Tag: Part

  • How standardized tests became part of the DEI debate

    How standardized tests became part of the DEI debate

    In the Education Department’s sweeping Dear Colleague letter last month, acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor wrote that colleges must eliminate all race-conscious programs and policies, from scholarships and admissions practices to campus cultural groups and DEI training.

    One surprising mention: standardized testing policies.

    Trainor wrote that test-optional policies could be “proxies for race” to help colleges “give preference” to certain groups.

    “That is true whether the proxies are used to grant preferences on an individual basis or a systematic one,” he wrote. “It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”

    Higher education leaders and researchers have long debated the pros and cons of standardized testing in admissions: Some believe they’re a meritocratic predictor of academic success, while others say they’re more aligned with family wealth. In recent years, those debates have become entangled with discussions of systemic racism in the American education system.

    During the COVID-19 pandemic, the vast majority of colleges waived test requirements for applicants. Five years later, most have retained their test-optional policies—though a year ago some selective institutions began returning to score requirements, reigniting a charged debate about the role of standardized tests in admissions.

    After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023, experts said test-optional policies could serve as race-neutral measures to help colleges maintain diversity in their applicant pools. They cited research showing that colleges with test-optional policies enrolled 10 to 12 percent more students from underrepresented racial backgrounds; other studies found that doing away with test requirements simplified the application process and thus removed barriers for first-generation and other underserved students. The Biden administration even included test-optional policies in its guidance for colleges adjusting to the court ruling.

    If colleges cited such research in keeping their test-optional policies, Trainor’s letter implied it could be grounds for a civil rights investigation.

    In a Frequently Asked Questions document meant to clarify the broad scope of the Dear Colleague letter, OCR made no mention of testing policies. But in response to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed about how the department views test-optional policies, Trainor left the door open to federal scrutiny.

    “This isn’t complicated,” he wrote. “When in doubt, every school should consult the [Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard] legal test contained in the [Dear Colleague letter]: ‘If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law.’”

    Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest and an outspoken critic of standardized testing, said assessments like the SAT have long been embroiled in debates about racial equity in education, but the discourse grew more prominent as attacks on DEI and affirmative action intensified.

    “The SAT has racial bias baked into it from its origins as an early IQ test to keep out the riffraff,” he said. “What Republicans are now saying is, that’s an objective measure of merit, and if white and Asian kids do better on them over all, then colleges not considering those scores is a form DEI run amok.”

    John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University, has published numerous influential studies on the effects of standardized testing policies, including those cited by the majority of Ivy League institutions that decided to return to test requirements. He said he understands where the Education Department’s skepticism comes from.

    “Schools might be tempted to continue test-optional policies to make it easier to maintain diverse classes, even if that makes it harder to assess students’ academic preparation,’” Friedman said. “I think that’s where some of the angst comes from, as part of a larger concern about higher education moving away from the traditional sense of meritocracy.”

    At the same time, he said the department should consider how institutions use test scores in admissions, which can vary widely.

    “The point is not that you can’t go test-optional. It’s that you shouldn’t if your goal is an end run around the SFFA decision,” Friedman said. “It would be bad to force institutions that decided thoughtfully that test requirements are not best for them to adopt those policies anyway.”

    Dominique Baker, associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, said she doesn’t believe it should matter whether colleges are considering racial diversity in deciding on their testing policies. The truth, she said, is that research on how testing policies affect applicant diversity is murky, and many of the colleges where the policies could have a demonstrable impact have already returned to requiring scores.

    For her, the mention of testing policies alongside other DEI initiatives is “head-scratching.”

    “The places the administration cares about have largely already returned to testing, or are certainly poised to do so soon. So who is this for?” Baker said. “It’s bananas that testing is even in here.”

    Reversing the Test-Optional Tide?

    So far, the letter hasn’t had any effect on institutions’ testing policies. But colleges are starting to respond to the Dear Colleague letter’s guidance in other ways, changing the names of student service offices, scrubbing mentions of race and equity from their websites, eliminating race-conscious programs, and canceling affinity group events.

    “It would be naïve to believe that certain institutions wouldn’t, at the very least, strongly consider changing their testing policies in order to fly under the radar with the administration,” Baker said.

    Some colleges are pushing ahead with their test-optional policies regardless. Last Thursday the University of Vermont announced that its test-optional policy, put in place during the pandemic, would become permanent.

    Jay Jacobs, vice president for enrollment management at Vermont, told Inside Higher Ed the decision was based on years of research that found that removing test requirements not only had little effect on students’ academic performance and persistence, but also helped UVM achieve its goal of enrolling more local and first-generation students.

    He said the university did not take racial diversity into account when measuring the policy’s enrollment impact—“we didn’t want that to be construed as the reason,” he explained—but said that whatever the rationale, he doesn’t believe the Education Department’s guidance should have any influence.

    “No external party should have a say in dictating institutional policy,” Jacobs said.

    Meanwhile, leaders in the assessment industry have remained largely silent about the Trump administration’s promotion of their exams as part of the war on DEI.

    The College Board, which owns and administers the SAT, did not release a public statement about the letter, nor did ACT, Educational Testing Services or any other major assessment organization.

    College Board communications director Holly Stepp wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the organization believes testing can promote college access, but it does not usually comment on policy matters.

    “College Board provides access and opportunity to millions of students from every background through programs that are mission-driven, evidence-based, and nonpartisan,” Stepp wrote. “We do not set policies around how our exam is used by higher education institutions and scholarship providers.”

    Juan Elizondo, ACT’s strategic communications director for government and public relations, told Inside Higher Ed that the company stands behind institutions’ freedom to set their own testing policies.

    “ACT respects the authority of our higher education partners to decide the admission standards that are right for their institutions,” he wrote.

    Failing the Logic Test

    As colleges like Yale, Harvard and MIT returned to test requirements last year, many cited the same new research: a study from Opportunity Insights that found that test-optional policies made it more difficult for selective institutions to admit students who could succeed academically—and to find qualified applicants from diverse racial and economic backgrounds. Statements from both Yale and Dartmouth said that test scores could “help expand access” for underrepresented groups, including students of color.

    So if both test-optional and test-mandatory policies can promote racial diversity depending on the institution, how will the Trump administration enforce its guidance?

    When asked this question, Trainor did not respond directly but implied that any institution using racial diversity as a justification for any policy, or even citing it as a potential benefit, could be in violation of the current Education Department’s views on civil rights law.

    Friedman, one of the researchers who produced the Opportunity Insights study, said his research showed that for some highly selective colleges, requiring test scores could help “a little bit” with diversity in the selection process. The argument is that by providing a standardized measure of academic preparedness, selective colleges can find a “diamond in the rough”—applicants from underresourced high schools who would struggle to stand out otherwise.

    “For some schools, going back to requiring testing may help improve diversity, but my sense is that improving diversity is not the primary motivation behind this policy change,” he said.

    Feder agreed but had a different prediction.

    “If I’m at the OCR and an Ivy League college is saying, ‘We went back to test requirements because it’s good for diversity,’ even if that’s not really the case, I’d go investigate them,” he said. “By their own logic, they’d have to.”

    Baker said there hasn’t been enough research to determine whether test-optional policies make a huge difference in promoting diversity. Many of the colleges that have kept them in place, she said, have also made more holistic changes to their admissions process that could account for diversity gains. But she believes ending the experiment early by government coercion would be a major step backward.

    “Researchers in the field are doing some real deep dives to better understand the effects of test-optional policies themselves. The people writing the [Dear Colleague] letter have no clue about any of that; they just read about how these policies are part of an anti-white war on meritocracy,” she said. “They’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall.”

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  • Closing a college with dignity (part 3) (opinion)

    Closing a college with dignity (part 3) (opinion)

    After a year of many last events, Cabrini University celebrated its final commencement ceremonies last May and a “legacy” event to ceremonially close the institution and pass the legacy to Villanova University, which purchased the campus. As the emotions have tempered, and Cabrini’s president and academic leadership team have moved on to new career opportunities, we offer these lessons learned for financially struggling colleges that may be facing the possibility of closure, as well as insights for colleges in positions of financial strength on how they can help.

    If Your College Is Struggling Financially

    The quickest route to a chaotic close is running out of cash. Depending on how liquid an institution is—a combination of how much actual cash it holds with how many assets it has that can quickly be converted to cash—running out of cash can happen suddenly. A constant awareness of liquidity is imperative to avoid such a terrible outcome, and any potential partner will ask how long the cash will last as a preliminary decision criterion.

    This is the third part of a three-part series. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here.

    For many institutions, the most accessible cash resource is the unrestricted portion of the endowment. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Some institutions today are actively drawing more on their endowment than the historic 4 to 5 percent in support of annual operations in order to solve potentially existential challenges (the blessing)—but if the revitalization effort fails, then institutional resources may not be available to preclude closure (the curse). Without the Villanova partnership, Cabrini would have faced a significant cash crunch, which would have forced very difficult choices, especially related to supporting employees in the final stages of closing.

    Rating agencies have also called out the growing amount of deferred maintenance colleges are facing. This is an in-the-weeds problem that many institutions are not addressing, at their great peril. In Cabrini’s case, we had to close a residence hall due to a heating system failure, and a heavily used campus road was so frequently repaired that it was difficult to traverse. We also could not provide competitive equipment for students in one of our most popular majors.

