Higher education has finally come around to the idea that college should better help prepare students for careers.

It’s about time: Recognizing that students do not always understand the connection between their coursework and potential careers is a long-standing problem that must be addressed.

Over 20 years ago, I co-authored the best-selling “Quarterlife Crisis,” one of the first books to explore the transition from college to the workforce. We found, anecdotally, that recent college graduates felt inadequately prepared to choose a career or transition to life in the workforce. At that time, liberal arts institutions in particular did not view career preparation as part of their role.

While some progress has been made since then, institutions can still do a better job connecting their educational and economic mobility missions; recent research indicates that college graduates are having a hard time putting their degrees to work.

Importantly, improving career preparation can help not only with employment but also with student retention and completion.

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I believe that if students have a career plan in mind, and if they better understand how coursework will help them succeed in the workforce, they will be more likely to complete that coursework, persist, graduate and succeed in their job search.

First-generation students, in particular, whose parents often lack college experience, may not understand why they need to take a course such as calculus, which, on the surface, does not appear to help prepare them for most jobs in the workforce.

They will benefit deeply from a clearer understanding of how such required courses connect to their career choices and skills.

Acknowledging the need for higher education to better demonstrate course-to-career linkages — and its role in workforce preparation — is an important first step.

Taking action to improve these connections will better position students and institutions. Better preparing students for the workforce will increase their success rates and, in turn, will improve college rankings on student success measures.

This might require a cultural shift in some cases, but given the soaring cost of tuition, it is necessary for institutions to think about return on investment for students and their parents, not only in intellectual terms but also monetarily.

Such a shift could help facilitate much-needed social and economic mobility, particularly for students who borrow money to attend college.

Related: OPINION: Post-pandemic, let’s develop true education-to-workforce pathways to secure a better future

Recent articles and research about low job placement rates for college graduates often posit that internships provide the needed connection between college and careers. Real-world experience is important, but there are other ways to make a college degree more career relevant.

1. Spell out the connections for students. The class syllabus is one opportunity to make this connection for students. Faculty can explain how different coursework topics and texts translate to career skills and provide real-life examples of those skills at work. In some cases, however, this might be a tough sell for faculty who have spent their careers in the academy and do not see career counseling as part of their job.

But providing this additional information for students does not need to be a big lift and can be done in partnership with campus staff, such as career services counselors. These connections can also be made in course catalogs, on department websites and through student seminars.

2. Raise awareness of realistic careers. Many students start college with the goal of entering a commonly known profession — doctor, lawyer or teacher, to name a few. However, there are hundreds of jobs, such as public policy research and advocacy, with which students may not be as familiar. Colleges should provide more detailed information on a wide range of careers that students may never have thought of — and how coursework can help them enter those fields. Experiential learning can provide good opportunities to sample careers that match students’ interests, to help further determine the right fit.

Increased awareness of job options can also serve as motivation for students as they formulate their goals and plans. Jobs can be described through the same information avenues as the career-coursework connections listed above, along with examples of how coursework is used in each job.

3. Make coursework-career connections a campuswide priority. College leaders must stress to faculty the importance of better preparing students for careers. Economic mobility is of increasing importance to institutions and the general public, and consumers now rely on information about employment outcomes when selecting colleges (e.g., see College Scorecard).

Faculty can be assured that adding career preparation to a college degree does not diminish its educational value — quite the contrary; critical thinking and analytical skills, for example, are of utmost importance to liberal arts programs and prospective employers. Simply demonstrating those links does not change coursework content or objectives.

4. Help students translate their coursework for the job market. Beyond understanding the coursework-to-career linkages, students must know how to articulate them. Job interviews are unnatural for anyone, especially for students new to the workforce — and even more so for those who are the first in their families to graduate from college.

Career centers often provide interview tips to students — again, if the students seek out that help — but special emphasis should be placed on helping students reflect on their coursework and translate the skills and knowledge they have gained for employers.

A portfolio can help them accomplish this, and it can be developed at regular intervals throughout a student’s time on campus, since reflecting on several years of coursework all at once can be challenging. A Senior Year Seminar can further promote workforce readiness and tie together the career skills gained throughout one’s time on campus.

By making these simple changes, institutions can take the lead in making students and the public more aware of the benefits of higher education.

Abby Miller, founding partner at ASA Research, has been researching higher education and workforce development for over 20 years.

This story about college and careers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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ALBANY, Ore. – It’s 7:15 on a cold gray Monday morning in May at Linn-Benton Community College in northwestern Oregon. Math professor Michael Lopez, in a hoodie and jeans, a tape measure on his belt, paces in front of the 14 students in his “math for welders” class. “I’m your OSHA inspector,” he says. “Three sixteenths of an inch difference, you’re in violation. You’re going to get a fine.”

He’s just given them a project they might have to do on the job: figure out the rung spacing on an external steel ladder that attaches to a wall. Thousands of dollars are at stake in such builds, and they’re complicated: Some clients want the fewest possible rungs to save money, others a specific distance between steps. To pass inspection, rungs must be evenly spaced to within one sixteenth of an inch, the top rung exactly flush with the top of the wall.

The exercise could be an algebra problem, but Lopez gives them a six-step algorithm that doesn’t use algebraic letters and symbols. Instead, they get real-world industry variables: tolerances, basic rung spacing, wall height.

Lopez breaks the class into five teams. Each team is assigned different wall heights and client specs, and they get to work calculating where to place the rungs. Lopez will inspect each team’s work and pass or fail the job.

Math is a giant hurdle for most community college students pursuing welding and other career and technical degrees. About a dozen years ago, Linn-Benton’s administration looked at their data and found that many students in career and technical education, or CTE, were getting most of the way toward a degree but were stopped by a math course, said the college’s president, Lisa Avery. That’s not unusual: Up to 60 percent of students entering community college are unprepared for college-level work, and the subject they most often need help with is math.

The college asked the math department to design courses tailored to those students, starting with its welding, culinary arts and criminal justice programs. The first of those, math for welders, rolled out in 2013.

More than a decade later, welding department instructors say that math for welders has had a huge impact on student performance. Since 2017, 93 percent of students taking it have passed, and 83 percent have achieved all the course’s learning goals, including the ability to use arithmetic, geometry, algebra and trigonometry to solve welding problems, school data show. Two years ago, Linn-Benton asked Lopez to design a similar course for its automotive technology program; they began to offer that course last fall.

