I find myself thinking often about a scene in John Osborne’s 1956 play, Look Back in Anger. Alison says to her father, Colonel Redfern, in reference to her husband, Jimmy, “You’re hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something’s gone wrong somewhere, hasn’t it?”
Fifty-two weeks ago, campuses closed and higher education as we’ve known it came to a halt. Ever since, we’ve been asking two questions: How will the pandemic change higher education? And how many of those changes will stick? Read on.
As we all know, this year a lot of things have gone wrong and many more things have changed. But what’s complicating everything is that one thing remains the same amid the chaos around us, and those of us in enrollment management are facing it this spring: the belief that we can predict next fall’s enrollment seven months out as usual.
At this time of year, it’s customary for people in my job to talk to chief financial officers, academic planners, presidents, provosts, deans, boards of trustees, and staff members in campus housing to get a sense of what “the number” will be. This year, the one thing most in demand is clarity: Now that things will return to normal, how close will our enrollment be to normal? Our habits, customs, and practices make this question seem, well, normal.
Unfortunately, what’s changed is almost everything we try to use to predict what fall will look like, and that’s causing a lot of restless nights and a foreboding feeling akin to watching a Hitchcock movie: Everything looks like it should, but there is a sense that something is just not right. It’s a feeling you find yourself unable to explain.
As I talk to colleagues around the country it’s clear we all see it, and like people watching that Hitchcock film, we’re all wondering when the suspense will be broken, or if the plot will suddenly turn in an unexpected direction. For now we can just try to pick up clues.
Harvard is up 57 percent in freshman applications from last year; Colgate has more than doubled its applications; and UCLA and UC Berkeley have both blown past the 100,000-application threshold. The takeaway is that the institutions near the top of the food chain will probably be just fine as always. Even if they don’t nail it the first time, they have long wait lists to fill in gaps in their enrollments.
What I hear, though, from smaller public universities that get less attention (often those with a direction in their name) is that this year’s applicant pools are down, by at least a little, maybe a lot. Private colleges outside of the bragging categories in U.S. News & World Report also appear to be feeling the sting.
Even well-known, large public research universities like my own that seem to be having a very good year in freshman applications have to wonder if maybe those increases are coming from students who have scaled back lofty dreams or who are simply hedging their bets. What if, we wonder, student behavior actually returns to normal after a very abnormal admissions cycle? Do those applications evaporate when it comes time to make a decision in May, when students will have the benefit of some improved glimpse of the future?
All data points in our world are connected, of course, and my peers and I have created perfectly plausible explanations for these trends: The Ivies are up because lots of students with good but not great SAT or ACT scores have been convinced that they have a better shot since standardized entrance exams have been abandoned or postponed; the same logic that causes people to buy two lottery tickets because their chances double might be driving these meteoric application increases. It’s also fair to note that there are always outliers: By my calculation, at least 200 colleges between 2002 and 2019 had at least one year with an application increase of 100 percent or more.
Further, we say, applications are down at colleges that serve first-generation, low-income students because those students are most affected by financial downturns. In an economic crisis, college becomes a luxury some people cannot afford or even envision, and data on Fafsa completion and applications to the Common App seem to validate the disproportionate impact we’ve all sensed for months.
We could be wrong, and we might not know the future until it happens. Bringing in a class is like landing a fighter on the deck of an aircraft carrier. At night. On rough seas. But in our case, all the power we push to the engines, all the minor changes to speed and direction, all the adjustments for unpredictable cross winds are made and programmed months before we go on final approach.
Faced with landing that jet, you want a very experienced pilot with great instruments.
Did I mention our instruments are broken? Because they’re broken.
Almost all the things we would normally use to try to predict what fall will look like are gone. For instance, we try to measure affinity for our institutions. If you’re moderately selective, you look at the group collectively to see how many students have visited campus during open-house events, how many spoke to an admissions officer at college fairs, how many showed up at a high-school visit. If you’re highly selective, you may allocate individual slots to students based on those criteria. Those data points are mostly nonexistent this year.
Even academic factors like GPA or class rank, and pseudo-academic factors like the SAT or ACT, are less reliable. Standardized tests, while adding almost nothing to an admissions officer’s ability to predict an individual student’s academic performance in college, did offer some insight into yield rates, because society has long believed in the value of the tests. This belief drove application patterns, it drove expectations, and it drove entitlement via both admissions and net price, as it was also frequently used by colleges in allocating institutional aid and scholarships. As test-optional and test-free admissions take hold, that variable, too, is lost.
Even academic factors like GPA or class rank, and pseudo-academic factors like the SAT or ACT, are less reliable.
The academic performance as measured by course rigor, GPA, and class rank has always been the most predictive of a student’s college success, and while we still have those, they are far less meaningful this year because of different blends of face-to-face, remote, and blended instructional modalities. Even grading scales and approaches over the final three high-school terms of this year’s graduates are hard to decipher: Some districts gave everyone a grade of A; others went to pass/fail; some maintained the status quo; and still others allowed students to choose.
All these factors — important in deciding whom to admit and how many will enroll next fall — are less meaningful this year. There may be downstream effects of this too, in the academic performance of students who are thrown in the deep end of the pool without sufficient high-school preparation. Add the difficulty teachers and counselors must certainly have writing letters of recommendation for students they only know through Zoom and the disruption of students’ out-of-class activities that are important to their emotional and physical well-being, and it’s easy to understand how even admissions decisions — let alone yield projections — are more challenging this year.
We know that not every student who is admitted will enroll, of course. The “yield rate” (the percentage of admits who do enroll) determines the size of your class. Your yield is partly based on whom you admit; and how many and whom you admit is based on your projected yield. This is the great paradox of admissions and enrollment management; one variable is always unknowable yet necessary to solve the equation.
Our business deals with the whims of the market and students who move like flocks of starlings at sunset: moving in unison with no discernible cause or prompt. Like Donald Rumsfeld, what scares us the most are the things “we don’t know we don’t know,” as well as the things we see but cannot yet understand.
Clearly, this is an institutional challenge, just as Covid is a national challenge. Getting through it is going to require an appreciation for the complexities that are writ large this year, an abandonment of our comfort with the tried and true, and some trust that we’re all doing the best we can.