    For institutions on the brink, deferred maintenance can be a real deterrent when considering deal terms with potential partners. Villanova has announced that it will spend $75 million to upgrade the Cabrini campus.

    Here are some additional factors financially struggling institutions should consider:

    • Your accreditor will not tell you to close until it is too late. Cabrini did not receive any warnings from its accreditor in the decade prior to closure. The institution remained accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education through graduating its final class and even moved through the required accreditation self-study process in the final year of operation. Do not rely on your accrediting body to make decisions for you.
    • Be honest and transparent with your campus community about enrollment and the college’s financial reality.
    • Consider the cash reserves necessary to close with dignity. Your expenditures will be higher than normal during the wind-down period. You will need to secure an excellent legal team with expertise in closing colleges. There will also be costs associated with exiting long-term contracts and licenses as well as severance and retention costs. Anticipating these increased costs and decreased revenues in the final year is critical to the success of the closure.
    • Anticipate that alumni may want to “save the college.” If you do not have a history of alumni making large gifts, these efforts will be unlikely solutions. When entertaining such possibilities, consider the amount necessary to raise not just to keep the institution open for another year, but to sustain operations over time.
    • Plan for a closing timeline, even if you are not certain you will close. Choosing the right time in the academic calendar to announce a closing is an especially challenging task. Primary consideration must be given to future educational opportunities for students, followed by maximizing employment opportunities for faculty and staff. If it is possible to announce a closing after the end of an academic year for two years into the future, that affords the opportunity to graduate juniors and seniors while preparing sophomores and first-year students for teach-out, and gives faculty up to two academic recruiting cycles, which is especially helpful for tenure-stream faculty. Having sufficient funding on hand is key to offering a two-year closing time frame, given that fiscal and human resources start to deplete as soon as a closing announcement is made.
    • As you plan for a closing timeline, consider the ethical responsibility to deliver a robust student experience. In its final year, Cabrini prioritized using funds for student events and experiences and reduced or eliminated budgets for employee travel, professional memberships and other non-student-facing services.

    If Your College Is Preparing for a Closure Announcement

    If your institution has decided to close, consider the following steps before you announce:

    • Build a website with critical information so that all of your constituents—students, employees, alumni and donors—can receive information. Continue to add to FAQs as more information becomes available.
    • Keep the circle of people who know about the impending closure small to avoid leaks prior to having as much planned as possible. Using nondisclosure agreements is critical. While holding this news may be questioned as unethical, the decision to wait to announce until plans are in place provides the community with more clarity on partner/teach-out institutions, career counseling, mental health counseling, health care, plans for severance and retention agreements, etc.
    • Consider hiring a crisis management team to prepare you for the announcement.
    • Plan to host open forums (virtually and in person) for parents, students and faculty to support their transitions immediately after the closure announcement. Understand that the messaging may not be absorbed when people are upset. Post recordings or PowerPoint slides on your closing website.
    • Plan for mental health support for employees and students, with both in-person and virtual options.
    • Plan for the many human resources issues you will need to consider. Compliance with the federal WARN Act is crucial in order to not incur additional costs. If you provide a notice of a year or more, you will want to retain key faculty and staff. Simultaneously, you will want some melt of employees to align with the melt of students (and tuition income) that will occur. This means you will need to consider both retention and severance agreements, while complying with terms laid out in employee handbooks.
    • Remain in close communication with your accreditor(s) and continue to report on compliance with standards as well as the closure plan. They have processes and expectations that colleges need to honor in order to retain accreditation for the final graduating class. As noted earlier, Cabrini had to complete a regularly scheduled Middle States self-study process, including the site team visit, in the final year of operation, while also completing processes related to closure and the asset purchase agreement.
    • Anticipate that there will be additional administrative tasks to finish after students and faculty leave. In this regard, there will seem to be multiple dates that feel like an ending—the date when academics cease and degrees are no longer awarded, the date when accreditation ends, the date when a transaction occurs for the property, the date the endowment transfer process happens through the Orphan’s Court—a process specific to Pennsylvania—and more. Audits, financial aid close-out and reporting requirements, tasks related to tax compliance, discontinuation of vendor relationships, transition of student records, withdrawal from the federal international student program and other administrative tasks will need to occur after most campus employees have been terminated. Understanding these requirements and creating a checklist for closure will keep your leadership team on track.

    If Your College Has Announced Plans to Close

    • Request department chairs work collaboratively to identify students who can realistically graduate prior to closing, determine what courses these students need and schedule classes to meet these needs. Closing institutions need to be flexible but not sacrifice the quality of the education. Modifying degree requirements to the point where students do not have the skills and knowledge that is expected of the degree is unethical.
    • Adapt catalog policies to ensure due process for managing grievances, academic standing determinations, grade disputes/changes, hearing requests, etc., within the timeline for closure. Once closed, transcripts cannot be modified.
    • Establish a working group on record retention to determine what needs to shift to another institution or agency and what needs to be shredded.
    • Prepare faculty and staff on campus to assume many roles as their faculty and staff colleagues depart throughout the year.
    • Anticipate that alumni will suddenly be more engaged than they have been in recent years. Your focus must remain on taking care of your current employees and students, who deserve a robust experience.
    • Give yourself grace and extend that to everyone around you. Everyone is experiencing some level of grief, stress and trauma. Be flexible even while knowing that at times you will need to have firm deadlines to respect people’s bandwidth and complete processes. Understand that students and employees will react differently and move on different schedules.
    • Have hope. There are moments of your closure period that will be horrific. There is no other way to describe it. There will also be moments of solidarity and togetherness. Ultimately, a closure can be a period of forced growth for many people. Many Cabrini employees found a new job opportunity that advanced their careers.

    If Your College Isn’t Closing, but a College in Your Area Is

    • If a college or university in your area is closing or is rumored to be closing, talk with them to ask how you can best support them. Before posting information on your website or speaking with the media about welcoming the students from the closing college or university, ask the closing institution directly about how you can best support their students and employees for a smooth transition.
    • Working with institutions to establish memorandums of understanding for supportive transitioning of students is important, as is acting with transparency and honesty. Unfortunately, there were institutions that exhibited predatory behaviors toward Cabrini students with flashy, false promises that led vulnerable students to spend more time and money to complete their degrees. Don’t be that institution.
    • If a college provides a notice period, understand that actively recruiting their students or employees prior to closure might negatively impact the closing institution. If you would like to offer employment to someone at a closing institution who is in a key position such as director of financial aid or registrar, consider communicating with the closing institution to seek a solution that can provide a transition period, possibly splitting the employee’s time between the two institutions.

    Final Reflection

    In an ideal world of higher education, no institution would have to endure a sudden or planned closure. However, the current financial and enrollment pictures at many colleges and universities point to a harsher reality.

    For others working at institutions that are exploring mergers, acquisitions or closures, do not work in isolation. There are now many higher education professionals who have lived through this experience who can offer advice confidentially and understand the need for nondisclosure. Higher education will be stronger if we work together, not in competition, and recognize our shared mission to serve students and our communities.

    The final two years were a very difficult time for Cabrini University’s community. The institution’s leadership is forever grateful to the faculty and staff, all of whom rose to the occasion to embrace the many lasts. Their selfless work and sacrifice will serve as a legacy for Cabrini, as will the colleges where Cabrini students chose to continue their educations and the institutions where former Cabrini faculty and staff will continue their careers.

    Helen Drinan served as interim president of Cabrini University. Previously, she served as president of Simmons University.

    Michelle Filling-Brown is associate vice provost for integrated student experience and a teaching professor in the Department of English at Villanova University. She formerly served as chief academic officer/dean for academic affairs at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 16 years.

    Richie Gebauer is dean of student success at Bryn Mawr College. He formerly served as assistant dean of retention and student success at Cabrini University.

    Erin McLaughlin is the interim dean of the College of Arts, Education and Humanities at DeSales University. She formerly served as associate dean for the School of Business, Education and Professional Studies at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 16 years.

    Kimberly Boyd is assistant professor of biology and anatomy and physiology at Delaware County Community College. She formerly served as dean of retention and student success at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 25 years.

    Missy Terlecki is dean of the School of Professional and Applied Psychology at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. She formerly served as associate dean for the School of Arts and Sciences at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 19 years.

    Lynda Buzzard is associate vice president and controller at Villanova University. Previously, she served as the vice president of finance and administration at Cabrini University in its final year.

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  • Closing a college with dignity, part 1 (opinion)

    Closing a college with dignity, part 1 (opinion)

    Founded in 1957, Cabrini University, a small, tuition-driven Roman Catholic liberal arts institution located outside of Philadelphia, closed last June after providing a year’s notice of its impending closure. One of at least 14 nonprofit four-year colleges that announced closures in 2023, Cabrini announced a memorandum of understanding with Villanova University in June 2023, signed a definitive agreement in November 2023 and closed the transaction in June 2024.

