Colleges that pledged to enroll more low-income students aren’t getting there.
Another year, another update from the American Talent Initiative that shows backsliding on the goal of enrolling 50,000 more low-income students at colleges with high graduation rates. With 2025 no longer so far in the future, it’s hard to see how this effort, announced in late 2016 by Bloomberg Philanthropies, will even come close to hitting its mark.
If there’s any good news, it’s that the latest numbers aren’t quite as dismal as those in the last couple of “progress” reports. The newest numbers show that, in the fall of 2021, 83 of the 128 current member colleges in the effort enrolled more lower-income students than they did in the fall of 2015. But that means that the rest (more than a third) didn’t, which is, uh, not great, considering that the high-performing institutions that voluntarily joined ATI are supposed to be especially committed to serving more lower-income students, not fewer.
Counted together, the 128 colleges enrolled 7,713 more low-income students in the fall of 2021 than they did in 2015. But that’s 507 fewer than in the previous year.
In fact, the aggregate numbers have been falling from year to year since 2018. ATI members did increase their enrollment of first-time students eligible for Pell Grants by 6 percent in the most recent tallies, managers of the project said. Unfortunately, that was offset by a 6-percent drop in transfer-student enrollment, as well as declines in the numbers of returning students.
But at least the latest figures are better than they were for the 2018-19 year, when only 68 of the 120 colleges that were then part of ATI reported an annual increase (or stability) in enrollments of low-income students. And the picture is a lot better than in the fall of 2020, when only 31 of 115 colleges reported growth in low-income enrollment.
All this leaves ATI a long way from its 2025 goal of enrolling 50,000 additional students at what it calls high-performing colleges. The goal applies not only to member colleges but also to 213 other institutions that consistently report graduation rates of at least 70 percent within six years. The group sees its role as propelling those efforts by example, and members meet periodically to share ideas and strategies. But how many of the 50,000 do they consider themselves responsible for? They’ve never specified a number.
Last June the 125 members that chose to stick with ATI recommitted themselves to a set of more-definitive enrollment goals under a program they call Accelerating Opportunity (since then, three more institutions have joined). The latest report doesn’t indicate how members are doing on their new goals because it’s too soon to know. I am hoping for breakdowns of the specific goals in next year’s progress report.
Meanwhile, the current report does feature updates — all positive — from a dozen institutions, noting that “members from across the initiative have made gains under even the most trying of circumstances, illustrating that progress is possible in a variety of contexts.” And it’s nice to see that in the last two years, 64 members have consistently increased their enrollment of Pell-eligible students.
You can also find three top-10 lists that spotlight the more-successful ATI members. The lists track institutions with the largest percentage increase of Pell enrollments (Colby College is on top); the largest Pell enrollments (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign); and the highest share of Pell-eligible students (University of California at Merced).
Check these out.
Here are some education-related items from other outlets that recently caught my eye. Did I miss a good one? Let me know.
- The number of students majoring in computer science continues to grow, while those choosing history, religion, or English are sliding downward, according to the latest stats from the U.S. Department of Education. Hat tip to Benjamin Schmidt, a self-described data-visualization expert, whose Twitter thread illuminates that and several other trends in a series of charts and commentary. “The downtick in humanities” in the 2020-21 academic year, he notes, “pushes up the ETA for when CS is larger than all humanities degrees together.”
- Degree-attainment rates have improved over the past decade, but “the progress is largely due to higher graduation rates for full-time students,” Complete College America says in a new report. “Part-time students continue to be left behind,” it says. That’s as more than half of all students now enroll part time, and they are “disproportionately from groups that have been historically excluded from educational opportunity,” according to the report, titled “Part-Time Students Must Be a Full-Time Priority.” It urges colleges to reconsider class schedules, academic-advising systems, and first-year-experience courses to ensure part-time students aren’t excluded.
- Colleges staring down the demographic cliff might take some lessons from Maine, where institutions have begun to reverse years of enrollment declines, according to this story in The Hechinger Report. Their strategies have included offers of in-state tuition to non-Mainers and trying hard to embrace (rather than alienate) prospective applicants. But the shifts require effort, the article explains: “Making the admissions process seem welcoming instead of intimidating and confusing is a surprisingly big culture shift in higher education.”
- The convenience of online courses can often be the lifeline students need to continue their studies, but enrolling fully online may be detrimental to completion, shows this working paper by Justin C. Ortagus, director of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida. Ortagus evaluated 10 years of transcript data for tens of thousands of community-college students and found that completion rates were higher for students enrolled in some online courses but lower for those enrolled fully online. The trends were even more pronounced for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.
- Is state disinvestment in higher education a continuing reality, as data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association shows? Or is it, as the Texas Public Policy Foundation asserts in a new report, merely “a myth”? This piece in Higher Ed Dive finds a reason for the notable discrepancy: different calculations for inflation.
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