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Math for welders changed student Zane Azmane’s view of what he could do. “I absolutely hated math in high school. It didn’t apply to anything I needed at the moment,” said Azmane, 20, who failed several semesters of math early in high school but last year got a B in the Linn-Benton course. “We actually learned equations I’m going to use, like setting ladder rungs,” he said.

Linn-Benton’s aim is to change how students pursuing technical degrees learn math by making it directly applicable to their technical specialties.

Some researchers think these small-scale efforts to teach math in context could transform how it’s taught more broadly.

Among strategies to help college students who struggle with math, giving them contextual curriculums seems to have “the strongest theoretical base and perhaps the strongest empirical support,” according to a 2011 paper by Columbia University Teachers College professor emerita Dolores Perin. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

Perin’s paper echoed the results of a 2006 study of math in CTE involving 131 CTE high school teachers and almost 3,000 students. Students in the study who were taught math through an applied approach performed significantly better on two of three standardized tests than those taught math in a more traditional way. (The applied math students also performed better on the third test, though the results didn’t reach the statistical significance threshold.)

So far, there haven’t been systematic studies of math in CTE at the college level, said James Stone, director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education at the Southern Regional Education Board, who ran the 2006 study.

Stone explained how math in context works. Students start with a practical problem and learn a math principle for solving it. Next, they use the principle to solve a similar practical problem, to see that it applies generally. Finally, they apply the principle on paper, in say, a standardized test.

“I like to say math is just like a wrench: It’s another tool in the toolbox to solve a workplace problem,” said Stone. “People learn almost anything better in context because then it has meaning.”

Linn-Benton dean Steve Schilling offers an example. Carpenters use a well-known 3-4-5 rule to get a square corner — lay out two boards at a square angle and mark one board at 3 feet and the other at 4 feet. Now a straight line joining the two marks should measure exactly 5 feet—if it doesn’t, the boards are out of square.

The rule is based on the Pythagorean theorem, a method for calculating the lengths of a right triangle’s sides: a² + b² = c². When explaining to students why the theorem describes the rule, the instructor uses math terms — “adjacent side,” “opposite side,” “hypotenuse” — that they’ll need to use on a math test, said Schilling. When using practical skills like the 3-4-5 rule on a project, “at first, they don’t even realize they’re doing math,” he said.

Related: Federal relief money boosted community colleges, but now it’s going away

Oregon appears to be one of the few places where this approach is spreading, if slowly.

Three hours south of Linn-Benton, Doug Gardner, an instructor in the Rogue Community College math department, had long struggled with a persistent question from students: “Why do we need to know this?” The answer couldn’t just be that they needed it for their next, higher-level math class, said Gardner, now the department’s chair. “It became my life’s work to have an answer to that question.”

Meanwhile, Algebra I was a huge barrier for many Rogue students. About a third of those taking the course or a lower-level math course failed or withdrew. That meant they had to retake the class and likely stay another term to graduate; since many were older students with families and obligations, hundreds dropped out, school administrators said.

For those who stayed, lack of math knowledge hurt their job skills. Pipe fitters, for example, are among the higher-paid welders, said welding department chair Todd Giesbrecht, but they need a solid understanding of the math involved. “Whether they’re making elbows, whether they’re making dump truck bodies, they’re installing steam pipe, all of those things involve math,” he said.

So, in 2010, Gardner applied for and got a National Science Foundation grant to create two new applied algebra courses. Instead of abstract formulas, students would learn practical ones: how to calculate the volume of a wheelbarrow of gravel and the number of wheelbarrows needed to cover an area, or how much a beam of a certain size and type will bend under a certain load.

Since then, the pass rate in the applied algebra class has averaged 73 percent while that of the traditional course has continued to hover around 59 percent, according to Gardner. Even modest gains like that are hard to achieve, said Navarro Chandler, a dean at the college. “Any move over 2 percent, we call that a win,” he said.

One day in May, math professor Kathleen Foster was teaching applied algebra in a sun-drenched classroom on Rogue’s wooded campus and launched into a lesson about the Pythagorean theorem and why it’s an essential tool for building home interiors and steel structures.

She presented the formula, then jumped to illustrated exercises: What’s the right length for diagonal braces in a lookout tower to ensure that the structure will hold? What length does the diagonal top plate for a stair wall need to be to ensure that the wall’s corners are perfectly square?

James Butler-Kyniston, 30, who is pursuing a degree as a machinist, said that the exercises covered in Foster’s class are directly applicable to his future career. One exercise had them calculate how large a metal sheet you would need to manufacture a certain number of parts at one time, a skill he’s used in the lab. “Algebraic formulas apply to a lot of things, but since you don’t have any examples to tie them to, you end up thinking they’re useless,” he said.

Related: Proof Points: Shop class sometimes boosts college going, Massachusetts study finds

Unlike at Linn-Benton, students at Rogue in any degree field can take this course, so some of the applied examples don’t work for everyone. Butler-Kyniston said he thinks applied math works better if it’s tailored to a specific set of majors.

Still, Foster’s class could rescue the college plans of at least one student. Kayla LeMaster, 41, is on her second try at a two-year degree. She had to drop out in 2012 after getting injured in a house fire. She’s going for a degree that will let her transfer to the University of Oregon to major in psychology; she hopes to eventually work as a school counselor or in some other job supporting kids.

But her graduation from Rogue hangs by a thread because she needs a math credit. She struggled in the traditional algebra class and had to withdraw, and the same happened in a statistics course. Applied algebra is her last chance. “When you add the alphabet to math, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. By contrast, in the examples in Foster’s class, “you get into that work mode, a job site somewhere, and you can see the problem in your head.” She got an A on her first test. “I’m getting it,” she said.

Gardner worries about the consequences of the traditional abstract approach to teaching math. When he was in college, “nobody ever showed me one formula that calculated anything really interesting,” he said. “I just think we’re doing a terrible job. Applied math is so fun.”