    Through this transaction, Cabrini was afforded a final year of operation prior to closure. Villanova acquired Cabrini’s assets, including a 112-acre property, and committed to preserving the legacy of Cabrini through commitments like naming its new campus Villanova University Cabrini Campus, providing Cabrini representatives two seats on the Villanova board for up to two successive five-year terms, stewarding the Mother Cabrini special collections and planning events for Cabrini alumni.

    In this three-part essay, we—Cabrini’s former interim president, Helen Drinan, and former members of the academic leadership team—describe our decision to seek a strategic partner, the planning that went into a dignified closure and the ways we supported employees and students through a mission-driven plan to help them transition in terms of their careers and academic studies.

    It was a dignified closing for an institution that began the 2022–23 academic year facing significant obstacles to its survival. As the university welcomed a new interim president, Cabrini’s profile reflected five metrics used to identify rising pressure on nonprofit higher education institutions with fewer than 5,000 students.

    • High acceptance rate: It increased from 72 percent in 2018 to 79 percent in 2022.
    • Low yield on offers of admission: It declined from 17 percent in 2018 to 11 percent in 2022.
    • Falling enrollment: 29.3 percent decline between 2018 (2,283) and 2022 (1,613).
    • Rising institutional aid: Institutional aid awards increased by about 38 percent from 2018 to 2022 ($10,595 per student in 2018 to $14,638 per student in 2022), outpacing small increases in tuition. In 2022–23, 39 percent of Cabrini’s undergraduate students were receiving Pell Grants and 99 percent received institutional grant or scholarship aid.
    • Persistent operating losses: Eight years of operating losses from 2015 to 2022, ranging between $1.9 million and $10 million, topped off by a fiscal year 2023 budget awaiting approval that included its highest-ever multimillion-dollar operating loss.

    Enrollment and financial operating data of course tell only part of the story of a troubled institution. Many leadership decisions made over time cumulatively result in these kinds of outcomes. At least three common practices have emerged as critical leadership traps in higher education: nonstrategic launches of initiatives intended to increase revenues or decrease costs, consistent drawdowns of the endowment to cover annual losses and accumulation of deferred maintenance. All three of these institution-threatening practices were occurring at Cabrini over the eight years leading to the summer of 2022, when we realized time was running out.

    The Road to Closure

    Sound strategic planning for a tuition-dependent, modestly endowed, indebted institution like Cabrini depends on choosing opportunities that expand on existing expertise, require minimal capital outlays and are tested for success within a three-year time frame. At Cabrini, too many new initiatives, well beyond historic areas of expertise, were launched in the eight years prior to closure, resulting in a laundry list of only loosely related activities: a targeted international student recruitment program, graduate online education, revived adult degree completion offerings, new doctoral programs, a new residence hall and parking garage, efforts to qualify as a Hispanic-serving institution, and the start-up of a new undergraduate nursing program. All this occurred while the university took on additional debt for construction activity and used federal pandemic relief funding to fill revenue gaps, pushing the institution to the point where it faced its largest-ever annual deficit and rapidly declining cash on hand going into fiscal year 2023.

    In summer 2022, Cabrini’s Board of Trustees approved a four-month budget delay, and the senior leadership team sought to identify $10 million in revenue and expense improvements. In September, the senior leadership team presented the board with two alternative paths: 1) a plan to operate for three-plus years to assess the financial feasibility of staying independent or 2) a plan to find the best possible partner to help support the institution financially. Past strategies such as voluntary separation programs, involuntary separations and the hiring of external consultants all yielded unsuccessful results and negatively impacted employee morale. The best opportunities for maintaining independence involved growing revenues, reducing costs (with the understanding that previous attempts to do so were insufficient), capitalizing on real estate and seeking nontraditional revenue streams.

    The Penultimate Year

    Prior to the decision to close, while institutional leaders remained focused on staying viable, senior leadership offered an exclusive interview to The Philadelphia Inquirer in the spirit of transparency, announcing very aggressive organizational changes and plans for new programs and publicly expressing an interest in partnerships. Such an approach, we realized, would raise further questions about the future of the institution: The truth is that once an institution acknowledges difficulties, questions will proliferate, and it is best to be transparent and open when responding.

    As fall 2022 moved into winter, our leadership team became aware of three negative trends: 1) efforts to recruit the new first-year class were falling short of enrollment targets, 2) new program launches took longer than expected, creating a lag in new revenue, attributable in large part to reduced marketing resources, and 3) partnership conversations yielded few opportunities serious enough to pursue. Two institutions were seriously considering partnering with us, allowing for academic and possibly athletic continuity. However, in both cases, potential partner boards determined they were “unable to buy Cabrini’s problems” because of its declining cash and indebtedness.

    Given the direction of these conversations, we concluded that the institution was not financially viable. We determined that the best opportunity to preserve Cabrini’s legacy and ensure students, faculty and staff would experience a full academic year prior to closure was to readily agree to the MOU with Villanova, the initial step toward an asset purchase agreement and a graceful closure.

    Villanova’s strategic direction proved key to the partnership decision. Villanova’s strength as an Augustinian institution in the Catholic tradition aligned beautifully with Cabrini’s heritage, and the missions of both institutions made for wonderful integration opportunities in such areas as immigration, leadership and services for marginalized populations. Cabrini’s real estate offered the expansion opportunities Villanova desired in close proximity to its beautifully built-out campus. And Villanova’s financial resources enabled Cabrini to deliver a robust final year to all its students, faculty and staff, the value of which is beyond measure.

    The university graduated a senior class in May 2024, offered placements to every student interested in continuing their education and supported its workforce with a combination of job-seeking resources, retention payments and severance, none of which would have been possible without Villanova’s remarkable engagement. (Part 2 of this series provides further detail about Cabrini’s final year and transition planning.)

    Part of why we think the partnership worked was because we, as the institutional leadership team, effectively checked our egos at the door. We knew our focus had to be on what was best for the institution, not our own personal outcomes, to credibly lead the university through closure. A key lesson for other institutions exploring acquisitions or mergers is that the future expectations of the sitting president as well as of board members in a new organization should be clarified early in partner conversations; otherwise, personal expectations could present an obstacle to the transaction’s success.

    Another lesson for any struggling institution is to think critically about the kinds of partner institutions that would find you attractive, how much leverage you might have and how much you can do to minimize your downsides. This is not typically work you can do as you face the threat of immediate closure. For institutions that may be financially stable but are experiencing some of the indicators of risk and stress mentioned at the start of this essay, the task of thoughtfully identifying potential partners could be an important activity for trustees and senior leadership teams to pursue.

    Editor’s note: The second and third installments of the series will be published on the next two Wednesdays.

    Helen Drinan served as interim president of Cabrini University. Previously, she served as president of Simmons University.

    Michelle Filling-Brown is associate vice provost for integrated student experience and a teaching professor in the Department of English at Villanova University. She formerly served as chief academic officer/dean for academic affairs at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 16 years.

    Richie Gebauer is dean of student success at Bryn Mawr College. He formerly served as assistant dean of retention and student success at Cabrini University.

    Erin McLaughlin is the interim dean of the College of Arts, Education and Humanities at DeSales University. She formerly served as associate dean for the School of Business, Education and Professional Studies at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 16 years.

    Kimberly Boyd is assistant professor of biology and anatomy and physiology at Delaware County Community College. She formerly served as dean of retention and student success at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 25 years.

    Missy Terlecki is dean of the School of Professional and Applied Psychology at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. She formerly served as associate dean for the School of Arts and Sciences at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 19 years.

    Lynda Buzzard is associate vice president and controller at Villanova University. Previously, she served as the vice president of finance and administration at Cabrini University in its final year.

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  • There is declining trust in Australian unis. Federal government policy is a big part of the problem

    There is declining trust in Australian unis. Federal government policy is a big part of the problem




    By: Graeme Turner

    in Analysis, Policy & Reform, Politics, Top Stories


    February 12, 2025

    As we head towards the federal election, both sides of politics are making a point of criticising universities and questioning their role in the community.

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  • Creating Durability with the Modern Learner Part 2

    Creating Durability with the Modern Learner Part 2

    In this episode of the EdUp Experience Podcast, we continue to dive deep into the world of the Modern Learner with host Dr. Joe Sallustio and his guest Sarah Russell, Vice President of Marketing, Dr. Chris Gilmore, Vice President of Enrollment Management and Katie Tomlinson, Senior Director of Analytics & Business Intelligence. Together, they challenge traditional thinking about higher education and explore how institutions can adapt to meet the unique needs of today’s diverse student population. You’ll hear insightful discussions about changing student behavior, the importance of accessibility, and the need for innovative program development. Listen to the podcast below or read the transcript.

    Transcript

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Welcome back everybody. It’s your time to “EdUp” on the EdUp Experience Podcast where we make education your business. This is episode two of a special miniseries titled “Education Elevated: Navigating the Future of Online Higher Education,” brought to you by the EdUp experience and our amazing partner EducationDynamics, who’s going to supply all of the brainpower today. I don’t actually have to do anything because they’ve got all the answers to your most pressing questions about today’s Modern Learner. So this series is really important because we’re going to explore the evolution, really the landscape of higher education as experienced by today’s diverse and interconnected student population. And I think what it comes down to is students today, however you define that, and I think it is important to define that student– an 18 year old, 88-year-old, somewhere in between, transfer credit, no transfer credit, first time full-time, freshmen, adult student, right?

