Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday, December 4. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

A mixed bag

December started off with early holiday presents for those who watch higher ed’s key performance indicators. The sector ended up with something nice … and a couple of lumps of coal.

🎓 Completion rates increased. The share of students earning a degree or credential within six years climbed half a percentage point, to 61.1 percent for the cohort that enrolled for the first time in the fall of 2018, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center said today.

• Powering the uptick: The dropout rate dipped by 0.4 percentage points to 30.2 percent, and the share of students who earned a credential after starting at a community college increased by 1.2 percentage points, to 43.4 percent.
• The context: Completion rates had been stagnant but have now climbed to their highest level in a dozen years.

📉 Financial outlooks dimmed. Money pressures are poised to mount next year on colleges across the higher-ed sector amid uneven enrollment prospects, legislative uncertainty, flat public funding, and constrained net tuition revenue, Fitch Ratings said in a Tuesday report.

• What it means: Even public colleges could increasingly restructure, merge, and close, according to the ratings agency.

🚨 Freshman enrollment is still down. Year-over-year enrollment of 18-year-old freshmen plummeted by 5 percent this fall, according to a National College Attainment Network analysis released Monday. The most- and least-selective colleges saw declines but were spared the brunt compared to the middle of the pack, and four-year institutions fared much worse than community colleges, as The Chronicle’s Eric Hoover reported.

• Early results held up: Data reported six weeks ago covered about half of colleges that report to the Clearinghouse and were current as of September 26. The new figures cover 80 percent of colleges through October. Both show a 5-percent freshman-enrollment plunge.
• Quotable: “FAFSA disruptions, the Supreme Court decision to ban race-conscious admissions, and an emerging narrative that college isn’t worth it — any and all of these could hit enrollment in their own ways,” Kim Cook, NCAN’s chief executive, said in a Monday webinar.

The bigger picture: Long-running efforts to retain more students and help them earn credentials of value may be showing results, but slowly. Meanwhile, seismic market pressures mount across the sector.

Quick hits

• Admissions preference for slaves’ descendants? A California bill would allow the University of California and California State University systems to grant admissions priority to descendants of slaves. That would help compensate for higher ed’s history of favoring donors and excluding others, said the Democrat behind the measure. The two large public systems enroll far more students than the private Georgetown University, which in 2016 announced admissions preference for descendants of Maryland Jesuits’ slaves. (Associated Press)
• College investigates all-gender bathroom vandalism: Someone wrote “God made two genders” in a restroom at California’s San Joaquin Delta College. Officials consider the message a bias-motivated incident. (Stocktonia)
• San Francisco State U. cuts lecturers: A spokesperson said “you can’t offer sections when there aren’t students” at the public institution, where enrollment fell by about 7,000 over the last six years, to under 22,400. San Francisco State didn’t share the total number of lecturers who won’t be rehired for the spring semester, but 19 were let go in the English department alone. (The San Francisco Standard)
• Temple resolves shared-ancestry probe: The public university in Philadelphia signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education to settle concerns that it didn’t consistently assess whether incidents created a hostile environment for students and employees. Temple received at least 50 reports of behavior like antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian conduct since 2022-23. It promised to review its responses to recent complaints, provide the Education Department with information about future complaints, conduct a climate assessment, and train employees. (U.S. Department of Education)
• For-profit acquisition completed: Perdoceo Education Corporation closed a $138-million purchase of the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences, which offers continuing education and graduate degrees in physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech-language therapy, and nursing. The deal was announced in July. (Perdoceo)

Stat of the day

22

That’s the number of papers in the journal Science of the Total Environment that the publisher, Elsevier, retracted in less than two weeks, Science reported.

The publisher flagged “fictitious” peer reviews written under real scientists’ names without their knowledge. Journals often invite researchers who are submitting manuscripts to suggest peer reviewers. That’s a potential avenue for fraud if researchers supply fake email addresses that they can use to submit positive reviews of their own work.

A scientist was involved in all 22 papers that have been retracted. Guilherme Malafaia, an ecotoxicologist at the Goiano Federal Institute in Brazil, has denied having written any of the reviews, suggested he might have been hacked, and criticized the publisher’s editorial processes.

More retractions could be on the way. Correspondence indicates 47 of Malafaia’s papers could be yanked.

Comings and goings

• Daniel G. Lugo, president of Queens University of Charlotte, has been named president of Trinity College, in Connecticut.
• Anita Sharif-Hyder, senior associate director of the universitywide committee on sexual misconduct at Yale University, has been named dean of students and assistant dean of academic affairs and student life in the School of Management.
• Denise Soares, assistant dean and director of graduate studies and interim director of the National Center for School-University Partnerships at the University of Mississippi, has been named dean of the School of Education at the University of West Florida.

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

Footnote

My college roommate took up smoking midway through the year. “Time for another lung dart,” he’d say, putting on his coat before heading outside for a self-rolled cigarette.

I couldn’t help but think about this when I saw the explanation behind the new Oxford University Press Word of the Year: “brain rot.” The term, which dates back at least as far as Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden, has been updated for the digital world to describe a deteriorating mental or intellectual condition caused by consuming too much “trivial or unchallenging” material, especially if that material is online. “Brain rot” can also refer to the material that causes such a condition.

The term surged in popularity over the last year after young adults and teenagers took it to TikTok. That means the young people who gave “brain rot” new life are the same ones creating and consuming the content that the term describes, noted Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages. And they popularized the phrase in the very same social-media world that’s said to cause “brain rot.”

“It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of social media that they’ve inherited,” Grathwohl said.

Cheekiness can be a coping mechanism when the adult world fails to tackle a problem. Today’s youth will need it, as the U.S. Department of Education made clear yesterday by issuing a call for schools to regulate students’ cellphone use. Self-awareness will have to do until those in power muster the will to fight yesterday’s battles, decades too late.

My old roommate and I fell out of touch, so I don’t know if he ever quit smoking. But there is reason to hope the “brain rot” generation will push institutions to bolster mental rigor — say, by taking on a culture that’s too often permissive of cheating and dismissive of reading.

The student-run Stanford Review recently asked that institution’s president, Jonathan Levin, about the case of a student who was on track to graduate in June, even though that student said he hadn’t read a book cover-to-cover since the third grade. Far from a lung dart or brain rot, that’s the kind of pointed question that shows a sharp mind willing to engage in uncomfortable inquiry.