The Edge

I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.

A nonprofit’s model of helping first-generation students land “strong jobs” perseveres — and adapts — during the pandemic.

It didn’t take long to convince me that Braven, a nonprofit that helps low-income students prepare for their post-college job hunt, was the real deal. I explained how it aims to develop students’ social capital in a newsletter last year. Now, after spending more time catching up with its founder, Aimée Eubanks Davis, last month, I’m just as impressed with the way the organization has adapted. Its lessons apply well beyond the organization.

Eubanks Davis is the first guest in a new Chronicle podcast series, Innovation That Matters, in which I will talk monthly with change-makers working to improve equity in higher education. What struck me most in our conversation was how she has positioned Braven to respond to the economic crisis new graduates face — with a tailored, digital offering — while preserving the program’s proven person-to-person core elements. To serve an obvious need, Braven pivoted (Are we sick of that word yet?) but is keeping its footing.

For a founder who espouses the mantra, “Go slow to go fast,” Eubanks Davis readily acknowledges that the last year forced the organization to embrace some internal contradictions. Her plan was to continue to expand the Braven model at the four campuses where it now offers a three-credit course coupled with employer mentorships for students. Then officials at those partner institutions and others asked for broader access to the digital curriculum to help more students navigate the challenging job market. Soon a “booster” program was being offered to some 85,000 students, not just the few thousand formally enrolled. Eubanks Davis still sees the campus- and community-based model, with mentors drawn from local employers, as its sweet spot. But some pandemic-induced changes are going to linger. In the future, she said, Braven will “work more nationally and more virtually.”

Meanwhile, colleges not necessarily affiliated with Braven have been beefing up their own mentoring and coaching programs in response to the isolation many students are feeling. Eubanks Davis had some advice on that, noting that especially for low-income, first-generation students of color, “mentoring doesn’t always work.” It has to be done very intentionally, she said. “Having cultural competency is very important.”

As for guiding students to make the leap from college to a career, Eubanks Davis said skills like networking, résumé writing, and cold calling need to be nurtured like athletic talent — “cultivated and treated and grown,” she said, “like we do our sports teams.”

To listen to our conversation, including Eubanks Davis’s thoughts on the challenges that Black female entrepreneurs face in finding financial support for their ventures, tune in to the podcast here.

Your thoughts on trends in fall enrollment online.

Several readers responded to my newsletter last week, in which I highlighted how, bucking the overall trend, some of the biggest online institutions saw significantly higher enrollments last semester. In your feedback, two themes stood out.

Enrollment growth doesn’t reveal the whole picture. “While these numbers are a little eye-popping,” wrote David Schecter, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of South Carolina-Upstate, referring to double-digit-percentage increases, “the proof will be in the retention and graduation pudding … data we may not know for some time.” He’s right, of course, and shame on me for failing to note that myself.

And while we’re on the subject, isn’t it time for better public reporting of completion rates and career outcomes for graduate-level programs, online or not? Perhaps that would help us answer another question a reader raised: Do employers value online grad degrees?

Online graduate programs don’t operate in a vacuum. Many depend on an inflow of students who have experience at traditional in-person colleges, or at least have developed the academic skills to succeed online. That thought came from Michael Patrick Rutter, a senior adviser for communications at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of a technology blog. “There still seems to be a hope/belief/marketing hype that anyone can just dive into online learning,” he wrote. “Isn’t that like saying to a young child: ‘Here’s a massive, free library — go forth and read! Upskill away!’”

Rutter says he’s “all for disruption in grad education,” especially for master’s and professional programs. But paradoxically, that might “make a more-traditional degree all the more important,” he adds. “Lifelong learning depends on a strong foundation, not on a delivery mechanism.”

I also found it edifying that others reinforced the predictions I shared from Richard Garrett at Eduventures about how online-enrollment trends might push traditional colleges to double down on a “hybrid campus” model. For example, the authors of this new paper said colleges might do that by reinforcing the in-person activities that deliver the most value for learners and by designing “third place” spaces, away from classrooms and residence halls, “where students can access synchronous social-learning experiences.”

And I appreciated reminders that enrollment spikes at some of the biggest online institutions may have been spurred by marked increases in their marketing — and that the trend reflected the continued consolidation of a maturing market for online ed. “The big are getting bigger, and the small continue to shrink,” said Seth Odell, a veteran marketing officer at several colleges and founder of Kanahoma, an education-marketing firm. “I don’t think Covid created this reality,” he said, “as much as it highlighted it.”

Two reports of note.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s new report on conversions of colleges from for-profit to nonprofit ownership highlights several areas where lax review by the Department of Education and the Internal Revenue Service allows former owners to continue improperly profiting from the new arrangements. The Education Department has committed to stepping up its oversight; the IRS said it will “assess its review process.” The report follows investigations by the Century Foundation, which has called some converted institutions “covert for-profits,” and the organization isn’t letting up on the issue. Within hours of the GAO’s posting its report, the foundation published a response that not only urged the Education Department to review past conversions but also to extend its scrutiny to “any college that exhibits signs of improper benefit to private parties, including contracts with online program managers and other service providers or lenders.”

The new Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges published its first report, highlighting the role that 118 regional public colleges play in ensuring access to higher education to low-income and working adults in rural areas. The report also shows that the top degrees awarded by rural public colleges align with major industries in those communities, including education, health care, business, hospitality and tourism, and natural-resource management. At a time when some lawmakers are looking to close or merge such colleges, the report argues that they are key “anchor institutions” for their regions.

Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.