Oregon’s leaders appear to see merit in teaching math in context. In 2021, state legislators passed a law requiring all four-year colleges to accept an applied math community-college course called Math in Society as satisfying the math requirement for a four-year degree. In that course, instead of studying theoretical algebra, students learn how to use probability and statistics to interpret the results in scientific papers and how political rules like apportionment and gerrymandering affect elections, said Kathy Smith, a math professor at Central Oregon Community College.

“If I had my way, this is how algebra would be taught to every student, the applied version,” said Gardner. “And then if a student says, ‘This is great, but I want to go further,’ then you sign up for the theoretical version.”

At the level of individual schools, lack of money and time constrain the spread of applied math. Stone’s team works with high schools around the country to design contextual math courses for career and technical students. They tried to work with a few community colleges, but their CTE faculty, many of whom are part-timers on contract, didn’t have time to partner with their math departments to come up with a new curriculum, a yearlong process, Stone said.

Linn-Benton was able to invest the time and money because its math department was big enough to take on the task, said Avery. And both Linn-Benton and Rogue may be outliers because they have math faculty with technical backgrounds: Lopez worked as a carpenter and sheriff’s deputy and served three tours as a machine gunner in Iraq, and Gardner was a construction contractor who still designs houses. “I have up to 16 house plans in the works during construction season,” he said.

Back in Lopez’s class, on a sunny Wednesday, students are done calculating where their ladder rungs should go and now must mark them on the wall. One team struggles. “I don’t understand any of this,” says Keith Perkins, 40, who’s going for a welding degree and wants to get into the local pipe fitters union.

“I know, but you’re not doing the steps in the right order,” says Lopez. “Walk me through it. Tell me what you did, starting with step 1.”

As teams finish up, Lopez inspects their work. “That’s one thirty-second shy. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” he tells one group. “OSHA’s not going to knock you down for that.”

Three teams pass, two fail — but this is the place to make mistakes, not out on the job, Lopez tells them.

“This stuff is hard,” said Perkins. “I hated math in school. Still hate it. But we use it every day.”

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Growing up in an immigrant family, I was painfully aware of the sacrifices my parents made for me to be educated in the United States. Their love and support were boundless, embodied by their long hours of work and their emphasis on education from an early age.

One day, I remember taking it upon myself to try to give them the best of everything by chasing after the golden ticket to success: getting into an elite college. It had been emphasized to me that those schools had the best resources, and if I wanted to become a successful scientist, this was seemingly the only way.

The benefits of an Ivy-plus education were drilled into my head from early childhood. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and actress Natalie Portman went to Harvard. Sal Khan (founder of Khan Academy) went to MIT.

And the colleges referenced in popular media and literature are always the hardest to get into: In the popular television show The Summer I Turned Pretty, Conrad, one of the main love interests and heartthrobs, transfers from Brown to Stanford. Many of Ali Hazelwood’s bestseller books are centered around premier institutions like Stanford and MIT. And I haven’t even begun to mention the arbitrary U.S. News Rankings.

In addition, teen social media feeds are filled with reels like “Do these five things if you want to get into Harvard” and “You’ll never believe where this INSANE applicant got accepted to college!”

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However, elite colleges aren’t a guaranteed means to success, and the immeasurable value we are placing on them sends harmful and dangerous messages to today’s youth.

From eighth grade on, I participated in activities that I loved and, of course, made me stand out. I even wound up on the news. College admission was always on my mind. I put everything I had into getting into one of the most prestigious colleges in the U.S.

This year, my senior year in high school, changed things. The Supreme Court’s ruling striking down affirmative action and changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) process induced an atmosphere of confusion and tension. Still, I applied to schools like Columbia and the California Institute of Technology.

My classmates and I vehemently expressed our frustrations with the FAFSA delays; some had to postpone making college commitments (early action) until they were sure that going to their school of choice wouldn’t place them under financial stress. Though we were encouraged to seek out help in school, we only had one counselor dedicated to helping a class of almost 800 seniors with their FAFSA and college application concerns.

For a family with no experience with American college admissions, the best free advice I could find was on platforms like Reddit, College Confidential and Instagram. When news hit that FAFSA had a calculation error, our physics group chat went wild.

The FAFSA errors and delays had the power to impact where we would spend ournext four years. And, from youth, we were taught that these four years had the sole power to determine the rest of our lives. I was lucky to have supportive friends and family and the luxury of a computer and internet at home. But without thousands to spend on expert advice and services, many of my classmates and I were often left in the dark.

Some of my friends expressed having no clue how to fill out the FAFSA with its tricky wording. My dad and I watched a step-by-step YouTube video and an Instagram reel I saved, “What NOT to do on the FAFSA,” to help us figure out how to fill it out.

As the months passed, rejections and waitlists hit me hard. I learned that college admission is not a meritocracy. On a popular Reddit community, I found posts of people lamenting their broken futures now that their Ivy dreams had been crushed.

I heard the stories of kids who stopped talking with friends and family and whose perceptions of themselves changed after getting rejection letters from elite schools. I felt the same. After six rejections, I wondered if I was good enough to pursue astrophysics, the subject I want to study in college.

My ambitious dreams felt foolish. After years of effort, I was planning to stay in my home state of Texas to attend UT Austin.

Just like that, some people changed their attitude toward me even though, in reality, I was the same girl. I had just been overwhelmed by an increasingly stressful and competitive process.

A person who goes to a state school is no less capable of success than a person who goes to Harvard. I’m tired of the college tutors, essay-writing companies and social media creators who are making some teenagers think otherwise.

Related: OPINION: Post-affirmative action, let’s look past our obsession with the Ivy Leagues and other elite schools

I got a call from one of my dream schools, the University of Chicago. I had been accepted off the waitlist, but it seemed likely that I wouldn’t be able to attend because of the cost.

Ultimately, with the help of financial aid, I’ll head there this fall.

We are forced to believe that only the very top colleges matter. When high schoolers are immersed in that mindset, it’s no wonder some feel like their world is ending if they can’t get in.

There is so much that goes into the college admissions process that we can’t control, but we can change the narrative of the culture surrounding it. We can start by providing free support to families who need it.

Siddhi Raut is graduating from Ronald Reagan High School in San Antonio, Texas, and she will be a freshman at the University of Chicago this fall.

