Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Thursday, October 26. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: rick.seltzer@chronicle.com.

Developing: Late on Wednesday, mass shootings in Lewiston, Me., near three college campuses, killed at least 15 people, NBC News reported, and injured between 50 and 60 others. Thursday classes were canceled at Central Maine Community College, the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn campus, and Bates College, which was also placed on lockdown earlier in the evening.

Good for two-years, bad for four-years

The pandemic’s enrollment swoon is over, suggest new numbers from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, as our Audrey Williams June reports. Unpacking the data, however, reveals reasons for four-year colleges to be concerned.

The good news: Undergraduate enrollment rose this fall for the first time since the pandemic started, according to newly released preliminary data. Covered in there are 9.6 million students at just over half of the institutions that participate in federal financial-aid programs and provide data.

Fall undergraduate enrollment climbed by 2.1 percent over last year. It’s now 1.2 percent higher than it was in the fall of 2021.

Community colleges drove the growth. Year-over-year enrollment jumped by 4.4 percent there, accounting for well over half of the overall increase in undergraduates. Note two trends contributing to that increase:

• Short-term wins: Enrollment in undergraduate certificate programs spiked by 9.9 percent, and in associate-degree programs it rose by 3.6 percent.
• Dual-enrollment boomed: It’s up by 8.8 percent.

But wait, freshman enrollment actually dropped across higher ed. After increasing last year, it fell by 3.6 percent this fall. First-year enrollment is now less than 1 percent higher than it was in the fall of 2021.

Bachelor’s degrees were the big losers. Here’s how freshman enrollment fell in those programs:

• At public four-year institutions it dropped 6.9 percent.
• At private nonprofit four-year institutions it was down by 4.7 percent.

Meanwhile, the number of first-year students at community colleges was essentially steady.

Surprise! Selective institutions lost more freshmen than other campuses did. Competitive and highly selective colleges in the data set lost more than 5 percent of their freshman enrollment, while less-selective institutions posted just a 0.9 percent decrease. That’s a stark reversal in trends from recent years, and it suggests that selective colleges are choosing to enroll fewer students.

• “Many of them had admitted more freshmen in the last two years to try to make up for the first year of the pandemic, and they’re going back to where they feel most comfortable,” Doug Shapiro, executive director of the research center, said in a call with reporters.

Here’s what else to know:

• Traditional-age freshmen evaporated, with enrollment among those ages 18 to 20 cratering by 5.2 percent.
• HBCUs notched gains, expanding undergraduate enrollment by 6.1 percent.
• White enrollment fell by 0.9 percent for undergraduates and by 1.9 percent among graduate students. White freshman enrollment dropped by 9.4 percent.
• Black, Latinx, and Asian students drove growth. They accounted for most of the gains at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
• Graduate enrollment also ticked up, by 0.7 percent.

The bigger picture: After bearing the brunt of enrollment declines during the pandemic, two-year institutions seem to be riding tailwinds of emphasis on career-oriented and short-term credentials. It’s a different story for four-year colleges, where the drop in freshman enrollment is a flashing red light amid concerns about disengagement at high schools, pandemic-era learning loss, and the demographic cliff that’s coming up in a few years.

Read Audrey’s full story here.

War in Middle East keeps stoking campus tensions

As thousands have died in Israel and Gaza, students, faculty members, and administrators in the United States are pushing the boundaries of academic freedom and freedom of speech.

A science journal’s board removed its top editor after he reposted satire about the Israel-Hamas war. In the post, Michael B. Eisen, a genetics and development professor at the University of California at Berkeley, applauded an article from The Onion titled “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.” The journal eLife’s board issued a statement saying Eisen’s leadership and communication had been detrimental to community cohesion. Our Maggie Hicks has more.

Florida told public universities that Students for Justice in Palestine chapters must be “deactivated.” The national SJP group distributed materials identifying with a “resistance” that includes Hamas’s attack on Israel this month, argued Ray Rodrigues, the State University System’s chancellor. He then cited a state law making it a felony to support a “designated foreign terrorist organization.” The University of Florida and the University of South Florida have active SJP chapters, Politico reported.

