News and The Hechinger Report, and distributed by PRX.

    Thanks so much for listening.

    More information about the topics covered in this episode:

    Learn more about direct admission here.

    See what colleges and universities have direct admission through the Common App.

    College Uncovered: The Real Cost of Free

    A trend colleges might not want applicants to notice: It’s becoming easier to get in

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

    Source link

  • College Uncovered: The Demographic Cliff

    College Uncovered: The Demographic Cliff

    Most Americans would probably rather forget the Great Recession that began in 2007. But as long ago as it may seem, it triggered something that is about to become a big problem: Americans started having fewer babies, and the birth rate hasn’t recovered since.

    That means a looming decline in the number if 18-year-olds. Since those are the traditional customers for universities and colleges, enrollment is projected to fall dramatically and campuses to close.

    In this episode, we tell you the surprising benefits of this for students and their parents — and the scary prospects for the economy, which will suffer shortages of workers just as baby boomers retire.

    Brody Scully is a high school student looking at colleges. “There’s a lot of pressure on me. I have to decide in these next two years that I’ve got to go to a specific college,” he says.

    Come with us to a college fair where recruiters line up to compete for applicants, and hear from enrollment consultants, economists, and the president of a school that has already closed.

    Listen to the whole series

    TRANSCRIPT

    [Kirk] This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza.

    [Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus. We’re going to start this brand-new season of the podcast by taking you back to a time most Americans would probably rather forget.

    [Archival news footage] Monday, Sept. 15, 2008. Lehman Brothers files the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, precipitating the global financial crisis. … The Dow tumbled more than 500 points.

    [Jon] What we now call the Great Recession started in 2008, and it left the world’s economy reeling.

    [Archival news footage] More than two million prime mortgages, traditional loans for people with good credit, are now delinquent.

    [Jon] The Great Recession did a lot of damage at the time, but it also caused something else most people haven’t noticed, and that’s about to affect us all.

    [Archival news footage] Birth rates in the USA have dropped to their lowest annual levels in three decades, falling for nearly every group of women. … It changed the game when it comes to job security, and it led many young adults to delay marriage and kids.

    [Jon] People stop having babies during economic downturns. That was a major but almost unseen impact of the Great Recession 18 years ago. And that means we’re about to run out of 18-year-olds. This is being called the demographic cliff.

    Hey Kirk, help me explain the deal with this demographic cliff.

    [Kirk] Yeah, so the demographic cliff is this big dropoff that’s about to hit the number of traditional-age college students. And the reason experts call it a cliff is that the number of students is going to go down, like you’re tumbling down a mountain and it never comes back up, Jon.

    [Jon] The demographic cliff is pretty much the focus of our new season of this podcast. There’s some surprising good news that we’ll tell you about for students and their families, and for the parents of prospective college students. But this demographic cliff is also a big, big problem in ways most Americans don’t realize yet, for colleges and universities — and for economy.

    [Nicole Smith] We are looking ahead down the road to circumstances, dire circumstances where we just can’t fill the jobs that are opening up.

    [Wes Butterfield] We are at the, I’m going to call it the crossroads. You know, we’re at the cross roads for many campuses where they’re going to have to think creatively.

    [Rachel Sederberg] We’re going to see issues across every occupation and every industry. There is going to be no one spared of this pain.

    [Jon] Those are the voices of some experts whose job it’s been to watch this coming crisis. Like the lookouts with binoculars on the deck of the Titanic.

    [Telephone ringing] Pick up, you bastards!

    Yes, what do you see?

    Iceberg! Dead ahead!

    [Jon] So forgive us for the mixed metaphors and come with us as we help you cross these icy seas and this pivotal crossroads. We’ll show you how the demographic cliff will affect you.

    [Kirk] This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH. …

    [Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus of The Hechinger Report.

    [Kirk] Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH …

    [Jon] … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report is here to show you.

    [Kirk] In our fourth season, we’ll be looking at the many dramatic ways that college is changing right now and what it all means for you. Today on the podcast: “The Demographic Cliff.”

    [Sound from college fair] Hi, guys, welcome to the college fair. If you’d like a bag…

    [Kirk] To get a sense of what the demographic cliff looks and sounds like on the ground, I went to a national college fair in Edison, New Jersey.

    [Sound from college fair] Students, make sure you have your barcode ready so the colleges can scan your barcodes.

    [Kirk] Inside a massive convention and exposition center in an industrial park, a bunch of juniors and their families anxiously waited in the lobby before passing through turnstiles, and then they mingled with college representatives.