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Over the last year I have spent a considerable amount of time talking with college presidents and inquiring journalists. What each asked is essentially the same — What lies ahead for American higher education?

For each, I have had the same answer. The funk that now engulfs us could be never-ending.

Most of those who ask are, like me, steady consumers of higher education’s morning news reports, which feature failed presidencies, campus closures, campus disruptions and political intrusions. This funk is reflected in the continuing dysfunction introduced by the federal government’s failed FAFSA adventure.

Then I discovered I was dead wrong. The real problem is that higher education, like society at large, is being engulfed by a deluge of righteous anger. My evidence? The nightly parade of commentators and hosts on cable news.

With raised voices, waving hands and pronounced grimaces, they declaim against an abundance of villains, bad ideas and misplaced loyalties. Ultimately, I’ve come to understand that what I read about each morning is but an echo of what I watch each evening on TV.

What is needed as an antidote to offset the righteous anger is something that unites rather than divides our campuses. It is a tough but necessary lesson that I finally understood when I joined a convening of 20 institutions developing three-year baccalaureate degrees, something more and more colleges are adding or experimenting with.

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

At that meeting, as before, I was asked what lies ahead for our troubled industry. Only now, my answer was different. What lies ahead is not more funk, but rather a voluntary wading into the darker waters of this righteous anger.

As is my custom, I ended my presentation with a call for questions. First up was a college president who, right on cue, snarled, “All right Bob, we get the message, but what are we supposed to do about it?”

Without hesitation, I told him: “Just do something! Something purposeful solving a key higher education problem. Something of value, a truly good idea that can engage important elements of your campus.”

The need for a uniting, positive force was the lesson the 20 institutions then developing three-year degrees talked about almost endlessly. They now knew what worked, what didn’t and how their effort had come to matter.

It was the lesson Christopher Hopey, president of Merrimack College, learned when he challenged a small group of his faculty to design three-year baccalaureate curricula.

Two months in he told me that his faculty were finding the College-in-3 work liberating, that it had given them a burst of energy and optimism.

Other schools had similar experiences; once they got going, success built on itself. What looked at first to be impossible had proven to be doable. There had been encouragement from their accreditors and a willingness on the part of their institutional friends to help.

Related: Momentum builds behind a way to lower the cost of college: A degree in three years

What makes these results possible is now pretty well understood by the members of College-in-3.

First, nearly every participating institution thought small, offering just a couple of three-year options, not the entire undergraduate curriculum. And while the prospect of an undergraduate degree that costs students one-quarter less was an administrative talking point, the real excitement was generated by the opportunity to design something really new, beginning with what students did their first year.

Old taboos were discarded. New ideas were readily tried and discarded if they didn’t work. The new watchword for effective design became, “Is it truly student centered?”

It became easier to integrate traditional learning outcomes with vocational interests; there was a new willingness to make internships, summer work and learning experiences elements of the new curriculum. That made it easier to consider this question: “What do we expect our students to know and be able to do when they leave us?”

Perhaps the most unexpected development was the feistiness of institutions that faced regulatory roadblocks. The New England Commission of Higher Education, for example, told the first of our institutions to submit proposals for a three-year degree to wait for a while.

Not deterred, the institutions mounted a successful campaign that convinced the commission to issue guidelines for approving three-year options.

In a different region, a public institution sought approval for a three-year degree, and seemingly did everything right, including securing the endorsement of its accreditor. But it ran into a political buzz saw when it sought the required approval of its state legislature: The faculty union declared the idea of a three-year baccalaureate degree dead on arrival. A 25 percent reduction in time to degree would mean fewer faculty jobs in general and fewer jobs in the liberal arts in particular.

The faculty union won. Yet, the institution, refusing to give up, has remained active in College-in-3.

Our push for a three-year alternative is not the only way to do something that matters, to create a uniting force. Still, it neatly illustrates the advantages of what I have in mind, involving both what and how students learn.

College-in-3does not call for protests or other means of acting out, but it can promise success for all students deemed worthy of admission, regardless of their backgrounds.

Not lamentations on a theme. Not the righteous anger of those alienated by a world turned topsy-turvy. Instead, purposeful change designed from the bottom up. That’s the antidote higher education needs.

Robert Zemsky was founding director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

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ATLANTA — Two construction cranes hover over a giant worksite just outside the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

What they’re building is both a show of optimism in and a way to attract more students to something universities badly need but are beginning to worry about: graduate education.

The $200 million project will house Scheller’s graduate and executive business programs in one tower, connected to Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in another. Linking graduate business programs with other disciplines has proven to increase demand; Scheller has already added a science, technology, engineering and math designation to its master’s program in business administration, with a resulting bump in applications, the school says.

At a university focused on technology, doing this “seemed like a natural fit, and we were seeing some of our competitors doing it,” said Peter Severa, Scheller’s assistant dean for MBA student engagement, in a conference room overlooking the construction site.

It’s also a kind of enticement that’s become essential in response to signs that, after years of increase, the graduate enrollment on which universities heavily rely for revenue may be softening as prospective students question the cost of grad school and as shorter, cheaper and more flexible alternatives pop up.

“What we’re seeing now is a combination of a leveling off and a big question mark as to where this long-term trend will go,” said Brian McKenzie, director of research at the Council of Graduate Schools.

Unlike undergraduate enrollment, which has been on a steady decline, graduate enrollment has gone up over the last decade. Undergraduate numbers fell by 15 percent between 2010 and 2021, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, while graduate enrollment grew by 9 percent. That was fueled in part by a change in 2007 that let graduate students borrow up to the full cost of their educations, unlike undergraduates, who can borrow only a limited amount.

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This growth made graduate programs a lucrative source of revenue for universities. To cash in, private, nonprofit, bachelor’s degree-granting universities and colleges in particular vastly expanded their graduate offerings, listing more than three times as many by 2021 as they had in 2005, according to research conducted at the University of Tennessee.

It seemed a good bet. Not even the pandemic slowed the increase in graduate enrollment. It reached its highest level ever in 2021, as workers who had been laid off or furloughed opted to get graduate degrees. Then, in 2022, it fell.

There was a slight rebound in the fall of 2023. But that was largely driven by an increase in master’s degree enrollment at public as opposed to private, nonprofit universities and in the number of international students, who have quietly come to constitute much of the growth at graduate schools. Among domestic students, graduate enrollment was starting to decline.

