With spring semester coming to a close for many, I hope your commencement ceremonies are proceeding with fanfare and celebration. Congrats to the many graduates of your institutions! In this week's issue, we look at a new report that finds most graduates believe their degrees were worth it. From there, we discuss calls for increased transparency in the admissions process and what that really means before closing with three Sparks on cost, aid, and the global enrollment picture. 

College Is Still Worth It 

From Even as AI Use Spreads, Graduates Maintain Their Degree Was Worth It | Inside Higher Ed 

A new report from Lumina Foundation and Gallup finds that alumni believe their degrees are worth it. 

Our Thoughts  

Oh, I wish this was the type of story that was picked up by the regular news media instead of just the higher education news. "Extra! Extra! Read all about it. Graduates still say their degrees are worth it." A person can dream, right? Even with the spread of AI and increased political polarization, most alumni say they'd do it again. That's an amazing stat and a clear example of the real value graduates put on their experiences in higher education. Of course, the report has more to say than the headline. The same alumni who tell us their degree was worth it are also telling us the price wasn't. 

Look at the cost picture the report reveals—half of borrowers have delayed a major life event because of what they owe. These alumni are delaying retirement saving, home buying, grad school, or starting families, and the fact that employed graduates are having to delay life should bother anyone who works in this sector. We say higher education provides opportunities for people to have a better life, but that life is increasingly becoming out of reach for many graduates until much later in their lifetimes. When only 10 percent of bachelor’s degree holders say the price that four-year colleges charge is fair, we really need to pay attention.  

Unfortunately, one reason why college costs so much is that we've collectively changed our minds about what it's for. For most of the 20th century, postsecondary education was understood as a public good. States invested in their colleges and universities because an educated population was an investment in the state's workforce, civic life, and economic future. Over the past several decades, the framing has shifted. Higher education is now treated as a private good, a personal investment that primarily benefits the individual who earns the degree, and the funding model has shifted to match. Christopher Newfield's The Great Mistake traces how that reframing took hold and what it cost public institutions. The short version is that once you decide a benefit is primarily private, you start asking the private beneficiary to pay for it. As I noted a few issues back, inflation-adjusted state and local funding per FTE declined by 1 percent last year, the first such drop since 2012, and that drop continues a much longer trajectory of disinvestment. 

Another reason college costs so much (that we don’t like to admit) is that college is a specialized service delivered primarily by people with deep expertise, and specialized expertise costs money everywhere it shows up in the economy. Doctors, lawyers, clinical psychologists, veterinarians, architects, scientific researchers: the price of any of them reflects years of training, credentialing, and the labor required to do the work well. Faculty are no different, and neither is the institutional infrastructure that supports them, including libraries, labs, technology, advising, student services, and accreditation. That infrastructure has gotten more expensive each year because inflation hits higher education the same way it hits every other industry. Public and private nonprofit institutions are both, in the end, in the business of selling education. For some, I know that sentence is uncomfortable, especially for those of us who came to this work because we want the mission to be about learning and changing students’ lives. Since 81 percent of alumni remember relationships with professors fondly, that mission is real, but it does have to be paid for. Increasingly, the people paying for it are the students themselves. 

What we typically do when cost comes up is pivot to financial aid, sticker price versus net price, or the lifetime earnings premium. While those answers are real, they are less persuasive than they used to be. The honest version is that education is expensive because of the expertise needed for it. If the public didn’t demand that, prospective families wouldn’t ask about student-to-faculty ratios and the number of faculty with terminal degrees on campus tours. That, combined with inflationary pressures and a societal decision to treat higher education as a private good instead of a public benefit, has led us to the situation we find today. If we want a different cost outcome, we Americans need to have a different conversation about who pays and who benefits. The alumni in this report told us what the bill is doing to their lives. It's on the rest of us to weigh that cost against the collective benefits we'd gain by sharing it.  

Transparency and Admissions 

From Why Transparency Is the White Whale of College Admissions | The Chronicle of Higher Education 

Eric Hoover looks at the reasons why the college admissions process is not transparent and ways in which it could be.  

Our Thoughts  

I spent enough years in and around enrollment work to know that "transparency" in college admissions can mean a lot of different things depending on who’s trying to define it. The Trump administration's Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), the Yale faculty committee's report, and the recent National Review essay from Edward Blum and Senator Todd Young all use the same word—transparency—and, yet, they all seem to mean something different. Hoover's right that real transparency is hard to deliver. Truthfully, I don’t know that everyone who seeks to demand it really wants it because transparency in admissions, especially elite college admissions, will uncover all the skeletons in the closet. Students who are admitted because their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents went to the institution, or because someone gave a generous gift, or because the national champion football team needs a new wide receiver.  Where are those students in any of these calls for transparency?  

