Colleges could reduce “harmful competition” among them by embracing the National Football League’s spirit of cooperation, a prominent enrollment expert writes in a new paper published by the Center for American Progress.
By forming a “league” of member institutions that agree to common admission goals and practices, as well as the sharing of resources, Jerome A. Lucido suggests, colleges might better serve the public—and curb their drive for institutional glory.
Mr. Lucido, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice, describes an “imbalance” in the nation’s higher-education system. “Our colleges are engaged in an unbridled, no-holds-barred competition—one that places them in constant danger of valuing prestige and ranking over mission attainment; market position over educational results,” he writes.
In this rendering, enrollment managers, who contend with a “multiheaded hydra” of competing goals, must re-evaluate the trade-offs they make. In the paper, “Lessons From the NFL for Managing College Enrollment,” Mr. Lucido says enrollment-management strategies that favor wealthier applicants, such as the use of merit scholarships, have compromised colleges’ commitment to access and diversity. An array of such self-serving strategies, along with a weak economy and public disinvestment in higher education, he writes, “lead to lopsided educational results for the nation.”
The paper arrives just a few days before Super Bowl XLVII. When one professional football team vanquishes another on Sunday night, a new champion will reign over a league defined by a paradox: Although the NFL’s bone-crunching games epitomize conflict, its business creed is cooperation for the greater good.
In the name of equity, the league restricts competition by enforcing salary caps and sharing revenue among its 32 teams, offsetting the advantages that wealthier franchises would otherwise enjoy. This system has helped teams in small markets—such as Pittsburgh and Green Bay, Wis.—succeed consistently despite their locations.
This “paragon of American competitiveness,” Mr. Lucido writes, is a model for colleges, which share goals but often operate as if they were rival corporations pursuing greater market share. He calls on college leaders, as well as policy makers, foundations, and corporations, to explore forming a consortium: a league that would redefine the terms of competition. Educational outcomes would be in; measures of wealth and status, out.
“The NFL is a tempered competitive environment,” Mr. Lucido said in an interview on Tuesday. “And we don’t have a tempered environment in higher education.”
‘A Collective Interest’
Although Mr. Lucido’s paper is more an imaginative game plan than a policy blueprint, it offers specific recommendations for reforming the admissions system. Perhaps the most striking ones involve pricing strategies and revenue.
Within the bounds of laws restricting collusion, Mr. Lucido suggests, colleges should adopt “reasonable methods and ranges of need calculations,” and should provide binding four-year aid estimates—with expected grant, loan, and out-of-pocket totals—to all students. “This measure would be deflationary with respect to the ‘price’ of college,” he writes.
Mr. Lucido also proposes that colleges annually reduce, by an agreed-upon percentage, how much money they devote to non-need-based aid. Colleges, the paper says, should also engage in “joint fund raising for financial aid, with an emphasis on schools with a high percentage of need-eligible students.”
Mr. Lucido, a former enrollment chief at Southern California and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, isn’t against competition; he just thinks colleges too often strive for the wrong goals, such as improving the metrics that feed college rankings.
“That we compete, for students and for faculty and for grants, drives us toward excellence,” he said. “But there’s a point where ... we see ourselves going after a few more points on an SAT score.”
Although test scores say something about students who enroll, they reveal nothing about the college’s success in educating them. Mr. Lucido proposes a leaguewide emphasis on developing better outcomes measures that would account for differing levels of preparation among students.
A related recommendation is to “ban steroids,” or the “hyped facts and figures” that colleges often tout in news releases and view books. Those supposed metrics of merit—test scores, application totals—are subject to manipulation, making them flawed indicators of quality.
Colleges in the league, the paper suggests, should provide accurate and consistent data. Under one proposal, colleges would publish ranges of admission and graduation rates, by category: academic record, income level, ethnicity, and geographic origin. Institutions would also provide more-detailed information about how they make admissions decisions, how they “meet full need,” and how much loan debt their students accrue.
Just as NFL teams draft players at the same time, the paper says, colleges would agree to “standard deadlines and notification periods.” Mr. Lucido imagines an even more common Common Application, and a robust database of information about student success throughout the postsecondary system (think of the National Student Clearinghouse’s using data to provide “results-oriented college matches”).
Although Mr. Lucido expects that his paper will strike many readers as unrealistic, he believes the theme will resonate with some presidents. “Competition is in our nature, but there was a time when a collective interest was more recognized,” Mr. Lucido said. Trophies aren’t going out of style, but enrollment leaders must ask themselves if the ones they’re chasing are hollow.