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    There’s so much definition that goes around the word student, and I think we fail in higher ed a lot of times to say exactly who we’re talking about. So this concept of the Modern Learner really has been something, and I’ve been championing here on the podcast and I got it from EducationDynamics. They came up with it and I was like, “Ooh, that’s good. I think I’ll steal that a little bit, but also give credit where it’s due.” And I always tag the group and I tag ’em and I give the call out. But the Modern Learner really speaks to, I think today’s student with evolved behaviors, the way they look at things, the way they make decisions. And so EducationDynamics has brought us a panel of experts today, a panel of the most knowledgeable people in enrollment and marketing that you can find anywhere. And I know this because I know them and I’ve talked to them before, and the insights that you can get from them are going to be incredible and let’s get them here on the mic one at a time. Ladies and gentlemen, first off, she’s Sarah Russell. She’s the Vice President of Marketing with EducationDynamics. How are you, Sarah?

    Sarah Russell:

    I’m doing great. How are you?

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Back again, right? I think this is the 2nd or third time you’ve been on with me.

    Sarah Russell:

    At least the second that I can remember,

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    But really important now as we talk about the Modern Learner, and we’re going to get to it because marketing obviously is a huge part of how you got to get to these folks first and their behaviors are a little bit different, and then you’ve got to figure out how to enroll them. Also, we’ve got Chris Gilmore with us today. He’s the Vice President of Enrollment Marketing with EducationDynamics. Chris, welcome back. How are you?

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    Yeah, I’m great, Joe. Thanks for having me.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    And then you know what, Chris, once you find the Modern Learner and you figure out how to speak to them and you get them enrolled, which is not easy, right? It takes a specific amount of knowledge and it’s not the same as enrolling what we would call a traditional student. It’s a completely different, you got to track and you got to have analytics and you got to data. And so we brought a data expert. She’s Katie Tomlinson, she’s director of Analytics with EducationDynamics. Katie, welcome back. How are you?

    Katie Tomlinson:

    Great. Thank you for having us join.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    So you guys are all back. We’re going to talk about the Modern Learner. This is so important and it’s really an honor for us to partner with EducationDynamics as we talk about the Modern Learner. And Katie, I want to start with you. Who is the Modern Learner? Seems like we need some definition around who the Modern Learner is. So let’s start there and any kind of stats or demographics, of course, you’re the Director of Analytics, so I have to ask you to bring the meat and potatoes, so to speak, any data you have around how you define the Modern Learner.

    Katie Tomlinson:

    Thanks, Joe. So the Modern Learner can really be anyone. We’re talking about working adults, we’re talking about parents, veterans, lifelong learners who are juggling those multiple responsibilities while still pursuing their education. The Modern Learner also includes our younger recent high school graduates. So those on that path between high school to college graduation. And what we’re seeing is that the lines are really being blurred between what we used to define as adults and traditional students as both their educational and their student preferences are evolving. And we need to rethink our assumptions about who these students are based on both their age or their background. My point here is that age really no longer predicts modality or pathway, which makes it extremely important as you move forward that your brand and your messaging strategy and your approach needs to be unified across your entire organization. We should not be parsing out different strategies based on perspective students age or their modality anymore.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    So we think kind of in a binary way in higher education, we say there’s traditional students who go to when we think that, or you talk to somebody who lives outside of higher education who has kids that attend an institution and you say higher education to them. They think red brick buildings, students walking on campus with a backpack, right? Traditional students. That’s what I think so many people envision. And then everybody else who’s the non-traditional student, the adult student, maybe the student who’s working, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What I hear you saying is the Modern Learner isn’t the modality, it’s not the way in which you journey through your educational pursuits. It’s characteristic based rather than modality based, right?

    Katie Tomlinson:

    That’s correct. Yeah. I mean, even if you think about the number of higher education students participating in online starting in 2019, that number was 33%. We’re now at that staggering 66%. So if you are thinking about describing that Modern Learner and those attributes, we really need to think about them having some of those same motivations and behaviors that we used to coin with that traditional online college student.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    That’s so good. And Chris and Sarah, I’m bringing you both in here. This is, I say I’m going to ask certain questions and then I actually get on here and I go, “I’m going to take a detour.” I have talked to over 300 college presidents. More than that, probably 320 that with what we have in the can. One of the most, I want to say it’s common, but it comes up is okay, there’s some traditional campuses, and when I say traditional, they’re on a traditional academic calendar, fall, spring, little bit of summer, fall, spring, little bit of summer, kind of like that. And you go, okay, how are you going to differentiate? What are you going to do in the future? How are you going to sustain your enrollment? Well, we’re going to bring in an adult student. We’re going to go after a Modern Learner. We’re going to bring in this different type of student than we’ve ever been used to before, and we’re going to do it.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    We’re just going to say, we’re going to go after this student and we’re going to bring them in on our traditional academic calendar with our classes that aren’t designed typically for adult learners or for the modern student. And I think that maybe there’s this expectation that just because you’re offering something online, magic happens and people start showing up in your classes, but it’s totally different infrastructure, thought processes, messaging, enrollment. Can you guys weigh in a little bit on some of the differences? I mean, you can’t just do it, right? You can’t just go, “We’re going to go after some college know credential population” and the magic takes place.

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    Maybe Sarah, you can start speaking to how we attract them in the first place, because even starting at that is a different game. And then I can talk a little bit to once we actually have them in the funnel.

    Sarah Russell:

    Yes, absolutely. So from a marketing standpoint, it’s really important that you understand the media habits and usage of this population and where you can reach them and at what stage of their decision journey they are typically in when they’re interacting with certain points of media. So generally, if you’re going to want to get in that consideration stage, you need to do it early because once they narrow their set of prospective colleges down to two or three, if you’re not in that grouping, you’re already too late. And if you’re focusing really heavily on the bottom of the marketing funnel with a lot of lead gen, but you haven’t gotten in that consideration list yet, you’re really wasting your dollars there. So making sure that you are allocating enough of your budget to inform that upper funnel awareness and consideration, and that’s going to allow you to really heavily play in connected TV, a lot of the reels and short form video in social, et cetera.

    Sarah Russell:

    And you should really have a strong messaging pipeline for how are you speaking to those students at the top of the funnel, How are you speaking to them throughout the funnel and how does their mindset change and what becomes important to them. Going back to school is a very big decision, no matter the student population. So whether that is a first time freshman going to school for the first time or an adult student who may be returning to school or finishing a degree, you really have to make sure that you are addressing their pain points with marketing because today’s Modern Learner is a very well-informed and highly researched student. So they’re going to want a lot of that information on the front end before they even consider your school as being in their prospect list. So really understanding those media channels, the messaging that’s going to resonate throughout. So then once they get to the point of raising their hand, requesting information, interacting with your institution, they’re a lot more informed than maybe they were 2, 3, 5 years ago,

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Chris. Okay. So you’ve done all of this different that Sarah made it sound relatively easy –it is not– everything she said is super hard. You have to have a completely different infrastructure thought process. Even your technology has to be upgraded in different. So let’s just say you’re skilled enough to do some of the things that Sarah says in terms of marketing, which many schools are not.

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, I agree with everything that Sarah said in terms of how we’re attracting them, how we’re engaging them, how we’re getting them into the funnel, and then a different workflow starts and that’s how we’re communicating with them. As Sarah said, we need to be making sure that we are in the channels that they’re in. That applies also once we get them into the funnel. So really flexible contact strategies are really important. With the Modern Learner, we can’t tell them how to communicate with us. We should be so lucky that they are choosing to engage in communicating with us. So we have to really be present wherever the student is comfortable engaging. So text messaging, email, phone call, if that works for them, but being present in multiple channels during the initial contact strategy. And then once you engage the student, it is a little bit of a different flavor to the conversation.

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    Both Katie and Sarah laid out that these students are primarily motivated by outcomes, career opportunities, job growth, compensation and salary potential. So to Sarah’s point, they’re doing a lot of research before they even enter that funnel. And when they do get to the funnel and they connect with your enrollment professionals, your enrollment counselors, your coaches, they’re likely to come with very specific questions. And those are likely to be amongst others, very outcome-based. So your team needs to be able highlight the value propositions of the programs, which means that your programs need to be aligned with a good outcomes-based value proposition because if it’s not, they’re not going to be attracted to it in the first place. If it is and we cannot articulate it, well then same thing, it gets a little blurry and not mid funnel. So I think being present in the channels that they’re willing to engage with you on, and then once we do get them engaged, being able to speak specifically to the needs of this population, understanding that it’s a little bit different than your straight out of high school population.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Do you think, Chris, that students, the Modern Learner is patient, are they willing to wait? And I ask this, let me give you the context. I’m on a fall spring calendar, right? My term is August. In January, I enroll a student in November or October and I say, “Hey, look, you missed fall. You got to wait till January or February.” Are they waiting around? Is brand so strong that they’re waiting around or are they going, you know what, “I’m ready when I’m ready and I’m going to find a school that’s ready for me.”