Look at what ACTS actually asks for. The federal survey doesn't include questions about legacy admissions, donor admissions, or athletic recruitment. James Murphy of Class Action made the point in his blog: the data coming out of highly selective colleges will be impossible to interpret accurately because those preferences have significant impact on who is admitted, and the survey is silent on all of them. Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, makes a related point in Hoover's piece. Institutions know that if the public saw how many seats were going to legacies and donor families, the prestige math would shift. There's a reason that math has been kept quiet for as long as it has, and it isn't an accident that the version of transparency being demanded loudly right now doesn't disturb it. Think about who’s asking and who benefits from those categories, and then see how much of your Venn diagram overlaps.  

The other issue with the transparency debate is who it actually matters for. The public conversation, shaped by the New York Times and the Chronicle and the rest of the higher ed press, is functionally a conversation about maybe 100 institutions out of the roughly 2400 four-year colleges and universities. NACAC has been documenting this for more than a decade: the vast majority of four-year colleges in this country accept two-thirds or more of their applicants, and only about a fifth admit fewer than half. The admissions process at the median American college isn't the white-knuckle competition the press describes. It's much closer to a recruitment exercise where the institution is working hard to get students to choose them. The transparency debate that captures the airwaves is, almost entirely, about the slice of higher education that operates at the very top of the selectivity curve, and it gets reported as if it describes how admissions works everywhere. Families absorb that coverage and reasonably conclude the game is rigged against them. For most students at most institutions, there isn't really a game at all. 

Even at the institutions where the debate is genuinely about competitive admissions, full transparency is closer to a fantasy than a realistic policy goal. Picture two applicants, Suzie and Jimmy, with effectively identical paper credentials: the same test scores, the same GPA, the same coursework rigor, comparable extracurriculars and references. Suzie wants to major in classics, where the department has 14 students. Jimmy wants business, where the department is already over-enrolled. Suzie plays oboe, and the orchestra is short an oboist. Jimmy plays piano, and there are already six pianists on the wait list. Suzie spent two years volunteering with international refugees. Jimmy is an Eagle Scout. Both are qualified. Both would succeed at the institution. The institution can take one of them. The decision turns on the institutional priorities admissions is paid to balance: departmental enrollment targets, programmatic needs, ensemble composition, athletic recruitment, geographic distribution, mission fit, financial aid budgets, yield modeling. Spelling all of that out for every applicant is a fool's errand, and some of it isn't even knowable at the time of the decision because it shifts as the class shapes up. 

Jon Boeckenstedt, the recently retired vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State and author of the long-running blog, Higher Ed Data Stories, names the underlying reality plainly in Hoover's piece. While the admissions office is always welcoming, we can’t lose sight of the reality that it is a business function of the institution. It's designed to work for the college to meet the college's needs and goals. It exists to fill seats, hit revenue targets, manage yield, and protect institutional metrics that shape everything from bond ratings to selectivity rankings. After all of the years of pundits saying colleges and universities should function more like a business, we shouldn’t be surprised that their admissions offices do. The fact that admissions officers are usually warm, capable people who care about students doesn't change the role admissions offices play in running a higher education institution.  

Unfortunately, because society has made the stakes feel so high, the work ahead is more challenging than it probably should be. Defending admissions by saying "the process is more nuanced than you understand" isn't going to work anymore. Much of the public has decided it doesn’t trust higher education any longer (see that first piece) and that perhaps the game is rigged. However, as a sector, I think there’s still good work to be done countering the narrative about the stress-inducing admissions process filled with rejection letters when that isn’t the reality for the majority of students. And for those institutions that are highly selective, it might be time to be slightly more transparent about your processes. While more data is unlikely to close the trust gap, fewer skeletons in our collective higher ed closets just might. 

Sparks 

• Financial Aid Administrators Wave the Red Flag Over OBBBA Time Crunch (Inside Higher Ed) - Financial aid administrators are concerned they will be penalized by the Department of Education due to changes in federal aid policy that take effect July 1, many of which are still being finalized. I feel for financial aid staff in this environment, but they’re also not the only ones who should be concerned.
• With Just One Word, Brandeis is Trying to Change College Shopping (New York Times) - Brandeis has introduced a new tool on its website that tells prospective students how much Brandeis will cost if they decide to enroll. Speaking of admissions transparency, this should be an interesting experiment. 
• Overseas student numbers to reach 9 million but ‘elitism remains’ (Times Higher Education) - The international student population is expected to grow to 9 million by the end of this decade, but there are stark regional disparities. Yes, I know this is about higher education worldwide, but that’s exactly why I think it’s important. We exist in a global ecosystem for postsecondary education and it’s good to be aware of what is happening in it.