    [Sound from college fair] And do you have one of the scan cards so I can get your information?

    [Kirk] It’s kind of like speed dating, with most of the colleges here selling themselves.

    [Sound from college fair] What’s cool about it is that we’re currently building our brand new college of business building that’s a lot of these that will be the biggest academic building on campus, so honestly your degree is going to work tenfold by the time that you end up coming to FSU.

    [Kirk] There’s rows and rows of colleges. In some of those rows, it seems like there are more colleges than students.

    [Sound from college fair] And we’re 10 minutes from London Heathrow Airport as well, so for international students getting on is great.

    [Kirk] After the initial rush, the crowd thins out and those turnstiles stop turning.

    Welcome to a new era of college admissions.

    As you come to a fair like this, what are you looking for exactly?

    [Brody Scully] I’m looking for environmental sciences and eco-engineering.

    [Kirk] Brody Scully is a junior from West Milford, New Jersey. He says he knows exactly what he wants in a college: someplace where he can be active and maybe ski, and someplace small.

    [Brody Scully] Because I definitely learn where there’s probably a smaller group of people, so I’m looking for that.

    [Kirk] Is it anxiety-inducing for you guys, going through this process?

    [Brody Scully] I would say yeah, definitely, and, like, time intensive.

    [Kirk] Why is it so stressful?

    [Brody Scully] There’s a lot of pressure on me. I have to decide in these next two years that I’ve got to go to a specific college.

    [Kirk] But Brody may be in luck, because in the college admissions game, he was born at the right time: in 2008, just as birth rates in the U.S. started to decline. Remember Jon, that means there will be fewer 18-year-olds applying to college over the next few years. And except at elite schools like Harvard or Stanford and a few dozen other most selective colleges, the odds of getting in are going up. Eight out of 10 applicants to public universities and 7 out of 10 at private colleges are accepted now. That’s nearly 8 percentage points higher than 10 years ago.

    Brody was surprised and thrilled when I told him this. In fact, his eyes widened.

    [Brody Scully] I’m not aware of that at all and I’m kind of happy now that you told me that.

    [Kirk] As the fair winds down, college reps, some standing alone in the back of the convention center, keep smiling, making eye contact, and hoping for just one more student to come by.

    I mean, the reality is, this is a competitive landscape for many colleges, and for students, it’s increasingly a buyer’s market.

    Take Rider University, which is trying really hard to stand out in this sea of schools. Its reps are simply telling potential students what the school is all about. and where it is.

    [Susan Makowski] It is a small private school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, which is about 15 minutes south of Princeton.

    [Kirk] Susan Makowski is director of admissions at Rider, and for the past 20 years, she’s helped organize this fair.

    This seems like organized chaos.

    [Susan Makowski] I think that’s a great way to describe it.

    [Kirk] This year, there are about 300 schools here looking for applicants. Colleges pay about $700 just to rent a booth. They think it’s worth it for a chance to connect with some of the nearly 3,000 registered students. And, of course, to scan their barcodes so they can follow up with endless reminders and marketing materials.

    [Sound from college fair] I think I’m all good, but I’m making some…

    Do you have one of the scans?

    Uh, yes I do.

    [Kirk] This year, Makowski tells me, Rider University is trying something a little different.

    [Susan Makowski] Tonight, to be honest, I’m in New Jersey school at a New Jersey fair. I bought two booths. That’s how I’m standing out physically tonight so that you see that I’m here, right? You can’t miss me.

    [Kirk] So you expanded your footprint.

    [Susan Makowski] Yes, I did.

    [Kirk] You can’t just walk, you can’t blow by you.

    [Susan Makowski] Right, but that’s a selfish thing that I’m choosing to do, because I want to make certain that I can capture as many students Who might not have heard of us or might be really interested in us

    [Kirk] Looking ahead and over the demographic cliff, Makowski tells me she knows things are about to change with fewer applicants.

    [Susan Makowski] I think that’s going to be a natural progression, simply because a cliff is coming.

    [Jon] Kirk, the seeds of this problem for colleges were planted back in 2008.

    [Archival news footage] It was a manic Monday in the financial markets. The Dow tumbled more than 500 points after…

    [Wes Butterfield] We were in a fairly dark place. And, again, that’s impacting us today.

    [Jon] That’s Wes Butterfield. He’s chief of consulting services at Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a consulting firm that helps colleges and universities recruit students.