Sheer population trends helped drive graduate enrollment during the last decade, with an increase in the number of Americans who are candidates for it — ages 25 to 44, with bachelor’s degrees.

But even as there are more of those 25- to 44-year-old candidates for graduate education, the proportion of them who actually go has started to erode. It’s down from 8.4 percent to 6.5 percent over the last 10 years, the higher education research and advisory firm Eduventures found.

“If that continues, and you see a slowing in the underlying population growth, then we’re starting to talk about some challenges,” said Clint Raine, senior analyst at Eduventures.

That’s because of a looming decline in the number of 18-year-olds beginning next year, which is projected to take another big toll on undergraduate enrollment. Basic math suggests that it will eventually hit graduate programs, too.

“The next five years we may be safe,” said Lily Bi, president and CEO of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, or AACSB. “But five years down the road, I think we really need to watch.”

There are other challenges. All those graduate programs that universities rushed to add meant that, even when graduate enrollment was going up, the number of students per program — and, therefore, the revenue that institutions made from them — was going down.

“The issue is that graduate student growth has not kept pace,” Raine said. “So we’ve seen a flood of programs in the market, but student demand has not kept up.”

Another challenge for graduate programs: A strong labor market has many people staying in their jobs instead of furthering their educations.

“The choice became, ‘Do I go to graduate school or do I look at some of these very good opportunities?’ Many of them chose to go with the money,” said Julia Kent, vice president for best practices and strategic initiatives at the Council of Graduate Schools.

Meanwhile, there has been a proliferation of alternatives to traditional graduate degrees.

“A prospective student today has never had more options,” Raine said.

Interest in traditional master’s degrees is down since 2019, Eduventures found, while interest in lower-price, shorter-term certificates and other nondegree offerings is up.

“We live in a fast-food society,” Bi said. “People want something easy, something fast.”

And flexible. Twenty-seven percent of master’s programs and 66 percent of MBAs are now offered online, giving students more choice of when and where to take them. That’s up from 12 percent and 36 percent, respectively, in 2012.

Students’ preference for part-time and online MBA programs translated into an increase in applications for those programs in the academic year that started in the fall, the Graduate Management Admission Council says. But applications overall were down by 3 percent, as enthusiasm waned for more conventional and expensive in-person versions, whose enrollments fell.

Related: Universities increasingly turn to graduate programs to balance their books

There has also been growing coverage of and skepticism about the high amount of debt students assumed for graduate programs that don’t necessarily result in earnings high enough to allow them to repay their loans. Those programs are disproportionately at private, nonprofit universities, which charge twice as much as public universities for master’s degrees in fields such as social work, according to a study by the Urban Institute.

The increase in borrowing for graduate study has sparked a warning from the U.S. Department of Education, which notes that growing numbers of borrowers are finishing their graduate educations with very high levels of debt. And while people with graduate degrees generally earn more than people without them, that premium has flattened out, “suggesting a potential decline in the net return,” the department’s chief economist observed.

At 15 percent of master’s, doctoral and professional programs, the median graduate makes less than the median undergraduate degree holder, according to a separate study by three think tanks across the political spectrum: the American Enterprise Institute, EducationCounsel and The Century Foundation.

The average graduate federal student loan holder owes $70,000, that study found, and one in five has borrowed more than $100,000.

While 90 percent of students who are studying toward or just got bachelor’s degrees say they are interested in graduate school, more than half consider the return on investment an important part of their decision, a survey by the higher education marketing firm Spark451 found. That’s the same questioning of value that has been eating away at undergraduate enrollment.

“We have to think about who’s on the doorstep now to graduate programs. It’s Gen Z. They’re that prime graduate-going cohort, and we know from some of our research that this generation is more price- and cost-sensitive compared to the last,” Raine said.

Mindful of this, the Council of Graduate Schools has created a task force to study the cost of graduate education and has recommended expanding eligibility for Pell Grants to graduate students and lowering the graduate student loan interest rate from the current 8.05 percent, Kent said.

Graduate students represent only a little more than a fifth of all students but account for nearly half of federal student borrowing, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

American students who have enrolled in graduate schools are less than enthusiastic about the value of it. Just over half say it was “definitely worth it,” a survey by the think tank Third Way found.

Related: Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students?

That has left universities to increasingly rely on one market that continues to grow: international graduate students. A closer look at the data shows that they now account for almost all of the rise in graduate enrollment.

The number of international students in U.S. graduate programs rose 21 percent in 2022 — compared to a 4.3 percent increase among international undergraduates — and 22 percent in 2023, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

In almost every graduate field that reported an increase in enrollment, it was due to a big jump in the number of international students, even as the numbers of U.S. citizen and permanent resident students fell.

The number of graduate business students who are U.S. residents or permanent residents dropped 7 percent while the number from other countries went up 19 percent in the fall, AACSB figures show.

That growing dependence on international students could be risky, as became clear during the pandemic, when they all but disappeared. Geopolitical tensions also could have an impact; though more international students continue to come to the United States from China than from any other country, the number of Chinese students fell slightly last year, according to the Institute of International Education.

Still, McKenzie, of the Council of Graduate Schools, pointed out that the number of students from India increased 35 percent during the same period.

Universities are aggressively recruiting international students. Georgia Tech’s STEM designation for its MBA program was devised in part as a way to help reverse a steady decline in the number of full-time MBA students.

Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

That’s because a STEM designation allows international students to stay in the United States and work in their fields of study, without an employer sponsor, for three years after earning a degree, compared to the usual limit of one year.

“If a large portion of our applicants are international, it’s important to be attractive to them,” said Emily Sharkey, Scheller’s executive director of MBA admissions and recruiting. That third year of a visa “is a game-changer as we look at our applications,” added Dave Deiters, associate dean of MBA programs at Scheller, who heads up its career center.

Among other universities whose business schools have added STEM designations: Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Indiana, Michigan, Northwestern and Rice.

Incorporating technology into business education also appeals to undergraduates who might eventually be candidates for graduate degrees.

