Demographic projections have inspired doomsayers and daydreamers alike. The sky-is-falling contingent says the declining number of white, affluent high-school graduates will sink many tuition-dependent colleges. Meanwhile, optimistic observers predict that population shifts will compel institutions to transform themselves by embracing underrepresented students like never before.
As any admissions officer could tell you, the number of high-school graduates in several Midwestern and Northeastern states will drop sharply over the next decade, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Nationally, the number of black and white students will decline, and the number of Hispanic and Asian-American graduates will increase significantly. The nation’s already seeing a sharp rise in first-generation and low-income graduates—the very students whom selective four-year institutions have long struggled to serve.
In conversations with college officials over the past few years, I’ve heard great concern about this trend. Many describe themselves as welcoming of diversity but worried about both financing and supporting needier students, especially because many aren’t as prepared as their wealthier peers. Enrollment managers, who must balance competing institutional goals—like expanding access and increasing net-tuition revenue—say their task is becoming more difficult. Imagine a juggler who now must tap dance, too.
Those national numbers mean only so much, however. The effects of demographic change have always varied from campus to campus. A college’s location and market position will play a large role in the next chapter of its story, and so will the way it chooses to define diversity.
One college might respond to a downturn in the number of affluent students by expanding its financial-aid budget, allowing it to enroll more low-income students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Making that move would most likely require losing something: budget cuts elsewhere, perhaps, or a freshman class with test scores lower than those who came before them.
Meanwhile, the college down the road might double down on international recruitment, bringing in more foreign students, who typically pay the full cost of attendance. China and other fertile recruitment grounds can look downright inviting when your traditional territory starts to dry up.
A big question is whether colleges will see the demographic shift as an opportunity to redefine themselves or as a trend to resist at all costs. Recently I asked Jerry A. Lucido which path most colleges were choosing. The familiar one, said Mr. Lucido, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice.
“The usual response at the highest levels of institutions is ‘What can we do to counter this?’” he said. “Often it’s ‘Where are the students we want who can meet our standards and continue the financing that allows us to keep this trajectory?’ Only when colleges see that the trajectory is truly threatened unless they alter something can they begin to address that change.”
In other words, many colleges might just have to give something up to stay afloat. Want to maintain your enrollment? OK, but your selectivity must go down.
Colleges don’t necessarily have a taste for trade-offs. For decades, enrollment chiefs have been ordered to produce more of everything. More applicants, more revenue, and—as indicated by higher test scores and lower admission rates—higher quality. Such are the triumphs that colleges tout in their annual proclamations of prestige. But that trajectory, enrollment officials agree, isn’t sustainable at many places, as much as presidents and boards might wish it were.
That’s not to say colleges are ignoring demographic change. Many, in fact, are responding in various ways, albeit incrementally. Just as demographic shifts don’t happen overnight, strategies for recruiting the next wave of students take time to develop. An East Coast college can’t just parachute into California and collect applicants for next fall’s class.
As J. Leon Washington explains, student recruitment is becoming an increasingly complex mix of local, national, and global outreach. How a college pursues one group of students may affect how it can serve another.
Mr. Washington is dean of admissions and financial aid at Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Pa., which has long drawn most of its students from the Northeast. Over the past five years, however, the university has perused projections and revamped its recruitment plan. “There’s not panic or anything,” he says, “but there’s been a change in attitude in how we work day to day.”
That change involves where to recruit as well as how. Previously, one of Lehigh’s admissions officers spent two weeks a year in California, a diverse, populous state to which many colleges have flocked, like gold seekers long ago. Now two reps spend four weeks each there. Yet, as many colleges have learned, buying a plane ticket is easy. Having meaningful contact with prospective applicants is hard.
That’s why Lehigh, like many other colleges, has cultivated relationships with community-based organizations that serve low-income and first-generation high-school students. Admissions offices see QuestBridge and the Posse Foundation, for instance, among a slew of smaller groups, as increasingly valuable partners because they help identify high-achieving students from low-income families. “They have their finger right on the pulse,” Mr. Washington says.