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    It is a big risk. You’re taking some might and it depends on the availability of the program and what really drew them to them, but more than likely they have alternative options to complete it and they’re going to find a way to get in faster. And to Sarah’s point, again, a lot of these students are doing research before they engage. A lot of this decision making is a little further on than we’re used to historically. So by the time they’re speaking with you, by the time you’re advising them on the application process, they’re ready to roll. And so we as institutions want to capitalize on that, but they primarily as students, they are ready for this step by the time they take that. So when you get them through that application process and then you tell them, “Hey, term starts in 12 weeks,” it’s not good. If they can find a way to start it in two weeks, they’re probably going to be motivated to do that.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Sarah, you back that up from your perspective and what you’ve seen that students are, I find the Modern Learner to be pretty impatient and rightfully so. It could be that they have tuition reimbursement or something and they go, I want to start right now. And you think about a student who comes back. A lot of these, some college degree students or no credential students, they’ve literally gone through the mental thought process of I want to go back. And then somebody says, well, you can’t start right now. Right? Then it’s done. It’s like the psychological contract that I was about to have with you is broken. And so it’s like Amazon telling you that your item is on back order for three weeks. You either order it something else or you go somewhere else to order it.

    Sarah Russell:

    Yes, I think that’s absolutely accurate and really bears out that concept of they’re doing a lot of that research. They’ve already decided they’re already bought in, and so the job now becomes less about I need to convince them that this is a good idea and more I need to show them the path for how it’s going to work for them. And if that path is longer than they had in mind, then you certainly run the risk of losing them to another institution that does have that schedule that fits more in their life. Like Chris said, there’s a lot of factors and we know that cost will always be probably the most significant factor, but that flexibility, that schedule, that timing is certainly a significant factor as well. And I think all of that goes into the mental math that prospective students, the Modern Learner today is really doing when they’re deciding to go back to school and where to do that.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Katie, I won’t come back to you for this, but then open it up to all of you, and I think a skeptic is sitting on this, is going to be listening to this at some point going, “You’re just talking about adult students.” What distinguishes the Modern Learner from this is an adult student conversation? And I know it’s not, I know, but somebody who’s listening to this might just go, you’ve relabeled what an adult student is. That’s not all the way, is it in what kind of data or analytics do we have or do you have where you went, “Oh, look at this. This is different than we’ve ever seen before and so now we’ve got to have a new category of the way we think about things”?

    Katie Tomlinson:

    Right? Well really to that point, Joe, we’re finding that the education and education process is really an ageless journey. We are seeing this age range continue to decrease. We are seeing that not what we used to label as this traditional adult student is the definition of who the Modern Learner is and ultimately, no matter what student they are, be it what we would’ve traditionally defined as an adult learner or what we’re labeling now as this Modern Learner, they all have the same goals, they all have the same needs, they all consume the same types of media, and it ultimately comes down to how we are engaging with those prospective students and from a timing perspective, how quickly they’re looking to make those decisions. To your point earlier, and I didn’t get a chance to jump in when Sarah and Chris were talking, still many of these students, 80% of them are enrolling at the school that admits them first and 54% of them want to start within one month. So it doesn’t matter. And to your point, I think having those multiple entry points throughout the school year, they want to be able to make those decisions quickly once they have really locked in and said, Hey, I want to pursue my education. And so we’ve got to capitalize on that throughout all the stages of the funnel and working with our enrollment management team to make sure we’re pushing them through very quickly as well.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Okay, let me stop there and Sarah and Chris jumping on this, but 80% of these students go to the school that admits them first.

    Katie Tomlinson:

    That’s correct.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    So somebody’s listening to this going, yeah, we’re working with the Modern Learner, and then the question is, do you think that you’re the one that admits them first? And if the answer is no, you’re probably not going to get them. I mean just that you think about that and it’s literally mind blowing. I would never have thought it was that high, right? So it’s way higher than I thought. And then you said 54% of the students, this goes back to the other point, 54% of those students want to start within one month. That makes sense to me because like I’m ready to go, I want to start now, and if you don’t have it, I’m going elsewhere. So you see these evolved behaviors and maybe speed plays a big part in this because we expect immediacy in all other parts of our life that we expect it now in higher ed too. Chris, Sarah, Katie, you can just take it where it goes.

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    I think that the first thing that raises for me is in talking with universities and colleges about your internal workflow for your application decision process, some are fairly streamlined and they’re aligned with prospective students. Others, especially super specific concentrations may involve faculty review, things like that. And it’s just worth looking at and taking that stat and comparing it to our internal workflow if we have a 30 day application decision process. Not saying that that might not work in some scenarios, but it’s pretty risky with this population because what it does for them is they’re still in the decision making process. So for that 30 days, they’re now open to alternative options and they may even be seeking out alternative options, and we really don’t want that If we’re aligned with them on program and value proposition, we want to be able to close that message out to them very quickly so we can engage them and lock them in close out the shopping process.

    Sarah Russell:

    And I’d love to really jump in on that comment you made, Joe, about what makes the Modern Learner different from an adult student or an adult learner. And one of the things that I think is really important for why we need to start talking about this Modern Learner is that a huge mistake I think I’ve seen a lot of institutions make as they’ve tried to expand into this population is coming up with an entirely different brand story almost for how that institution serves their adults and non-traditional students relative to how they’ve been talking to and positioning themselves with a more traditional student. And I think the Modern Learner concept is really important in that it starts identify where there’s not as much of a clear delineation anymore between what type of student or type of person fits into a traditional student versus a non-traditional post-traditional adult student.

    Sarah Russell:

    There’s starting to be a lot more crossover and those lines are blurring a little bit. And so if to your point Joe, a lot of institutions realize that there is so much different infrastructure and process that’s necessary for that population versus maybe where they’ve traditionally enrolled that on campus residential student. But to take that concept and carry that over into how you as an institution are messaging yourself I think is very dangerous because from a prospective student population, you are one institution and it’s important that you are bringing forward the value props that are most resonant to an 18-year-old first time freshman versus to an adult student. However, the Modern Learner concept really I think necessitates that you have to have a unified brand story across those different audiences and understanding that student population and where there are hard lines and where there are not between how we’ve traditionally talked about first time freshmen versus adult students, but really starting to encompass this idea of a Modern Learner is going to really have characteristics of both and how do we make sure that we haven’t drawn these really unnecessary lines in between how we’re talking to those students and how we’re talking about ourselves as institutions.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Now I know you guys all do amazing work as an institution– EducationDynamics — I’m talking about, is an organization, an institution comes to you and says, we really want to access the Modern Learner population. We want more of these students to come to our institution. We have some marketing money, you’re going to help us spend it and maximize it, and you’re going to generate leads for us and students who are interested in our programs and then we’re going to take those, that student interest and we’re going to enroll these students. And as easy as that sounds, it’s not that easy. And I bet there’s some frustration on the EducationDynamics side where it’s like, okay, did that lead even get in the system? We generated it, you gave us money, we generated, we helped you generate this interest and did it make it into your system?

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Are you measuring it? Do you know if the student enrolled or how long it took ’em to enroll? Did they come with transfer credit? How long did it take to get the transfer credit evaluated? That could be the reason the student just took off because it took you three weeks to evaluate the transfer credit. So what advice do you have to institutions who are really trying to access the modern learning? What are the things we should be looking at before we can really jump into the water and go after and recruit these students? Chris, why don’t you start?

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    So for me, I would start with the product as the first point. Both Katie and Sarah have made the good point a few times that these are very outcomes-based students, they are attracted to growing career fields. They want close to assurances that they’re going to be in a high employment scenario come graduation. And so for me, the very first thing that I would do is take a look at the product that I’m trying to engage them with the programs, are they aligned with those types of outcomes? Because if they’re not, you’re taking already difficult work and making it nearly impossible. So that’s where I would start from there.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    So you’re saying don’t give me a lemon program, I am at EducationDynamics, don’t give me a lemon and tell me to market it because it’s going to be a lemon.

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    Don’t give me a lemon. But in general, I’m not of the position. There are a ton of lemons in the field, but there are a lot of programs that do not appropriately articulate their outcomes-based value propositions, and if we can’t message it internally as a university, we’re certainly not going to be able to engage students that this is something that will help you get there.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Yeah, that’s a good one. Katie, what do you think anything that an institution needs to really consider?

    Katie Tomlinson:

    I mean from my perspective, Joe, it always comes down to the data, right? You need to be able to measure everything and have as much information without creating barriers to prospective students, filling out lead forms and those types of things to have information about your students. So even if you have some basic information you’re collecting on your RFI, are there opportunities to append additional variables to understand more about your existing population? To your point, I think you mentioned measuring different event dates throughout the lifecycle as well. So are we capturing when a student moves from an inquiry to an application or an application to an enroll, do we understand how many days that is taking? Can we understand maybe some of the different drivers, a media mix and what that looks like and the conversion rates between those different things? But if you do not have good data across your entire ecosystem, be that within your marketing efforts and your enrollment efforts, you’re never really going to be able to fully capitalize on your marketing engine and what you’re trying to accomplish.

    Katie Tomlinson:

    So the more data you can bring, the more you can append to what you have, and the more you can understand about those students and perspective students, the more armed you will be to be able to create different messaging strategies to have different marketing strategies even in your admissions process, understanding how different perspective students want to be engaged with and contacted with. Maybe that’s based on program, maybe that’s based on their age, maybe that’s based on the life cycle or stage that they’re at in their life, but if you have all of that, that’s the gold really, and what you can do with that is really limitless.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Sarah, what advice, what do institutions need to consider?