Even as an undergraduate at Scheller, “I’ve learned coding and stuff I probably wouldn’t have learned at other business schools,” said Elizabeth Curvin, who just finished her sophomore year there. “Compared to my friends at other business schools, we get a lot more of that,” said Amelia Fox, a junior. “You’re set up very well.” And Daniel Manning, a junior, already has a concentration in strategy and innovation. “That gives you practical information about how to manage engineers,” he said.

But none was ready to commit to investing in an MBA.

“I’d probably go out to the workforce and see if it was something that I wanted,” Curvin said. Junior Aubrey Charron said she also wants to try out her planned career in hospital administration first, “just to make sure I’ve really found what I want to do.”

Concerns about graduate enrollment go beyond what students might earn or owe, or how such changes might affect universities’ bottom lines. There are growing shortages of workers who require graduate degrees, the Council of Graduate Schools says.

“It is concerning that domestic enrollment is slightly down, because it will be critical to have more Americans participating in graduate education,” said Kent, at the Council of Graduate Schools.

Yet what’s happening at graduate schools has so far been eclipsed by a focus on falling undergraduate enrollment, Raine said.

“It’s a very much less discussed future trend that we certainly are trying to shed more light on.”

This story about graduate enrollment was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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Niki Elliott skipped the fifth grade. She was so smart that she could have skipped another, she said, but her mother didn’t want her in class with older boys.*

And so she was always bored in school. She had a “near photographic” memory and didn’t need to study, she said, so she never learned how to. She remembers finishing her assignments in five minutes and spending the next 30 waiting for her classmates to catch up.

When she got to college, where classes were much more difficult, she said, “I really had a big crash and burn.”

Elliott is what’s now called twice exceptional, a term used to refer to children who are gifted in some areas, but also experience a learning or developmental challenge. In Elliott’s case, that challenge was attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder which made it difficult for her to manage her time and focus her attention.

She remembers being in college and thinking, “People told me I was so smart, but why am I struggling so hard?”

She became a special education teacher, and said she never stops thinking about how to create a world in which a young Black student like herself could be taught to work with (instead of against) her learning differences, to reach her full potential. Now, a clinical professor in the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego, she’s helping to open, in August, the school’s Center for Embodied Equity and Neurodiversity.

At its simplest, neurodiversity is the idea that everybody’s brains work differently, and that these differences are normal. Neurodivergent, which is not a medical diagnosis, is an umbrella term that refers to people who have autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, dyslexia, or other atypical ways of thinking, learning and interacting with others.  

“Embodied equity,” the other term in the new center’s name, refers to an anti-discrimination approach that considers all aspects of people’s identities — including race, gender, ability, socioeconomic status — when addressing social problems.

“Who gets to develop the genius?” Elliot said. “Who gets the constraint? Who gets pushed more toward the social conformity? And how do we create a space for all learners to thrive according to their unique design?”

Elliott said the center’s work will fall into four main categories: training K-12 teachers and education support staffers, training community college educators, working on policy issues that affect neurodivergent students and offering programs to set up neurodivergent students for success in college and the workplace.

The training is being funded through contracts with schools, colleges and other organizations; additional costs will be covered by grants from philanthropic foundations, Elliott said.

“We really have to work to change the mindset of faculty to understand the ways in which these adaptations to their delivery and development of content could make all the difference for so many more highly bright and capable students to thrive in higher ed,” Elliott said.

Related: Students on the autism spectrum are often as smart as their peers — so why do so few go to college?

If teachers and education support staff are equipped with strategies to help students whose brains work differently, Elliott hopes that more of these students will have the option to go to college. With access to programs designed to help them transition beyond high school, more neurodivergent students will have the skills they need to succeed when they get there, Elliot said.

As the public understanding of brain differences expands, college leaders are trying new strategies to help make campuses more hospitable to neurodivergent students.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Lisa García Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies, convened a task force to identify the needs of neurodivergent graduate students.  The task force is focused on medical care and access to screenings or assessments; disability accommodations for students and for employees, because grad students often work for the university in some capacity; and potential changes to the curriculum.

García Bedolla said that the needs of neurodivergent students force academics to confront a bias in which needless inflexibility is equated with academic rigor.

San Diego State University offers a class focused on cognitive and social differences. It’s designed for neurodivergent students or those who want to work in fields such as social work, special education or psychology. According to the course description, topics include executive functioning and time management; social cognition, context awareness and how to take on the perspective of another person; communication and relationship skills, and self-advocacy.

Inna Fishman, the founding director of SDSU’s Center for Autism and Developmental Disorders, said that although there’s been a “huge paradigm shift,” meaningful change for neurodivergent college students will take time.

“It’s one thing to ask schools to make accommodations for a learner. It’s a whole other empowering thing to help the learner take the bull by the horn and understand themselves.”  

Niki Elliott, professor, School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego

“I don’t mean to imply that it could be done ‘like that,’” Fishman said, snapping her fingers. “I’m sure for everybody, including the big systems, like universities, it’s not a simple transition to this new way of thinking about neurodiversity.”

This work is also complicated by the fact that it’s virtually impossible to know exactly how many students stand to benefit. In part that’s because definitions of neurodivergence vary.

Many experts believe the number of students with brain differences that fit under the neurodivergent umbrella is growing, whether because of an increase in people with such conditions or because of reduced stigma, greater awareness and better identification of such conditions.

For example, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the rate of autism spectrum disorder diagnoses has been steadily increasing since 2002. In 2020, an estimated 1 in 36 eight-year-olds had an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Some experts argue that the rise is the result of overdiagnosis.

Conditions such as autism can go undiagnosed for various reasons, including whether the student’s parents have been educated about such conditions or have the money and time to take their child to the appropriate doctors to be assessed.

The number of colleges where at least 5 percent of students report having a disability has risen from 510 in 2008 to 1,276 in 2022, according to data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. But this measure is imperfect: It includes students who have physical disabilities. Also, roughly two-thirds of college students with disabilities who choose not to disclose their disability to their college.

“A lot of students when they leave K-12, they want to wash their label off of them and start fresh,” Elliott said. “They want to believe that they can do well in college without it, or that they would be mistreated or stigmatized if they let people know.”

Experts say that students whose brains work differently often face challenges during their K-12 education; when they get to college, the challenges don’t stop, they just change.