    [Wes Butterfield] Anytime we reach those types of points in our history, birth rates go down. People just simply stop having babies. People were concerned about whether or not they’d have the resources to be able to start a family. And so those numbers backed off, and it takes a while for us to get to a point where it truly begins to impact us.

    [Jon] The decline in births that started 18 years ago is about to translate into fewer students coming out of high school and enrolling in college. By 2039, there will be 15 percent fewer 18-year-olds per year than there are now.

    The effect of all of this that you and I report about the most, Kirk, is what it will do to colleges and universities. It comes on top of a decline in enrollment that’s already been happening over most of the last 10 years. People have been questioning whether college is worth the high cost, and a relatively strong labor market drew a lot of high school graduates straight into jobs. Emily Wadhwani keeps a close eye on this as a senior director at Fitch Ratings, where she’s the sector lead for education. Fitch rates the financial health of institutions.

    [Emily Wadhwani] We’ve been seeing kind of a trending downward of demand in terms of enrollment, particularly on the undergraduate side. So this is definitely a longer trend that we’re seeing.

    [Jon] The pandemic only made things worse. And now the demographic cliff is here.

    [Emily Wadhwani] Where we are now climbing back out of this post-pandemic recovery period, we see the same challenges that schools were facing prior to the pandemic, only now it’s more pronounced because those demographic trends have only deteriorated since then.

    [Jon] That’s why colleges have started closing. Fitch categorizes the outlook for the higher education sector as deteriorating. Kirk, you and I have been seeing that a lot lately on abandoned campuses of colleges that have closed.

    [Bob Allen] This is sort of a movie-set college campus, and people say that as soon as they essentially walk in the front gate.

    [Kirk] That’s Bob Allen. He was the last president of a 185-year-old Green Mountain College in Vermont before it closed in 2019. By the time I visited the campus, it looked more like a ghost town.

    [Bob Allen] So, yeah, watch yourself on these. They aren’t, see normally all of this would have been cleaned up.

    One of the advantages of a small school is that it really was like an extended family. I knew not all of the students by name, but I knew most, and they knew me. They called me Bob, which was what I would prefer.

    [Kirk] To Allen’s right, the red brick dining hall and dorms. To his left, the empty swimming pool, a ghost-like symbol of dried-up enrollment.

    [Bob Allen] Increasingly students want to go to schools in cities and not rural areas. Poultney is a very tiny Vermont town.

    [Kirk] At the time, Allen told me he preferred to give tours like these when the college was still open.

    [Bob Allen] It was a lot more fun when we had students, all right.

    [Kirk] At its peak, Green Mountain had about 800 students. That was already pretty small. But by the end of the 2010s, there were only a little more than half that many left. So Allen and his board decided that the college had to close.

    [Bob Allen] It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do personally. I spent most of my career building businesses and to take a 185-year-old institution and have to shut it down was really tough.

    The demographics are working against all colleges, but in particular, small rural colleges. It’s tough for surrounding towns when colleges close too. Our payroll just for the college alone was $6 million. It has to, in the end, have an economic impact on the town. You know, some of the businesses had closed even long before we made our announcement.

    [Jon] Kirk, the demographic cliff means there will be a lot more colleges closing. Don’t take it from us. That’s the prediction of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Already, 21 colleges defaulted on their bonds last year, or were at risk of defaulting. That’s way up. Here’s Emily Wadhwani from Fitch.

    [Emily Wadhwani] We’ve seen the closure rate accelerate over the last few years. We expect to see that continue for the next few years. That has tended to be smaller, private, liberal arts, sometimes religiously affiliated schools with perhaps less than a thousand students. I’m generalizing; there are a couple outliers there, but broadly speaking, those are the types of schools that we’ve seen close.

    [Jon] That’s a pretty good list of the kinds of colleges that are in trouble, and consumers need to keep that in mind. No matter what schools you’re considering, you need to do more these days than look at their courses or the athletics program. You need to check out their finances.

    [Emily Wadhwani] The second place I would look is the strength of fundraising, often an indicator of the level of wealth the university has — the capacity to fund scholarships and other aid packages, less reliance on tuition as a primary means of operating revenue.

    [Jon] We’ve talked before in this podcast about how you can see if your college might be in financial trouble. And we’ll post the link to that in the show notes.

    Now, it’s obviously a sad situation when colleges close, for their employees and students and alumni, and for the towns that depend on them. But, Kirk, there are a couple of bright spots if you’re currently a college student or the parent of a college student, or have a child who’s considering college.