In California, for instance, feedback from such organizations drove home an important lesson to Lehigh: If it wanted to recruit more Hispanic students, it had to engage their parents. That meant talking about financial aid in Spanish, even with families who also spoke English, Mr. Washington says. Now Lehigh offers information sessions in Spanish both on and off the campus.
Attracting more students from across the country takes time. This year about two dozen of Lehigh’s 1,200 freshmen came from the Golden State, up from just a handful five years ago. It’s progress, Mr. Washington says, but also an endeavor that requires much planning, effort, and money.
The same is true of international recruitment, widely viewed as a safety net that can protect against shortfalls in enrollment and revenue. Advocates for low-income students are wary of the global-recruitment boom; they worry about colleges’ giving more and more seats to students from other countries instead of to underrepresented applicants from the United States.
But the equation is more complicated than that, Mr. Washington explains, and it’s up to him to balance it. “Two full-freight-paying students,” he says, “allow us to fund more heavily a domestic student with greater need.”
Since 2007, Lehigh has increased its enrollment of foreign students to 7 percent, from 3 percent. Admissions officers continue to wrestle with what an ideal proportion might be. Ten percent? Fifteen? That depends on institutional priorities and goals.
In the end, each college gets to write its own rules. To my eye, there’s a sharp divide between colleges that are playing the recruitment game the same old way and those that are adopting new strategies for achieving greater diversity. Some are entrenched, others are imaginative.
I recently spoke with W. Scott Friedhoff, vice president for enrollment and college relations at the College of Wooster, in Ohio. He, too, described the importance of working with groups that help—and help identify—underrepresented students. He was “jazzed,” he said, about a burgeoning partnership between Wooster and the Noble Network of Charter Schools, which serves low-income students in Chicago.
This fall the college sponsored a bus trip that brought about 20 high-school seniors to the campus. As of early December, more than 80 seniors from the network had applied to Wooster. The admissions staff will read those students’ applications—and package their financial-aid offers—preferentially, Mr. Friedhoff says.
Although he expects to enroll only a handful of those students next fall, he believes that the program will help diversify the campus over time. It’s the kind of innovation, he says, that a predominantly white institution in northeastern Ohio should be part of: “We’re working on creating a pipeline.”
Recruiting students is only part of the challenge, of course. Helping them afford college is another. In 2008, Lehigh replaced loans with grants for families making less than $50,000 a year, and reduced the amounts that other students would have to borrow. Such commitments require dedicated fund raising and shuffled resources, if not serious sacrifices. Some colleges, such as the University of Virginia, have tried such financial-aid policies and found them unsustainable.
How long will colleges cling to the same old, narrow admission metrics?
And access is not just a matter of affordability: It’s also a question of assessing students’ academic preparation. How long will colleges cling to the same old, narrow metrics of student achievement? Although admissions officials say they want students with grit and determination, many still give much weight to ACT and SAT scores.
The “overreliance on standardized testing and institutional obsessions with traditional measures of quality” can have harmful consequences, argue Donald R. Hossler and David H. Kalsbeek in a recent article in Strategic Enrollment Management Quarterly.
Enrollment-management tactics have often been used in ways that work against low-income students, write Mr. Hossler, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, and Mr. Kalsbeek, senior vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University. At some point, current obsessions might seem hopelessly out of date, or at least out of step with the cohort now marching to college.
Some colleges will have to admit more students with lower test scores. And harder than merely admitting them, of course, is helping them succeed. Many colleges, the authors write, aren’t investing enough in the programs and services needed to help a more-diverse group students stay enrolled and graduate. Institutions are ignoring what Mr. Hossler calls “the demographic imperative.”
Colleges don’t like choosing one goal over another, the authors note: “In short, they want it all.”
But in the years ahead, as an increasingly diverse pool of applicants, with a range of abilities and needs, comes along, colleges will have to decide what they want most.