    Sarah Russell:

    I would certainly piggyback on everything Katie said because within marketing it is becoming so tech enabled that you have to have that data infrastructure and you have to know how to feed that data into your marketing platforms because all of the bidding, all of the optimization is really happening behind the scenes using AI, using these tech enabled tools, and you have to make sure that you are giving the algorithms the correct data and the most valuable data to be able to make those decisions around how much should you be paying for this spot, for this click, for this impression in that moment for that particular audience. It’s a very different game today than it was a few years ago when all of that was kind of being manually decided by your media strategists and now it’s more you are using your skills to inform all of these tech enabled tools and AI powered tools. So making sure that not only are you doing that correctly, but you’re building that data infrastructure in order to power that is so important from a marketing standpoint.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Yeah, you said AI, it’s like bing, bing, bing, everybody’s ears perk up. But if you think about the Modern Learner, even just the way Google is operating right now, if you do a search, you’re going to get a AI output that’s going to explain to you the school that you’re looking at or the type of program that you’re looking for and who might have it. So how the decision making process is being made is changing daily, minute by minute, Sarah, and you just go, how do we understand what’s happening?

    Sarah Russell:

    As an institution, you absolutely need to partner with the people, the companies, the teams that can help you navigate through that because it is so dynamic and like you said, Joe, it’s probably changing right now while we’re on this podcast. One thing that I see as being very much in flux right now is how prospective students and the Modern Learner are seeking information. Because you’re right, we’re seeing a lot more of that AI overview if they’re seeking an answer, it happens right there in the search results. There’s less of a drive I think to click through and navigate websites in that environment. So how do we think about website optimization and SEO differently than we did prior to that kind of experience? You also see a huge amount of especially younger students using social media platforms as search engines rather than going to Google. And so how they’re seeking out information, how they’re valuing this information, it certainly is continuing to change and I do not think it is feasible for an institution to navigate that completely alone. You have to partner with agencies, Google, Facebook, you have to understand all of those changes and how they are going to influence you.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    I think about this a lot. I interview so many people and then I get on my soapboxing thing and I’m kind of laughing to myself because I repeat these things a lot and I want to say ’em again and Chris, I’m going to come to you on it because so many of them are enrollment focused, but when you start to think about what an institution has to consider, yes, the marketing, yes, the messaging, yes, the branding, where the interest goes, can you log it, can you get it? And then your actual tactical and policy infrastructure takes over. It’s like take a Modern Learner and stick ’em into your policy structure and everything breaks. It could be your admissions requirements, it could be the transfer credit evaluation process. It could be how you admit the student. Maybe if it was a traditional student that had to go speak to a dean somewhere and write letters of recommendation and now you’ve got a Modern Learner who’s like, I am not going to do that stuff.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    I am literally I’m working somewhere. I’ve got a good job. I’m not going to spend my time writing letters of recommendation. I’m going to go somewhere where you make it easy for me to enroll and you respect my background and almost I’ve seen students take it almost offensively like I got to go do all this stuff that a kid would have to do if I’m older. And so you start to see this policy structure break. Then to your point is the product, can I just take the product I have it expect a Modern Learner to go through it, or do I need to look at alternative academic schedules that are non-standard term with different financial aid modeling, with leave of absence policies that allow me to go in and out and in and out because I may not be continuous forever because of my job and it’s like, do we really consider these even eight to five, like the eight to five, you really truly have no idea what you’re doing with a modern student. If everybody just works eight to five, if everybody’s working eight to five, you’re really not available to serve a Modern Learner who might want to call you at eight o’clock at night. Who the heck is working in multiple time zones? If a Modern Learner is coming from Central’s time to Pacific time, do you have somebody that’s even available to talk to a student when that student gets home from work or whatever? I know I’m ranting, but all of these become problems.

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    It’s rant worthy. Yeah, it’s rant worthy. It’s tough, and I think we talk about it quite a bit with our university partners and the first piece of advice is to review your internal workflows and that includes your policies and procedures from application to initial registration and continuing student experience. The Modern Learner is used to clicking and receiving, clicking and receiving.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    I like that.

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    Our internal policies and procedures often are really clunky and so they’re worth a review and I am not of the mindset of we need to wipe the slate with all academic policies and there are reasons and scenarios for certain programs to require letters of recommendation and everything like that, but there is a lot of fluff in there oftentimes, and those are the things that we need to look through. We need to ask, what value is this serving today? What risk does it put into our enrollment funnel? And we need to kind of balance those out and where the risk is greater than the value. I recommend reviewing that and maybe removing that and where it is substantial and it’s worth keeping in place, we just need to make sure that we’re clearly articulating the why of that process to the student. Students will get it.

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    You are right. They’re not patient people. I am not. We are not. But if we understand the why behind it, which means that in our messaging on the application process when they’re on the app page, it’s very clear, very easy to understand when they’re asking our staff, they also understand how to describe it and then that those processes are easy to do. They’re not administratively clunky, and that’s really what we look at. With that. You also raise another thing that I wanted to touch on, which is these students are not typically available in traditional work hours all the time. Some are, some aren’t. But even if they are, they may not want to communicate with you in the way that historically institutions are used to pushing out communications like get on the phone with me for 45 minutes. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn’t. But to Sarah’s point, we have so many new tools that to me, it used to be a huge challenge if I couldn’t invest in a workforce that’s going to be available up until 8:30 PM on the evenings and most time zones. Now, yes, that’s ideal if you can have a portion there. If you can’t, let’s talk about some of the new tools, generative AI chat, making a really high quality generative chat experience that may not totally take the place of personalized coaching, but there’s a time and a place for it. And if a student wants to engage and they have a question at 9:00 PM at night, I certainly would rather have an option to engage with them than to let them know I will reach out to them at 8:30 the next day.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    I think, Katie, about a LeBron James a lot when we’re talking about the modern student. I know it doesn’t make sense the way I say it like that, but when he went to Miami, he says, “I’m bringing my talents to Miami.” And I think about a student doing that. It’s like this era of higher education post Covid post now AI, I don’t want to say not post AI, but as the variables have changed, the student is dictating more of how the university operates rather than the university dictating how the student needs to operate. So it’s like the driver’s seat is now the student’s in more control and I mentioned ins and outs and the student kind of coming in and coming out. Maybe they’re taking non-credit courses, credentials, and you’re nodding your head, you’re just like, yes, yes, yes. And I just go, what resonates with you on the in and out of a Modern Learner and the way that they’re choosing?

    Katie Tomlinson:

    I mean, I think the biggest thing that we have seen over the last few years is just the demand for certificates both on the grad and undergrad side and thinking about the fact that based on 2023 completions, our undergrad certs were up 13% and our grad certs were up 27%. We’re continuing to see the demand for the types of programs, some of these shorter term credentials. That’s a big shift in what we had historically seen in the market, and they still represent maybe a small number of the degrees awarded overall, but this piece of the pie continues to get larger.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    And you’re right, it is and the demands are changing, and that’s the whole point of the whole Modern Learner designation is that how we’re choosing what we’re choosing, why we choose and when we choose are all up to us. And there’s multiple, it’s like choose your own adventure in higher education now it needs to be one path, right? Higher ed said you’re going to get a degree. That’s why I say that the era has changed that you’re going to get a degree or you’re not going to have a degree. Now it’s choose a pathway and you could go on an end around and end up at a degree way later in life where you could start. And there’s so many ways to achieve it institutionally. Back to Chris and Sarah, real fast enrollment and marketing synergy I would imagine here has to be like lockstep, right? I think that’s pretty common in higher ed. Still this guy where one points at the other, well, you didn’t get enough enrollment as well, you didn’t generate enough interest, and it’s that whole back and forth, and I’ve always felt one that is one unit and should be under one person, not in every institution. Can you just talk about synergy and why that’s going to be important here as we try to recruit a Modern Learner?

    Sarah Russell:

    Yeah, absolutely. I’ll get started and then Chris, I’m sure you’ll have something to add as well. It’s absolutely imperative to have that really synced up understanding of what is driving our performance, how can we tie that back to our marketing results and really have that continual pivot of this is the student sentiment, here’s what we’re hearing when we get on the phone with these prospects or this isn’t working at all and the leads that we’re getting here don’t even align with what we’re looking for. So that I think is really basic that fundamentally needs to be in place. But as we’re thinking about the Modern Learner and how the landscape is changing, I also think it becomes so important to have a third component of that duality. Now it becomes maybe a hierarchy. You have to have your data aligned in a much more impactful way because when you’re investing in some of the awareness generating mediums and you’re investing in your website, you’re not going to have as much of that one-to-one, I placed X number of media dollars in this campaign and it generated X number of inquiries and they converted at X rate and now I have this many students.

    Sarah Russell:

    It is rarely going to be that linear, and I think we’re going to see that become more and more non-linear as we continue to unpack this era of the Modern Learner. And so having that really strong data component becomes so much more important because you have to have the understanding of your attribution a little bit. How did we invest in this area that influenced this other area and what does that look like? And having a really clear data storytelling to help influence that back and forth between enrollment and marketing is going to be so crucial because again, maybe we want it to be, maybe we’re used to it being more linear, but that’s not the reality anymore and we have to have the data literacy to understand the more non-linear journey.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Chris, go ahead.