Laudan B. Jahromi, a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, said these students often struggle with what she called “cognitive flexibility,” which can affect time management, planning, prioritizing and other such organizational skills, and make college classes more difficult to manage. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.) 

Fishman, at SDSU, said students with brain differences might need help taking notes, more time to take exams or to have instructions repeated to them multiple times. They might miss certain nonverbal communication or cues from their professors or peers.

Colleges offer accommodations that can help with some of these challenges, but often students can only unlock this help with a qualifying diagnosis, which can be difficult to get, depending on a student’s health insurance and access to the appropriate assessments.

Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

Many neurodivergent students use medications, which must be taken on a certain schedule, to help manage their conditions, Elliott said. Problems arise when students’ classes are only offered at a time that doesn’t work with their medication schedule. If students need such a course to progress in their major, then they’re stuck trying to pass it in conditions that don’t make sense for them. Elliott said this can lead attrition or underperformance. 

And physically being in the classroom can cause stress for students who are sensitive to factors such as flickering fluorescent lights, certain types of sounds or who have difficulty being around large groups.

Some neurodivergent people struggle with understanding social dynamics and cues, or with social anxiety. Requiring social interaction (by way of graded group projects) puts them at a disadvantage. Socialization can pose significant challenges for these students outside the classroom, too, as they navigate community living, friendships and dating.

“She didn’t have a name for what my brother was experiencing. But she knew that it was not in alignment with who he had the potential to be.”

Kimberly White-Smith, dean, School of Leadership and Education Sciences, University of San Diego

Neurodivergent college students are often left to figure out how to survive in a system designed by and for people without brain differences. The students must also be their own advocates, often without fully understanding their own needs.

“The accommodations high schoolers are getting, they don’t know that they’re getting them; they’re just used to always having them,” said Melissa Boduch, a learning specialist at Beacon College in Florida. “If a student doesn’t necessarily know what they need, they don’t know what to ask for, either.”

That problem is less common at Beacon College because its entire system is designed for neurodivergent students; accommodations are embedded in its structure. Big projects are broken into smaller parts with individual deadlines and extra time is built into the syllabi by giving students advance notice about assignments, Boduch said. Students are required to make regular visits to the Center for Student Success to meet with their learning specialist who helps them stay on top of their workload, understand the challenges they face and learn how to advocate for themselves with their professors.

Though people with brain differences have always existed, the challenges they face have not been thoroughly understood, nor have there been systems in place that could help them move through the world more easily and successfully, said Kimberly White-Smith, dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego, where the new Center for Embodied Equity and Neurodiversity will be housed.  

Related: Almost all students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. Here’s why they’re not.

White-Smith grew up in the foster care system with a brother who was nonspeaking. Because he didn’t talk, social workers thought he must not have the ability to learn and labeled him “uneducable,” she said.  

Her foster mother believed he did have the ability to learn and wanted him to be able to reach his full potential. She fought to have the “uneducable” label removed and transferred both kids to Catholic school. White-Smith’s brother eventually began speaking. He did well enough in his classes to graduate from high school.

“She didn’t have a name for what my brother was experiencing. But she knew that it was not in alignment with who he had the potential to be,” White-Smith said. “We’re much more aware now than we were 40 years ago.”

“A lot of students when they leave K-12, they want to wash their label off of them and start fresh [in college].”

Niki Elliott, professor, School of Leadership and Education Sciences at the University of San Diego

As the public understanding of neurodiversity grows, White-Smith said it’s incumbent on educators and college leaders to make changes to support these students.

“There are a lot of challenges that come with being neurodivergent, but there’s also a lot of potential,” White-Smith said.

Elliott said that the new center will offer a program that will support Black students with and without brain differences starting in sixth grade. The idea is to help students understand their learning styles, what they need to be successful in school and how to advocate for themselves as they move toward college. If the students finish high school and qualify for admission to the University of San Diego, they will have a full-ride scholarship to attend.

Next year, Elliott said the center will begin offering a summer bridge program specifically for neurodivergent students, with a similar curriculum.

“It’s one thing to ask schools to make accommodations for a learner. It’s a whole other empowering thing to help the learner take the bull by the horn and understand themselves,” Elliott said. “It’s teaching each person where their gifts are, how they contribute to a whole and how to use that to navigate a successful higher ed experience.”

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Niki Elliott’s name.

This story about neurodivergent students in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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If survival required a special backpack and a portable first aid kit, you’d do well to hear that with enough time to prepare. If wilderness guides knew all this and didn’t tell you, what kind of wilderness guides would they be?

But when a college student enrolls in a course that has a high rate of students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing – or high DFW rate – the only way they might find that out is through informal warnings from an academic advisor, said Bridget Burns, chief executive officer at the University Innovation Alliance, a group of public research universities that works to increase college graduation rates. Historically, students enrolling in these classes haven’t been equipped with the academic first aid kit they might need to get through the course without becoming part of the DFW statistic. 

Those who run colleges know when a course is a “high DFW” course, Burns said, but their approach is simply to hope that students don’t fail. “And we’re smarter than that, as a sector. We care too much about students to let that kind of posture for our work continue.”

This realization sank in for Burns during the pandemic, when leaders from the University Innovation Alliance began reporting increased DFW rates. Surely Covid itself was a factor, but it was unclear what else was contributing to these students earning Ds or Fs or withdrawing. Factors such as the time of day a class is offered, whether it’s in-person or online, the student demographics and faculty demographics, or the combination of classes a student is taking could all contribute, but there hasn’t been a way of identifying why certain classes have high DFW rates. 

“I was shocked to discover there’s no way of diagnosing DFW rates,” Burns said. “That blew my mind.”

Not surprisingly, students who receive Ds, Fs or Ws graduate at lower rates than their peers, according to a 2021 analysis of data from eight colleges by the Association of Public Land Grant Universities. The report found that 69 percent of students who had never received a DFW graduated in four years, compared to 44 percent of those who had received one DFW, and 22 percent of those who had received more than one DFW.

And students from certain groups get DFWs at higher rates than others, the study found. For example, in 18 of 20 classes analyzed, first-generation students were more likely to have a DFW than their peers. Students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups were more likely than their peers to have a DFW in 19 of 20 classes. Students receiving Pell grants were more likely to have a DFW in 17 of 20 classes. 