The Penn Club of Israel disaffiliated from its parent university. The alumni group is “disengaging” from the University of Pennsylvania based on how it handled a controversial Palestine Writes Literature Festival and its lack of outreach to alumni in Israel after Hamas’s attack, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported.

Students for Justice in Palestine protests were projected on a George Washington U. library. Four demonstrators on Tuesday night projected phrases including “End the siege on Gaza” and “Glory to our martyrs,” according to The GW Hatchet. Another said that Ellen Granberg, the institution’s president, “is complicit in genocide in Gaza.” The projections appeared for about two hours and drew counterprotesters before the demonstrators left at the direction of university officials. The institution said the projections violated campus policy.

A University of California at Berkeley graduate-student instructor dangled extra credit for attending a pro-Palestinian walkout. A university spokesperson told the Daily Briefing that the course was “Asian American Communities and Race Relations” and that “as soon as the administration was made aware of the assignment, it moved quickly to ensure that it would be changed.” Students can now attend any local event related to the course’s subject matter, including the protest, or watch any documentary about the Middle East.

The AAUP called on colleges not to sanction faculty members for controversial speech. Educational institutions must uphold academic freedom in teaching, research, and “extramural speech,” the faculty group said in a statement. “Institutional policies that affirm a commitment to academic freedom have little meaning if administrators ignore or selectively apply them in tense or stressful times,” it said.

Quick hits

• Oregon State clears bomb threat on food-delivery robots: The university issued a warning on Tuesday to “avoid all robots until further notice.” It then isolated the robots, investigated, and sent an all-clear. The robots’ manufacturer, Starship Technologies, said a student had sent a bomb threat via social media and later said it was a prank. One person has been arrested. (Associated Press)
• Baylor violated Title IX, jurors say: A former student, Dolores Lozano, alleged that Baylor’s failure to protect against sexual violence had placed her at risk and that university employees hadn’t acted properly after she reported that a football player assaulted her in 2014. On Tuesday, jurors found that Baylor was negligent and had violated the federal law barring sex-based discrimination, and they awarded Lozano $270,000. Baylor contended that its employees had acted appropriately. (ESPN, The Chronicle)
• Hebrew Union will shutter degree programs: The Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, which operates three campuses in the United States, plans to shut down doctoral and master’s programs in Jewish studies in Cincinnati, a doctoral interfaith-ministry program in New York City, and a master’s educational-leadership program in Los Angeles. Its president cited financial and enrollment constraints. (Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

Comings and goings

• James Rodríguez, dean of social sciences and education at California State University at Bakersfield, has been named interim provost and vice president for academic affairs.
• Jeff Edwards, head of the department of crop, soil, and environmental sciences at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has been named dean of the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food, and Life Sciences and senior associate vice president for academic programs in the system’s division of agriculture.
• Dana R. Fisher, a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park and president of the Eastern Sociological Society, has been named a professor in the School of International Service and director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity at American University.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.

Footnote

Can you keep a secret? I have no strong feelings about Taylor Swift. I’m happy to acknowledge the high quality of her songs I happen to hear, her logistically impressive touring, and the dynamic commercial operation she’s constructed. But I’d be misrepresenting myself if I were to desperately appeal to Swifties by doing something cheap like, say, packing a Footnote with song titles.

Some academics, by contrast, are very interested in Swift. More than 1,000 people have registered to attend an academic conference on her next week at Indiana University at Bloomington. Speakers are scheduled to discuss Swift’s influence on fandom, gender, music theory, politics, and pop culture. Panel topics include “Taylor as an Anti-Hero” and “Feminism and Capitalism.” Everything will wrap up with a market of Swift-related goods for purchase.

Tickets were free but had all been claimed when I checked, on Wednesday. Any fans who missed out will just have to hope that the university’s in-state rival will host “Taylor Swift: The Conference Era (Purdue’s version).”