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    Agree with all of that. The only other point that I would add in there is just for all of those reasons, it historically, and a lot of times still with universities is looked at as front of funnel, mid funnel, and we really just got to get rid of that and put in good old fashioned team synergies because everything that Sarah has described absolutely critical. We also just have to make sure from a human perspective that the teams are on the same page, that they view one another as the same team, that there’s not this I report here and you report there, I have these KPIs and you have these KPIs, and I think making sure that you have a team that understands that messaging, that if you have more than one leader over marketing and enrollment, that those people are closely aligned with vision on how these things should be, that they’re in good rapport and that they’re spreading that down to their team regularly.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Sarah, what do you call it when you put in a fourth component? A “quadra-“

    Sarah Russell:

    “Quadrarchy” perhaps. I think that’s it.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    I bring that up because say, you better have financial aid in a good spot because you can do all this work. You can go after this Modern Learner, you can recruit this Modern Learner, enroll this Modern Learner, and then stick them into a antiquated, perhaps long financial aid process. And boy, don’t they want that information right now. They want to know how much it’s going to cost right now, and if you make me wait two weeks to find out what it’s going to cost, I will simply go elsewhere. There’s no chance that I’m waiting for the intro on Netflix. I hit that skip intro button every single time, and students will do the same thing when it comes to that. And financial aid is just another key component in this because you can lose students really easily through slowness, and I think the Modern Learner expects service, right?

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    Yeah. I think at the start it was Katie who mentioned that they’re price sensitive and they want a low cost option that is a need that we know upfront. And I think in financial aid traditionally it used to be more like a backend function, and now it’s absolutely both. So I view front end financial advising that needs to be an add-on service to your standard enrollment support mid-funnel. The teams that are having those conversations need to be able to easily articulate not only the cost for the credential, but what the financing options are in terms of financial aid or tuition reimbursement or however that individual student is looking to pay for it. Your team better be able to easily communicate it. And then if that’s a fit for them and they actually get started in the process, you’re absolutely right. Once they complete that fafsa, once they sign that master promissory note, we can’t have 30 days before we follow up with them with what their award letter is, with what their loan eligibility is. That needs to be a faster process, and that is often a big risk on the further back end of the funnel is I completed this fafsa, even if I got this information from my enrollment advisor upfront, I’m feeling kind of gray about this. I don’t have clarity, and we don’t want anything in the gray zone at that stage in the enrollment and financial aid can often be.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    And then you add in something like, well, I understand what my costs are, but I submitted for transfer credit, but they told me it’s going to be three weeks before I actually know what I’m going to pay. Those are just major risks that we have to fix in higher ed. As we kind of come to the tail end of this episode, I feel like it’s necessary to ask this question because if you’re an institution and you do serve primarily a traditional student for the most part, or even if you’re serving some Modern Learners, you probably have a marketing organization that you’re working with that’s helping you at a traditional student level. And I have seen personally institutions try to expand those marketing agencies to serve a Modern Learner and fail because there’s a specialty vibe I think to this. But there’s also some risk, not risk that you can’t mitigate in managing multiple marketing companies serving multiple learners.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Can you guys talk about how EducationDynamics really fits with institutions? What value proposition do you provide really love on yourselves a little bit here as we come to the end of the episode, because I’ve worked with you guys, this is true life testimonial right here. I hired EducationDynamics at my last institution and they absolutely slate it for me. I mean, you guys killed it. Our enrollment for the Modern Learner was going up by 20 and 30% per term. It was insane. Nearly doubled our Modern Learner population in a very, very short period of time. And that’s truth, that’s just Joe CIO truth in working with you guys, but there is some puzzle pieces that you have put together.

    Sarah Russell:

    Yeah, I’ll absolutely start on that one because I think what where I have seen agencies potentially struggle when they’re going from a traditional student marketing and recruitment strategy to trying to get into the sphere of the Modern Learner is not necessarily understanding how the marketing channels that the Modern Learner is very fluent in should be managed and operated within the realm of higher education. Because it’s so important that you have the ability to optimize your campaigns and build your campaign structure and create your ad messaging in a way that’s going to speak to that student population. It’s certainly not a copy paste. I think that there tends to be more of a, I’ll just buy a list or I will just mail out some mailers when you’re talking about a traditional first time freshmen recruitment strategy. But there’s so much more complexity and layers in being able to bring that strategy to the Modern Learner that I think it actually works a lot better if you are maybe working with a partner on recruiting for the Modern Learner.

    Sarah Russell:

    And then how can you expand that to more of that traditional first time freshmen? Because we’re seeing those behaviors of those first time freshmen start to mimic what we’ve just been operating under as truth for Modern Learner for the last several years. So I think it works better one way than the other, and that’s where I think if you are looking to maybe centralize or consolidate any of your marketing efforts, I think it’s going to work a lot better if you take your learnings, you take your relationships that you have from marketing to a Modern Learner, a post-traditional student, and bring those to your traditional student marketing rather than vice versa.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    100%. I agree with that a hundred percent. Well, let’s close this out. I want to give everybody a last word, and Katie, I’ll end with you since we started with you. Chris, anything else you want to say about the Modern Learner that you feel is important for institutions to know?

    Dr. Chris Gilmore:

    Yeah, I just think that it is the reality now. So it’s no longer this thing that we have to plan for the future to Katie’s points in the very first minutes of this, they’re here. They’re the new normal for us. So if you’re not deeply in the work already, it’s time to start.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Sarah, same question. What else do you want to say about the Modern Learner?

    Sarah Russell:

    They are very complex and reaching them is not a straightforward endeavor in any way. So making sure that you understand and respect the complexity of developing a marketing strategy, and I think you might’ve mentioned this very early on in the episode, Joe, it sounds easier than it actually is, and making sure that if you get to the point where you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, you’re reaching out to the pros to help you.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    One thing we didn’t even get to was the whole value of higher ed and how that is making the Modern Learner like their BS meter is so on point. You need to really message because the alternative messaging coming to them is, well, you don’t need to go to school. You don’t need a degree. So when they get information in front of them, it has to be authentic and true and pointed and tactical and tell ’em exactly what they need to know, which is a whole other conversation for a podcast in a not so distant future. Katie, last word to you. What else do you want to say about the Modern Learner?

    Katie Tomlinson:

    Well, I really want you to think about education now being ageless. And again, this idea that age no longer predicts our learning modality, and I’ll give you a little teaser for the spring. So this year we’re actually going to shift our focus from our annual online college student survey, which we’ve coined our OCS survey to be more inclusive of what we’ve talked about today, which is the Modern Learner. I really can’t wait to share the new insights about this population and really provide some more definition as to how we can engage with these prospective students as we move into 2025. So we’ll be sharing those insights from our new sample at our InsightsEDU conference in February and hopefully with you and your listeners around the same time too.

    Dr. Joe Sallustio:

    Katie, I got to tell you, the report that you all put out, you’re renaming it, but this report that details what’s happening in the industry as we look at a Modern Learner and the way they make decisions is really the foundation, at least it was for me as I was working to recruit the Modern Learner, the foundation for how I was making my decisions, where I was investing my money, how I was designing my policies and my procedures around serving the student. It’s critical research. You do a great job. EducationDynamics does a great job of putting this out there, and I encourage everybody when it does come out, which I’ll know before you know… unless you attend InsightsEDU! Do you guys like that transition? InsightsEDU in New Orleans, February 12 through 14. It’ll be my birthday. Maybe you’ll get it as a birthday gift as we pass it out to the audience. But this is critical research that will help you serve a Modern Learner, and I urge you to attend InsightsEDU and to check out the report. Great work, Katie. Great work EducationDynamics. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve just “EdUp-ped!”

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  • How to IPEDS, Part II

    How to IPEDS, Part II

    This will be the second part of a series of blogposts about how to use IPEDS, The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System of the federal government. If you’re just starting, I highly recommend you go to the first post to bring yourself up to speed on the basics.  If you don’t, some of this might not make sense.

    In that post, I covered several of the ways you can extract simple tables of data for a single year or a single institution; or summary data, including fairly basic and interactive charts when you’re looking for something simple.  In this one, I’ll go over how to extract custom data over multiple years, and then walk you through the frustrating process of making sense of the output.  Warning: I get a bit cranky about this, because the data formats are largely unchanged since I started doing this perhaps 20 years ago, and they create far more work for the end user than they should.

    The last post covered the options in italics.  This one will cover the options in bold.

    Data Explorer
    Publications and Products
    Data Trends
    Look Up an Institution
    Statistical Tables
    Data Feedback Report
    Summary Tables


    Custom Data Files
    Compare Institutions
    Complete Data Files
    Access Database

    Custom Data files is a fairly easy way to get the data you want for a single year.  In this example, I’ve used EZ Group to select all institutions (again, larger selections are better because it’s easy to remove but harder to add), and clicked “Institutions” and then the “Select All” button.  It looks like this. 

    Click the “Continue” tab, and choose “csv” as your download option.

