Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, January 14. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Freshman enrollment didn’t flop after all

It’s time to tear up the enrollment narrative from last fall, our Eric Hoover reports.

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center botched closely watched enrollment data released in October, it announced on Monday.

❗ Freshman enrollment didn’t drop as initially reported. It actually increased. Some students were counted as dual enrolled when they should have been counted as freshmen. That resulted in an overcount in the number of dual-enrolled students, who are high-school students taking college classes, as well as an undercount in the number of college freshmen. The error didn’t affect estimates of the total number of undergraduates.

• The same problem was present in prior reports, but it was magnified this fall because more high-school students enrolled in dual-enrollment programs.

‼️ It’s worth repeating: The number of freshmen did not fall by 5 percent, as reported in October, and again about a month later.

Still unclear is exactly how much freshman enrollment increased last fall. The Clearinghouse Research Center is still checking its past work. It’s promising an update on January 23, based on data that won’t require the same type of number crunching as the fall reports, because it will be based on data from almost all colleges, instead of just a sample.

This shakes the foundation of key stories that have rocked higher ed. Among them:

• FAFSA fallout: The U.S. Department of Education’s trouble-filled rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid last year was widely panned — including in this newsletter — as a factor undercutting fall enrollment. Officials raised eyebrows — including in this newsletter — for suggesting a rosier picture.
• Earlier-than-expected financial headwinds: The illusion of declining fall enrollment sounded alarm bells because it arrived shortly before the number of graduating high-school seniors is expected to peak. Declining freshman enrollment when the pool of new students is shrinking is a stiff financial challenge. Losing freshmen even before that decline arrives would have been another beast entirely.

Still, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. No matter what the Clearinghouse data shows, the FAFSA blunder really was an added barrier for some of the most vulnerable high-school students, and it frustrated college employees. Higher ed is still facing an enrollment cliff.

“We deeply regret this error and are conducting a thorough review to understand the root cause and implement measures to prevent such occurrences in the future,” Doug Shapiro, the research center’s executive director, said in a statement.

The bigger picture: Even though the Clearinghouse regularly cautions that its early fall enrollment reports are preliminary and subject to revision, we know significantly less today than we thought we did when we woke up yesterday.

Read the full story: Wait, Freshman Enrollment Actually Increased Last Fall

Sprint to the end

Track athletes may be familiar with the concept of running through the finish — continuing at full pace, all the way through the end of a race. President Biden’s team seems to have adapted the idea for its higher-ed work.

A week before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Biden administration forgave more student debt. Here’s how the cancellations announced on Monday break down:

• $2.5 billion for 61,000 borrowers receiving total and permanent disability discharges, some of which were automatically approved by matching data with Social Security Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs records.
• $1.3 billion for 85,000 people under the Borrower Defense to Repayment program, which is for students who were misled by their colleges.
• $465 million for 6,100 borrowers through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which goes to the likes of teachers and police officers who’ve made a decade of on-time payments.

Officials wouldn’t rule out forgiving more debts in the short time they have left. They don’t have any insight into what Trump’s team will do when it takes office, but Monday’s announcements can’t be reversed, they said in a call with reporters.

Republicans denounced the cancellations, reiterating criticisms they’ve lobbed throughout the Biden administration.

• “It is shameful that, in its final days, the Biden-Harris administration is doubling down on efforts to push as much forgiveness as possible through the door, once again ignoring the rule of law,” Tim Walberg, a Republican who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, said in a statement.

The Biden team has been churning in its lame-duck period. Since Election Day, the Education Department has:

• Completed shared-ancestry investigations that were opened after the Israel-Hamas war inflamed campus tensions. On Monday, the Education Department posted an agreement with Lehigh University, resolving allegations that the Pennsylvania institution hadn’t adequately considered whether Jewish students faced a hostile environment. Like other recent resolutions, the agreement called for the university to review its response, assess its climate, and train employees — even though Republicans called for harsher penalties in such cases.
• Yanked regulatory proposals involving transgender students’ participation in athletics and student-loan cancellation. These bureaucratic formalities effectively prevent the Trump team from getting a head start on its own rules.
• Penalized a college for its marketing practices, levying a $2.5-million fine against Baker College, in Michigan, to settle allegations it misrepresented students’ career outcomes.

To be clear, Biden didn’t stamp higher ed with all of the lasting changes he’d pitched. Only 42 percent of Biden’s higher-ed rules were finalized without being blocked by the courts, found a review by Inside Higher Ed. Just last week, a judge threw out Title IX regulations that would have added protections for LGBTQ students. Debt forgiveness has been a mixed bag, with the courts striking down or tying up many of the administration’s most ambitious efforts, even as it cleared loans under existing programs.

And Republicans have already started driving the federal agenda. The University of Michigan last week said it will end a two-decades-old partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, which drew national security concerns from the GOP, according to The Detroit News.

The bigger picture: Outgoing administrations notch all the wins they can, defend their records, and try to reset the terms of the debate as they prepare to leave. The Biden administration, and its signature push to take on problems with the student-loan system, are no different.

• “These are choices that Congress and the president will face in the future,” Neera Tanden, White House domestic policy adviser, said on Monday’s call with reporters about debt forgiveness. “The president is incredibly proud of the work he has done, up through his last days in office.”

Quick hits

• More women researchers stopped publishing over time: Just a quarter of female researchers were continuing to publish 19 years after their first paper appeared, compared with 36 percent of men. That’s according to an examination of biological-sciences fields like neuroscience, genetics, and immunology, which had a roughly even split of men and women at the beginning of the periods studied. It’s yet to be peer reviewed. (Nature)
• Columbia U. splits with pro-Palestinian professor: Katherine Franke, a law professor who has advocated on behalf of pro-Palestinian protesters last year, said that while the university might describe her departure as a retirement, it is a “termination dressed up in more palatable terms.” Columbia had investigated Franke after receiving complaints about comments she made on the radio about Israelis. A university spokesperson said Columbia is committed “to being a community that is welcoming to all.” (The Chronicle, Center for Constitutional Rights, The New York Times)
• MLA conference marked by protests: Demonstrators used the Modern Language Association’s annual conference last weekend to voice their objections to the organization’s Executive Council, which last fall blocked a boycott, divestment, and sanctions resolution against Israel. (Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle)

Comings and goings

• Monique Michelle Dozier, vice chancellor for advancement at the University of California at Riverside and president of the UCR Foundation, has been named vice chancellor for university advancement at North Carolina A&T University.
• George Nnanna, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Texas Water and Energy Institute at the University of Texas-Permian Basin, has been named founding director of the School of Engineering at the University of Missouri and St. Louis.
• Kerry Tipper, city attorney for Denver, has been named vice president, university counsel for the University of Colorado system.

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

Footnote

Check out this impressive data set documenting the writers sponsored by National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, starting with the year the NEA was founded in 1965 and running to 2024. Researchers compiled it by scraping data from NEA records, cross-referencing information against a report from the public agency, and digging through a web of other sources like authors’ biographies, interviews, and literary criticism.

The result details writers’ demographics, education, and geography, revealing trends that might otherwise be easy to miss. A shockingly low 15 percent of all grantees are identified as Black, Asian American, Latinx, or Indigenous. Much more predictably, the University of Iowa and its famed Writers’ Workshop can lay claim to graduating the most master of fine arts recipients.

Also a surprise: This data comes to us from north of the border. The research team was led by Alexander Manshel, a professor in the English department at McGill University, in Montreal. The Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council provided funding. Just six of 3,705 fellowship winners are listed as coming from Canada, meaning the team identified a very exclusive club.