Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Monday, October 14. Megan Zahneis wrote today’s Briefing. Brian O’Leary compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Why white-student enrollment is declining

As the enrollment cliff edges ever closer and colleges contend with the banning of diversity efforts in some states and race-conscious college admissions nationwide, much of higher ed’s attention has been on how to enroll and retain minority students. But in a surprising twist, it’s undergraduate enrollment of white students that has dropped more than that of any other racial group in the past decade. Our Katie Mangan dug into why with number-crunching help from Brian O’Leary.

• Public perception plays a role. Recent research has uncovered skepticism about the value of a college degree, particularly among conservatives, who are overwhelmingly white and more likely to be swayed by politicians accusing colleges of indoctrinating students with liberal ideas. A recent Chronicle survey found that minority respondents were more than 20 percent more likely than white respondents to say colleges did a good or excellent job educating students.
  
  • Quotable: “After four years of college, there’s no guarantee you’ll get a job,” said Drew Hundley, 19, of Waterloo, Iowa, who started working as an apprentice for a local electric company after graduating high school in May. “If you go for something really specialized like medicine or engineering, college would make sense, but if you’re just taking random stuff like liberal arts, it doesn’t seem like it’s worth it.”
• The pandemic didn’t help. While white enrollment has been declining across all of higher ed for a decade, researchers haven’t taken notice until the past couple of years, since they were focused at the height of Covid on recruiting minority students. Now, though, enrollment numbers for the latter are stabilizing, while white enrollment plummeted further in 2021 and 2022.
• Some majority-white colleges have been plagued by financial woes. Here are two prominent examples: In recent years, sagging enrollment and financial troubles prompted Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education to consolidate six of its campuses into two. Likewise, West Virginia University made sweeping cuts last year to stanch its financial bleeding.
• There’s a hot market for lower-skilled jobs, which are more readily available in rural than urban areas, and white men are especially likely to earn middle-class wages from them, according to a study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

The big questions: White-student enrollment can be a touchy topic, Katie notes. Does raising concern over declining white enrollment inadvertently suggest that colleges should shift attention away from minority students? Considering higher ed’s past of excluding nonwhite people, is it insensitive to ask why white students are opting out and how to lure them back? Those questions, she writes, may be unavoidable.

Read the full story: Where Are the White Students?

Quick hits

• Federal investigation of possible cancer cluster at NC State moves forward: A year ago, the university closed Poe Hall, which housed its psychology department and College of Education, after finding that some of its rooms contained levels of toxic chemicals up to 38 times greater than federal-safety standards allow. But NC State’s withdrawal from a federal investigation into the health hazards drew plenty of criticism, prompting that evaluation to restart. Now, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is asking the state of North Carolina to cross-reference Poe Hall employees with the state’s cancer registry and provide local cancer data to determine if an excess of “specific cancer types” occurred among workers in the building. (WRAL, The Chronicle)
• Government agency bans arbitration platform that misled student-loan borrowers: Ejudicate, a private dispute-resolution platform, was banned by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which found it forced borrowers into arbitration without their consent. The company misled borrowers who worked with a now-shuttered company, Prehired, by “falsely representing itself as a neutral and impartial forum for consumer debt arbitrations” and failing to disclose its financial ties to Prehired. (American Banker, CFPB)
• Clark Atlanta University hits restart on alumni association: The HBCU disbanded its alumni association this month in favor of a system it says will better enable direct connections with alumni and keep up with the university’s growth. Other historically Black institutions have turned toward more institutionally controlled alumni associations in recent years, a change Clark Atlanta’s representatives say was inevitable. The now-former alumni association had also dealt with years of infighting, some graduates say. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Quote of the day

“Faculty definitely know that people are watching.”

— Erik Larson, chair of the religious-studies department at Florida International University, says it’s unclear whether an ongoing review of courses for antisemitic content or anti-Israeli bias will ultimately lead to censorship.

The review was prompted by alarm over several test questions posed to students at FIU that were shared on X over the summer. After criticism from Randy Fine, a Republican and Jewish member of the Florida House of Representatives, the state’s dozen public universities were told to conduct a keyword search of their undergraduate- and graduate-course descriptions and syllabi for words like “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Zionist,” and “Jewish,” then start a “faculty review” to look for “instances of either antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias” and report them to the chancellor’s office.

Details on that audit have been sparse, but according to spreadsheets obtained from six of those universities by our Emma Pettit, at least 250 courses were flagged for review. While many are related to international politics, Judaism, and the Middle East, some have titles like “Percussion Ensemble,” “General Parasitology,” “Painting Workshop,” and “Global Hip Hop.”

It’s not clear what happens next. Because of the “large volume” of courses submitted for inspection, a spokesperson for the state university system said, “a sample” was chosen for review this semester. She did not specify which courses are being reviewed. Meanwhile, professors whose courses and textbooks were identified for possible review told Emma they were worried about political intrusion.

Read the full story: Do These Courses Contain Antisemitic Content?

Remedies for the modern college presidency

Higher-ed pundits and members of the general public alike are prone to wondering why anyone would want the job of college president. It’s an understandable question — think about the raft of budget shortfalls, enrollment declines, academic-freedom controversies, and high-profile no-confidence votes and resignations many have faced in recent years.

But does the problem lie in individual missteps by one leader, or is it something else? Editors of The Chronicle Review posed that question to 13 current and former presidents, whose diagnoses varied. Among the issues they identified:

• Presidents not engaging in shared governance
• A lack of succession planning at the top of the ladder
• Not enough partnership with businesses and employers
• Inattention to presidential burnout

Read the full story: The College Presidency Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.

Comings and goings

• Aleta Savage, assistant vice president for research operations at Loma Linda University, has been named assistant vice president for sponsored program administration at Wayne State University.
• Doug Marsh, vice president for facilities design and operations and university architect at the University of Notre Dame, will retire at the end of May.
• Jessica Karbowski Weare, chief operating officer and chief legal counsel for the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential, has been named general counsel for Grand Valley State University.
• Pouyan Nejadhashemi, a professor in the department of plant, soil and microbial sciences at Michigan State University, has been named director of the university’s Institute of Water Research.

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

Footnote

Researchers at Oregon State University are working on a way to help parents of toddlers ensure their kids stay physically active. And yes, it involves enlisting the aid of our robot overlords.

The Oregon State contingent sat in on weekly play sessions for kids ages 2-3 in a playroom equipped with standard toys as well as a “GoBot” — a wheeled, and, crucially, foam-padded — robot designed by researchers. For the first portion of each session, the GoBot sat in the room but wasn’t active. Then a researcher used a video-game controller to direct “keep-away maneuvers"; for the grand finale, the robot controlled its movements autonomously. In each of the latter phases, the GoBot encouraged kids to interact with it by emitting sounds, lights, or bubbles when they came near.

The result? The children were more physically active when the GoBot was, too. Naomi Fitter, an assistant professor in Oregon State’s College of Engineering, said a “relatively low-cost robot playmate” could be a viable addition to parents’ toddler-entertainment toolboxes in the near future.

No word, though, on how to make particularly energetic children less active. Perhaps the GoBot can be equipped with a lullaby mode.