    [Kirk] Yeah, Jon, colleges teach this in Econ 101. It’s the simple law of supply and demand. As the number of students is falling, there’s less demand. And as demand goes down, two things are happening. First, most colleges are becoming easier to get into. And second, the price of tuition has actually started falling.

    [Jon] Now, Kirk, let’s be clear: College is still expensive, and to make up for keeping tuition low, colleges with dorms and dining plans are raising the price of food and housing. But increases in tuition are finally dropping when adjusted for inflation, after decades of exceeding the cost of almost everything else that Americans spend money on.

    [Kirk] Exactly, Jon. You’re also likely to be able to negotiate for more financial aid. We gave a lot of advice about this in the first episode of our second season, and we’ll link that in the show notes too.

    [Jon] We’ll have a lot more to tell you about the dramatic changes in admission in our next episode. So check that out.

    [Kirk] So that’s all pretty good news for future students and their families. But there’s more bad news. And not just for colleges, but for the economy and society. There will be fewer graduates coming out the other end with skills employers need, and fewer young people in general available to work in any kinds of jobs.

    [Jon] Right, and all of that, Kirk, is coinciding with the tidal wave of baby boomers who will be retiring at the same time.

    [Rachel Sederberg] We’re already well underway in this process where we saw vast retirements over the last few years.

    [Jon] That’s Rachel Sederberg, a senior economist and director of research at the labor market analytics firm Lightcast. Ten-thousand baby boomers are turning 65 every day. And Sederberg says there just aren’t enough workers coming up behind these retiring baby boomers to fill the jobs they’re leaving.

    [Rachel Sederberg] The generations that follow the baby boomers are simply smaller and cannot mathematically make up for that decline.

    [Jon] These shortages are already happening, Kirk.

    [Rachel Sederberg] We are losing people across every occupation and industry. So we’re going to need more workers across, and we don’t have enough of any kind.

    [Kirk] Okay, to tie this all together for you, we reached out to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. It studies the connection between higher education and the economy. Chief Economist Nicole Smith connected these dots for us.

    [Nicole Smith] So if you’re a college president, one way to look at this is, you know, ‘I don’t have enough students.’ But as an economist, I’m also thinking of the impact on the economy. Young people and young labor and the labor force — it’s the lifeblood of our society.

    [Kirk] Smith says the decline in the number of traditional-aged college students will affect much more than whether a bunch of colleges close.

    [Nicole Smith] We just don’t have enough who are completing and going to college and finishing school at as fast a rate as the economy is creating jobs for people with college degrees.

    [Kirk] She’s not just talking about bachelor’s degrees, but all kinds of education after high school, including in manufacturing and the trades.

    [Nicole Smith] Seventy-two percent of all jobs over the next decade will require some type of education and training beyond high school. So even if you don’t need a full bachelor’s, we need something that’s beyond high school and everyone has to be prepared to go back to get that credential so that you are prepared for that particular job.

    [Kirk] So we’re all going to be falling down the demographic cliff together. In some parts of the country, labor shortages are already well underway.

    [Nicole Smith] Many communities are facing this already. Rural communities are already having problems filling vacancies for some of their medical fields. They’re offering all sorts of incentives for doctors to come and work in those locations. So we’re already there.

    [Jon] Kirk, as our experts have said, this demographic cliff is a dramatic turning point for higher education and it comes alongside questions about the value of college and a general decline in the proportion of high school students who are bothering to go.

    [Kirk] Right, Jon, and that’s on top of huge political pressure on colleges and universities under the Trump administration and massive funding cuts.

    [Jon] Throughout this season of the podcast, we’ll be looking at the ramifications of this unprecedented moment in the history of higher education. We’ll tell you how admissions is changing, why men in particular aren’t going to college, and the many new ways that are popping up, other than college, to train people for the workforce. and there’s much more.

    [Kirk] So keep listening to future episodes to hear more about what colleges and universities don’t teach you in class.

    This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH.

    [Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report.

    [Kirk] This episode was produced and written by Jon Marcus …

    [Jon] … and Kirk Carapezza, and it was edited by Jonathan A. Davis. Our executive editor is Jennifer McKim.

    [Kirk] Our fact-checker is Ryan Alderman

    Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT. We also used some music in this episode from the Stony Brook University Orchestra.

    The demographic cliff was set to sound for us by James Trayford of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in England.

    Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robbins.

    [Jon] College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation. It’s produced by GBH News and The Hechinger Report, and distributed by PRX.

    Thanks so much for listening.

    More information about the topics covered in this episode:

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