Rebounding enrollment of low-income students
Organizers of the American Talent Initiative, which was announced in 2015, long hoped it would be “a unifying, measurable expression” of high-performing colleges’ commitment to increase their number of low-income students. The goal was to collectively add 50,000 such students by 2025 at more than 350 colleges with high graduation rates. As of today, 140 colleges are members of ATI.
I’ve been paying close attention to the effort as it took off, then faltered (even before Covid), then faltered again. Now, with ATI’s latest progress report released on Monday, several trends have become clear. The effort is beginning to pay off — with 18,100 additional low-income students enrolled at ATI’s member colleges since the outset of the program.
“The initiative is back on the growth trend,” said Martin Kurzweil, vice president for educational transformation at Ithaka S+R, the nonprofit consultancy that helps run the Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded project.
And yet, there are still some notable laggards, even among the ATI member colleges: Since the project’s inception, 20 percent of members have seen their numbers of low-income students actually decline, and an additional 20 percent have seen their numbers just hold steady, according to data from last fall.
What’s more, it’s become increasingly evident that the campaign hasn’t been much of an inspiration to high-performing colleges that didn’t formally join up. According to ATI’s latest report, the enrollment of low-income students at the couple of hundred of high-graduation-rate colleges that didn’t sign on appears to have collectively fallen by more than 12,000 since 2015. (The data from the nonmember institutions isn’t as current as for those colleges reporting directly to ATI, and so might not reflect the picture as of the fall of 2023.) As the report acknowledges: “It probably did not motivate the 200+ institutions that chose not to join.”
While maybe that’s obvious, I appreciate the frankness of that assessment. Lesson learned.
The last time I wrote about ATI, I highlighted a new phase of the project that required all continuing members to set specific enrollment goals for themselves, based on their own baselines. ATI established three sets of “accelerating opportunity” enrollment goals for the 125 colleges (out of 132) that had stuck with it, and since then 15 other institutions have signed on. It never made public which institutions were expected to meet each of the goals. But I’d hoped ATI would at least report on the members’ progress toward their specific enrollment goals. In this latest report, it did, albeit in the aggregate, without names attached. Of the 137 members reporting data, 90 have met or are making progress toward their ATI goals; 28 have not made progress or are declining; and 19 have experienced declines but continue to enroll Pell Grant-eligible students at rates well above the average for their sector.
Make of that what you will.
ATI has less than two years to go and is still 32,000 students short of its overall target — or maybe more, considering the declines among nonmember institutions. So what’s next? Well, for now, the ATI membership is plugging along with its work to increase enrollment through early outreach to high schools and prospective transfer students. Organizers say enrollment data from the past two years — especially the increase of more than 8,000 low-income students from the fall of 2022 to the fall of 2023 — is encouraging. Ditto the willingness of more than a dozen colleges to join the effort at this late stage.
Driving the latter phenomenon is “a presidential commitment to improve access,” said Elizabeth Davidson Pisacreta, Ithaka S+R’s director of educational transformation and co-leader of ATI. And it’s one reason ATI continues to focus on helping presidents prioritize the enrollment goals, offering special programs for new presidents and encouraging all presidents to engage their board members as well. It’s also begun recognizing some member colleges as “high fliers” for achieving steady gains in lower-income enrollments since 2015-16, a high share of Pell Grant-eligible students, and innovative recruitment, enrollment, and retention practices.
Since one key to enrolling more low-income students is having the money to support them, I’m surprised that ATI hasn’t focused more on helping colleges raise funds, but maybe the members go elsewhere for that advice. Still, I’d love to see some data showing whether ATI colleges are asking donors to give for student support and how those appeals have played out.
Even though it looks all but certain that ATI won’t hit its 50,000-student target by the fall of 2025, Kurzweil told me that he expects a continuation of the effort “in some form” after the deadline passes. Even considering the modest impact of this project, I’m glad to hear that. In the wake of the Supreme Court decision outlawing race-conscious admissions — and this year’s continuing mess with the federal application for student aid — higher ed needs every available effort to help ensure that low-income students don’t get shut out.
Recent findings of note on credentials
Do microcredentials compete with or complement traditional higher ed? That’s a question I continue to ponder. So I was interested to see findings from a new survey of continuing-education leaders that suggest such credentials are increasingly seen as a complement. According to the “State of Continuing Education 2024 Report,” just 24 percent of respondents said their institutional leaders “fear microcredentials will cannibalize enrollments from other portions of the institution.” That was down from the 2023 survey, when 31 percent had that feared. In each case, however, the sample size was small.
A taxonomy could make sense of many kinds of credentials. Chris Mullin, strategy director of data and measurement at the Lumina Foundation, recently published a blog post summarizing his work on six ways “to reduce the chaos” surrounding the wide array of postsecondary badges, certificates, credentials, and whatever else someone may have invented. I particularly appreciated his suggestion for thinking about credentials in three ways: “macrocredentials,” which are degrees and certificates that reflect the completion of a program of study of sufficient depth and duration; “microcredentials,” which result from short-term learning and training and include certificates, badges, and continuing-education units; and “maintenance credentials,” which need to be renewed or are time-limited in their applicability, such as computer skills or teaching certificates.
See you in San Diego?
If you’ll be at the ASU+GSV Summit next week, please join me and my colleague Ian Wilhelm in conversation with Nancy Gonzales, provost of Arizona State University, on the trends that will reshape higher ed in the years to come. We’ll be reflecting on ideas from The Chronicle’s “Trends Report 2024” and our new “Higher Education in 2035” report. Our session, in person in San Diego, is on Tuesday, April 16, at 10:10 a.m. PT. Check out the info here for the rest of the details. Hope to see you there — and/or somewhere in those buzzy hallways.
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 X, @GoldieStandard is my handle. Or find me on BlueSky Social, which I just joined with the same handle.
