The cliff, the pandemic and the hurricane (opinion)
My children are youngsters now, 16 and 13. In recent times, weight units have changed Lego units, video video games have changed board video games and pins on Pinterest have changed chalk on boards. Whereas my spouse discovered practically each transition emotional and important, it was not till it got here to boxing up and donating our image books that I started to ask, with a tear or two in my eye, “Is it me, or is it dusty in right here?” To be clear, I’ve nothing in opposition to the younger grownup style and nonetheless personal my outdated copies of each Animal Farm and The Lord of the Flies, however, candidly, I miss the simplicity, poignancy and imagery of fairy tales and youngsters’s tales, maybe as a result of the outdated adage is true: An image is value a thousand phrases.
And so, whereas tons of of 1000’s of phrases have crammed on-line and print publications during the last decade in an effort to explain the numerous challenges dealing with American greater training enrollment, the reality is we may sum it up with three footage and a brief story: the Cliff, the Pandemic and the Hurricane.
The Cliff
As soon as upon a time, there was a demographer named Nathan Grawe who lived within the far northern reaches of our honest land. Someday, in his map-filled research at Carleton Fort, he regarded into his crystal ball and noticed one thing disturbing. As he peered carefully, he realized that there was a Cliff far within the distance that posed a risk to the dominion’s faculties. So, Sir Nathan bubble-wrapped his crystal ball, rolled up his maps and commenced touring the countryside warning leaders about what he had seen.
In board rooms full of fruit trays and cheese platters, he introduced to trustees, presidents and legislators, “Watch out for 2025 and past! The Cliff is coming! The start dearth is actual! You might want to change your methods now if you wish to defend your campuses. There is not going to be an infinite provide of conventional college students sooner or later. The highest of the funnel is shrinking!”
Whereas some buried their heads of their arms or the proverbial sand and had been sluggish to make adjustments, many deans and administrators of admission unsheathed their quills and commenced drafting fancy paperwork referred to as Strategic Enrollment Plans to stop their faculty from falling off the aspect of the approaching cliff. Whereas these plans diversified from campus to campus, they typically included urging leaders to spend money on some mixture of the next ways: sturdy switch articulation agreements, dual-enrollment packages and partnerships, an growth of on-line programs and levels, worldwide pupil recruitment, and enhanced service to graduate and grownup learners.
The Pandemic
Within the spring of 2020, whereas campuses fortified their gates and enrollment sentries stored their binoculars targeted on the Cliff, a horrible illness struck the land. Like a thief within the evening, COVID-19 got here with no warning and introduced chaos, confusion and controversy to high schools, finally altering postsecondary plans for 1000’s of American college students. School rooms, dorm rooms and board rooms had been evacuated, quads turned ghost cities, and the identical leaders who had been making long-term plans to climate the Cliff now needed to make real-time choices about maintain college students wholesome and secure whereas juggling the numerous budgetary implications of on-line course supply and plummeting auxiliary revenues.
Finally, nonetheless, whereas time was in brief provide, cash was not. Distant within the nation’s capital, Congress handed magical scrolls just like the Coronavirus Help, Reduction and Financial Safety Act, which included a Larger Training Emergency Reduction Fund. In complete, HEERF offered greater than $14 billion of emergency funding to greater training, together with greater than $6 billion on to college students within the type of emergency grants.
In consequence, honest reader, opposite to the apocalyptic rhetoric you’ll inevitably discover in the dead of night corners of the interwebs, nonprofit faculty closures (executed and deliberate) have averaged simply a bit over one per 30 days since 2020. Unbeknownst to kingdom sages, nonetheless, extra challenges loomed.
The Hurricane
As campuses welcomed their college students again in fall 2023, darkish clouds started to crest the horizon. The winds picked up and introduced with them phrase of a slow-moving kind—nay, storm—referred to as FAFSA.
College students and households waited patiently. October got here—however no FAFSA. Halloween and Thanksgiving gave solution to the winter break and nonetheless no FAFSA. Alas, it was not till the day of our Lord, Dec. 30, 2023, that the FAFSA arrived. And with it, turbulence, disturbance and perturbance from all corners of the land.
All through the spring the FAFSA storm raged. Know-how failed, the Division of Training flailed, monetary help administrators wailed and no pupil help provides had been mailed.
In extremely ranked, well-resourced, nationally distinguished establishments, orders had been despatched posthaste: “Leverage the endowment! Make means for the CSS Profile! Maintain the oil lamps lit for weary monetary help employees members!” Nevertheless, within the universities serving the best numbers of low- and middle-income college students, money reserves and monetary help employees members had been in brief provide. Regardless of the noble efforts of the weather-weary crew, the storm waters continued to rise and the onslaught of federal failures and foibles dampened morale and enrollment prospects.
Compounding and confounding the issue, this occurred simply as COVID reduction {dollars} had been drying up, and in contrast to throughout the Pandemic, there was not one other injection of federal money to offer college students with well timed monetary help.
And that brings us, reader, to right now …
The Eye
Summer season information protection described one thing referred to as “a closing FAFSA completion hole”—from a year-over-year deficit of 40 % within the spring to latest studies placing that quantity below 10 %. But information of hope and light-weight might merely be an indication we’re within the Eye of the Hurricane, as a result of simply as there was a major time lapse between the FAFSA opening and faculties receiving pupil knowledge, there’s a comparable chasm between FAFSA completion and a pupil truly receiving help and due to this fact gaining the boldness wanted to start faculty. In consequence, I worry regional public faculties and extra accessible personal faculties are most probably to see important enrollment declines when census totals are printed later this fall.
On the point of the Cliff and with the federal {dollars} from the Pandemic now gone, the Hurricane is prone to be the accelerator of drastic measures within the yr forward (layoffs, furloughs, gross sales of property and extra) as we emerge from the Eye into the winds and rains once more.
Storm Preparation
Jeremy Singer, at the moment on mortgage from the Faculty Board to the Division of Training, has said that this yr’s FAFSA will once more not open to all college students on Oct. 1, however he guarantees a Dec. 1 launch on the newest. But at this level, most monetary help administrators in our story have one eyebrow raised in suspicion at any assertion emanating from the Training Division’s heralds.
What ought to the yr forward maintain?
- On the campus stage: The final yr has proven the pressing want for establishments to spend money on their monetary help info methods and employees. (See: monetary help administrators’ raised eyebrows on the prospect of a easy help yr.)
- On the state stage: Continued efforts to incentivize FAFSA completion for graduating seniors and evaluation of upper training appropriations, notably surrounding complete monetary help packages.
- On the federal stage: Continued advocacy to extend the worth of Pell Grants and elevated funding to the Workplace of Federal Pupil Help.
- On the Division of Training: In true fairy story fashion, lock whoever is working to repair the FAFSA in a tower and throw away the important thing till it’s achieved; spend money on the mixing of methods to ease the burden of making use of for federal monetary help; combine AI help inside the FAFSA to facilitate accuracy and timeliness.
Whereas our story began with a demographer trying into the longer term, historians are prone to look again on the confluence of the Cliff, the Pandemic and the Hurricane because the story of how the panorama of upper training modified endlessly.
The excellent news is I’ve a field stuffed with lighthearted youngsters’s books in my storage if you wish to borrow one.