    Click on the file that you just downloaded to open it (it should open with Excel), and you’ll see something like this (not all columns are displayed due to space constraints.)

    If you want to do this for multiple years, you can go back, change the year, and repeat the download and then stack the files.  The real advantage of this approach is that the data in the columns come in as labels: That is, the size categories are listed as “Under 1,000” or “5,000-9,999” for instance.  That means, especially with large files, you don’t have to translate codes, where “Under 1,000” is listed as 1, and “1,000 to 5,000” is listed as 2, etc.  This keeps you from doing multiple LOOKUP functions in Excel that are a part of other formats.

    If you are going to do a lot of work in IPEDS, I highly recommend you use this method to create one giant file of institutional characteristics to import into an Access Database, and use it to merge that with data from statistical downloads (like endowments, admissions, financial aid, etc.)  There are a couple of reasons for this: It’s too easy to overlook or skip a variable you want to include in your subsequent downloads, but more important, IPEDS only allows 250 variables in a single file, so this can save you 70 or 100 or 150 spots in the future.

    You’ll notice that there are also options to download this data in STATA, SPSS, or SAS, which are statistical programs.  Those require downloading a csv file, a script for the software, and then editing the script to point to your file, running it and saving the output.  With the Custom Data Files option, that’s a bit superfluous.

    Despite the confusion and difficult work arounds that are native to the Compare Institutions option, it’s the one I use most often.  Warning: This is not for people who do not have Sitzfleisch. Even the best data cleaning tools are stymied by some of the quirks in IPEDS.
    So let’s go back to our institutional selections, and select all in the IPEDS universe.  If you want to start with things like Carnegie Classifications because you ignored my earlier advice, we can do that, and then we’ll look at Fall Enrollment over time.  Let’s start with the former.  I’d recommend selecting it for one year, unless you want to look at how those classifications have changed over time.  We do that like this.

    Then (and this is where it gets tricky), we’ll start specifying enrollment variables.  Let’s say we want to look at how enrollment has changed over a span of time, so we’ll use Fall, 2022 and Fall, 2012.  You have a lot of options, but only these options (IPEDS really should allow you to query the database in the ways you want, but that’s another story.)

    Let’s do the first option: By Gender, Status, and level.  We’ll have the chance to look at men and women (IPEDS has reported gender as binary as its policy, not mine), full- or part-time, status, and graduate or undergraduate level.

    Here’s how that selection is done.

     
    When you approve that, this is what you see.  Note that this selection creates 17 variables in your data output: One for the Carnegie Classification, and 16 for the enrollment data.  If you added another year, you’d add eight more, and so on.  If you got more granular on the enrollment data, it would increase those counts as well.

    Approve the selections (these are the ones I use, but you can change them.  I highly recommend including UnitID unless you’re doing a short, quick analysis).  

    You will get a ZIP file, with the raw data and the value labels.  In this case, the only values that need to be translated into labels are the Carnegie Classifications.  That translator table looks like this.  If you are proficient in Excel, it’s not hard to use a VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP function to translate those values into labels, but it’s still, IMHO, a quirk leftover from days when it made sense to keep file size as small as possible.

    The actual data file looks like this, and it’s probably the thing that makes a lot of people decide to never do IPEDS again.  The first column contains the ID number, the second contains the name, the third contains the numeric value of the Carnegie classification, and the fourth?  Well, the fourth variable is a tricky one, as it’s actually four variables rolled into one: Year, level (in this case undergraduate), gender, and status (in this case, full-time.) 

    For this to be most useful, the data should look like this, with one row for every discrete combination of characteristics:

    And that’s the hard part:  I use a Tableau Data Restructuring Tool, Excel tools like Flash Fill (if you don’t know it, you have to check it out), Excel Add-ins, Kutools for Excel, EasyMorph and Able Bits.  I’ve used Tableau Prep, but frankly find it confusing and often frustrating. 

    Getting your data into this format not only makes it easier to visualize in Tableau, but it also helps you create better pivot tables for the spreadsheet lovers in your office.

    There are two other options in IPEDS, the Access Database and Complete Files.

    Complete Files is easy, because you can download with one click the complete survey (admissions, financial aid, degrees awarded, etc.)  But again, you get those pesky codes you need to translate, and no translator files or even the ability to translate variable names.  It’s a major pain.  If you’re going to go this route, I’d recommend the SPSS, STATA, or SAS options, where the script will translate and output the file for you.  Another (IMHO) unnecessary step.  IPEDS could make this much easier.

    And, to top it off, if you download the enrollment file, for instance, the values are not discreet.  You’ll have one column for total, which is the sum of men and women separately.  That same total will roll up full- and part-time.  It will roll up grads and undergrads.  You have to be very careful to break them apart and not double count everything.

    Finally, I’ve tried and failed several times to make sense of the full Access Data Base option. It’s huge, it’s clunky, it’s in code, and it duplicates values: In short, it’s the worst of all available options, in a  harder-to-use format.  Enter at your own risk.

    I hope these two posts have been helpful to you as you think about navigating IPEDS.  And I hope someone at IPEDS reads this and realizes how much modernization could be brought to these important data.

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  • How to IPEDS Part I

    How to IPEDS Part I

    Most, but not all, of the data visualizations on this site use data from IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.  And all of the visualizations (as I recall) use Tableau, a very powerful data visualization tool, especially for people like me who don’t know how to write the code necessary in some software packages.

    In this post, I’ll start with a few of the easiest and quickest ways to get data out of IPEDS.  I’ll follow it up with one that dives a little deeper for people who like the raw data for analysis.

    The question I get asked most often is how I get the information out of IPEDS.  And that’s not an easy thing to answer, as I use several of the methods available depending on what I’m doing.  Since you federal tax dollars have not yet been used to create an easy guide to IPEDS, I’m going to give you a primer on how to do the most simple things, and hope you’ll do like I did, which is to learn it the hard way through trial and error once you get started.

    Some tips before we start: You can use Excel to get the information you want, but it ends up being a lot easier if you start with a single download of institutional characteristics in a table and load it to an Access database, if you’re even marginally proficient in that software.  But for now I’ll presume you’re not.

    In the IPEDS Data Center you’ll find several different ways to get IPEDS data  The ones in bold will be covered here:

    • Data Explorer
    • Publications and Products
    • Data Trends
    • Look Up an Institution
    • Statistical Tables
    • Data Feedback Report
    • Summary Tables
    • Custom Data Files
    • Compare Institutions
    • Complete Data Files
    • Access Database
    Data Explorer has aggregated data in a report, and it’s useful if you want to look up something quickly and if there is already a report that summarizes that information.  It’s aggregate, so best for high level trends.  For instance, if you look at Degrees Awarded by Ethnicity, you’ll see this.  Note that you can change the year displayed, and download the Excel file.

    Publications and Products can be helpful, but you may end up going down a rabbit hole chasing what you want, only to find it’s in a restricted file only available to researchers.  You can find links to things like The Condition of Education or the Digest of Education Statistics which is a data rich treasure trove of information, mostly designed to print ala 1998; if you want to analyze it, you have a LOT of data clean up to do.

    Data Trends shows data over time, and it can be very helpful if you want to look at a single statistic in a time sequence. Click on one of the questions and you’ll get your answer quickly.  You can filter and download the data if you wish.

    Look Up an Institution allows you to select any single college or university and look at almost all of the information it reports to IPEDS in one place. It can be helpful when you want to look up a few facts about an institution quickly, but otherwise I find little value in it. 

    Typing more of the name of the institution gets you easier results.  For instance, you’ll get a long list if you just type “California.”

    But as you type, the list gets shorter.

    After you make your selection, you’ll get this, and you can click on the plus sign on the blue bars to expand.

    Statistical Tables are less helpful for my work, but maybe they’ll be good for you.  This is where you’ll get your first chance to select a group of colleges, so I’ll go over that first.  You can choose almost any combination of institutions, by location, type, sector, or almost any variable.

    I like to us EZ Group and make a large selection: It’s a lot easier to start with a large file and eliminate institutions than to try to augment it last.  But if you are certain you want a set of four-year public institutions in California that admit freshmen, for instance, you can get that like this.  The dialog box tells you you’ve selected 48 institutions.

    In this case, you might want to look at total fall 2022 enrollment of undergraduates, in which case you’d select like this:

    Keep clicking “Continue” until you get here, and specify the statistics you want.

    And you’ll get something like this.

    Data Feedback Report is mostly helpful for college and university staff looking at their own numbers in comparison to self-identified competitor or aspiration institutions. CHE did a story on this, and you can read a few articles a month there if you give them your email name (however, if you work in higher ed, you really should subscribe anyway.) 

    Summary Tables are very helpful for the casual user.  Specify the variable you want to look at (in this case it’s enrollment by race and gender) and you’ll get a nice summary table over time.

    However, you can also get a summary of the institutions you selected (if they’re still in memory) like this:

    OR (this is the cool part) you can show individual data for a pre-selected set, or one you specify. 

    Go ahead and practice getting information out of IPEDS like this.  You cannot break anything.  There is a Start Over button in case you get stuck. 

    Good luck and check back soon to get the guide about the more powerful ways to extract information, coming soon.

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