As Typical Student Changes, So Do Worries About Costs
By Sara Lipka
Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle
As the economy sputters and outcry over the cost of college continues, more students keep enrolling—even if, in the past year, some have used campuses to protest their debt burden and what they see as other economic injustices.
Enrollment has ticked up, but who goes to college and how they do it are changing. Students long dubbed “nontraditional” have become more common. Colleges are seeing more adult learners, significant proportions of part-time students, and increasing mobility through transfers and dual enrollment.
Maintaining those enrollment gains is a looming concern. Some administrators, especially at private colleges, worry that liberal levels of tuition discounting to fill classes are unsustainable. And projections of the numbers of high-school graduates published in 2008 by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education continue to produce angst, especially in certain regions. The commission foresees declining numbers for the next six years in the Northeast and Midwest.
But, for now, the state of enrollment is healthy, at least according to the most recent available figures, from 2010. In the fall of that year, degree-granting colleges and universities enrolled more than 18 million undergraduate and nearly three million graduate students, up a total of more than 588,000 students over the previous year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
That means almost half of the young people who completed high school are enrolled in higher education, compared with roughly a third three decades ago. Black, Hispanic, and white students are all going to college at increasing rates. The number of students entering college for the first time in 2010 was 2.1 million, up 6.8 percent over 2006, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
After three years of big increases in enrollment, community colleges saw a slight decline last year. From the fall of 2010 to 2011, total enrollment dropped nearly 1 percent, to 8.3 million. Still, the sector’s enrollment is up 22 percent since 2007. But the surge, a result of the recession that began in late 2007, finally seems to have let up, said David S. Baime, senior vice president for government relations and research at the American Association of Community Colleges. “There’s always a flattening after some especially bad economic downturns,” he said.
Meanwhile, nondegree programs are on the upswing. Higher education’s most common award is still the bachelor’s degree, but certificates are the new runner-up, having surpassed associate and master’s degrees, according to a report in June from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
Certificates made up 22 percent of credentials awarded in 2010, compared with just 6 percent in 1980. The most common occupations of certificate holders are office work, transportation, health care, and metalworking.
Moving Around
Across sectors of higher education, colleges are adjusting to shifting patterns of enrollment. For instance, the general rule that students go to college close to home doesn’t hold true as much as before, in part because of new recruitment strategies at public colleges crippled by declining state appropriations.
Given that out-of-state students pay higher tuition, Randy Hodgins, the former chief lobbyist for the University of Washington, said he once told a joke to his counterpart at the University of California that has more than a grain of truth: “The answer to both of our budget problems is, I take your kids and you take mine.” In 2010, Arizona State University enrolled more freshmen from California than did six California State University campuses.
No matter where students start, about a third switch institutions at least once before earning a degree, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The study, which covered the five-year period beginning in 2006, found that among students who transfer from four-year public institutions, more than half transfer “in reverse,” to community colleges. Lower tuition and less-difficult courses may be part of the appeal, observers speculated.
In examining mobility, the center also found that 7.7 percent of students attended more than one institution in the 2010-11 academic year. Colleges are trying to adapt: An agreement between the University of Texas at El Paso and El Paso Community College, for example, allows students to move back and forth—and keep their financial aid—as long as they remain enrolled full time.
For the best picture of enrollment patterns, data collection must happen on the individual rather than institutional level, the National Student Clearinghouse has asserted this past year, adapting an idea that was proposed in a 2006 federal report but assailed by privacy advocates. The Education Department tracks institutions’ totals, and that method can produce distortions, by, for instance, making transfer students look like dropouts.
Federal officials did announce, in April, a plan to broaden their collection of undergraduate data beyond only first-time, full-time students who don’t transfer and who graduate roughly on time. Many observers cheered the change but doubted it could be accomplished easily.
Clifford Adelman, a senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, has criticized the “sloppiness that has accumulated” in institutional databases that national numbers depend on.
“Making sure everybody can do it the same way, and with consistent results,” he said, “will take a few years.”
Protest Over Costs
Despite public debate about the value of college, young people seemed to affirm its worth. Four in five young adults think college is more important now than it was for their parents’ generation, according to a poll last winter by two research and advocacy groups, Demos and Young Invincibles. Respondents also largely agreed that college is becoming increasingly unaffordable.
The extent to which a college can help students land a well-paying job after graduation carries increasing weight in their decision about where to enroll, according to the annual Freshman Survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Academic reputation, however, remains the most important factor students consider.
Politically, nearly half of students identify as “middle of the road,” the survey showed, with 21 percent viewing themselves as conservative and 28 percent liberal. Over all, college freshmen’s views on social issues like same-sex marriage and rights for illegal immigrants continued to be more liberal than in the past.
On campuses across the country this year, protests sprang up, many of them linked to the national Occupy movement. Some demonstrators focused on student-loan debt and college affordability, as students interrupted governing-board meetings, organized bus rides to statehouses, and put up and took down encampments. As the Occupy movement took hold nationally, protests at two University of California campuses, Berkeley and Davis, generated YouTube videos, lawsuits, and widespread criticism for campus police officers’ harsh response.
But despite demonstrations across the country, only about 6 percent of respondents to the Freshman Survey anticipated taking part in campus protests. Although that may seem low, it’s still one percentage point over 1968, a year of much campus unrest.