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter

Burns said the answer should not be to track students into easier classes, but to ensure that all students have enough academic support to succeed in the tough classes and finish their degrees.

“It’s more expensive, it’s a little bit more resource intensive, I get it,” Burns said. “But it’s so much more costly for us to have students getting Ds, Fs and Ws and walking away.”

Over the past few years, Burns has been working to better understand DFW rates, reduce them, and figure out how to help students recover academically after they’ve received a D or F or withdrawn from a particularly tough class.

Burns and leaders at 11 colleges across the country have put together a sort of academic first aid kit, and are testing it on students who have got a D or F or withdrawn from certain classes. The kit includes things like academic coaching, writing assistance, supplemental instruction and tutoring. As a part of the trial, they also re-enrolled students in the courses they’d failed, at no cost. 

According to data from the University Innovation Alliance, about 77 percent of the students in the trial passed the class the second time, compared to 55 percent of students who paid to retake the course and did so without the added support. These figures reflect the outcomes of 311 students who had earned Ds, Fs or Ws in certain classes and then retook them with the support of the University Innovation Alliance last summer or fall.  

The participating colleges are the University of California, Riverside; North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; the University of Illinois, Chicago; Georgia State University; Purdue University; the University of Utah; Virginia Commonwealth University; Oregon State University; the University of Central Florida; Arizona State University and the University of Colorado, Denver. 

Each college selected courses with high DFW rates, including classes in math, chemistry, biology, psychology and English. 

Burns said that academic support services are clearly helping the students as they retake the difficult classes. And they’re resources that are already available at most colleges. If students are not being connected with these resources before enrolling in these challenging courses for the first time, Burns said, “we are just not giving ourselves the benefit of our own knowledge.”

“Why are we letting students fail when we know that they’re going down a path that is unlikely to be successful?” Burns said. “We’re going to have to interrogate the practices that allow students to consistently struggle with the exact same classes over time. Because it’s not the student that’s the problem.”

This story about difficult college classes was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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Students say the most important factor in choosing a college is academic quality. But the reality is, it’s really hard to tell how much college students actually learn.

While there are a lot of tests to get into college, there are no exit exams to get out. Despite the soaring price of tuition and the fact that most Americans strive to go to college, undergrads often spend little time studying compared to other activities. Instead, they’re working, socializing or partying and, as a result, show limited gains in critical thinking — the hallmark of American higher education.

At the same time, to address mental health concerns, colleges are creating more courses in fields like “the environmental humanities,” Hamilton and Taylor Swift studies and offering more and more wellness days.

So what’s really happening inside classrooms?

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Kirk: Hey, Jon, do you remember that New York University professor who was fired after he was accused of being a little too tough on his students?

Jon: Right. His firing raised all kinds of questions about academic quality and safe spaces and snowflakes.

Kirk: Yeah. His name is Maitland Jones, and he taught organic chemistry for nearly 60 years, 43 at Princeton and then another 15 at NYU, before he was fired. Jones says he was very popular with many of his students, and he says he loved being in the classroom.

What were your students learning?

Maitland Jones: Well, nominally, they were learning organic chemistry, how to interpret the interplay of structure and reactivity. It’s been quite properly noted that many of these students will go on to medical school.

Kirk: Jon, you know the famous saying, write: ‘Save a life.’

Jon: Right: ‘Fail a pre-med.’

Kirk: Yeah. So we asked Jones, do pre-med students really need to know organic chemistry to become doctors?

Maitland Jones: Most doctors don’t really need to know the details of organic chemistry. And that’s right. But what they do need to know how to do is to problem-solve.

Kirk: Over his decades in the classroom, Jones noticed his students’ ability to problem-solve was declining, and as a result, more of his students were struggling. Jones found himself handing out more and more Fs. Then, during the pandemic, his students started a petition. But it didn’t stop there. The students’ parents called the dean to complain that Jones was being too tough on their kids. I mean, that makes sense, right? The families are doling out $50,000, $60,000 for their kids to go to NYU. They want to make sure they get a return on their investment. Right?

Maitland Jones: Well, I don’t think it’s supposed to be that transactional. At least I would hope it isn’t. You know, I’m an old timer, and I believe that there is value in, well, humanities, and a humanistic approach to teaching science.

Kirk: Ultimately, as the parental complaints piled up, NYU let him go.

Maitland Jones: I was fired.

Kirk: Because you were trying to maintain standards?

Maitland Jones: I think I’ve got to avoid that question.

Kirk: Welcome to College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report. Between us, we’ve been covering higher education for years.

Kirk: And in the process, we’ve learned that higher education is a huge, multibillion-dollar-a-year industry. With colleges treating tuition-paying students like customers, and schools increasingly operating like giant corporations.

Jon: So we’re here to tell you some of their most closely held secrets about quality, and what you get for your hard-earned bucks.

Kirk: Today on the show: ‘What Do You Learn and What Will You Earn?’

Okay, so students say one of the most important factors in choosing a college is academic quality or rigor.

Jon: Sure, just behind getting a job. But the reality is that it’s really hard to tell how much students actually learn in college, and whether what they learn will lead to a career. There are a lot of tests to get into college, but there are few exit exams, you know, to demonstrate that you’ve actually learned anything.

Kirk: Perhaps that’s why a declining percentage of Americans see practical value in college degrees. A report from Gallup and Strada Education Network finds that the top reason students attend college is to get a good job. Yet only a quarter of working Americans with college experience strongly agreed that their education was relevant to their work and daily life.

Despite the soaring price of tuition and the fact that most Americans strive to go to college and then get a good job, research shows undergrads often spend a little time studying compared to other activities. Instead, they’re working, socializing or partying, and research finds — get this, Jon — college students show limited gains in critical thinking, the hallmark of American higher education.

Josipa Roksa: Students are not spending adequate time on academics and academic pursuits. And that has consequences for how much they learn in higher education.

Kirk: That’s Josipa Roksa. She’s a sociology professor at the University of Virginia and coauthor of the book Academically Adrift.

Josipa Roksa: And so the data shows that, you know, many students are not making much progress on the critical-thinking skills over the first two years. And it’s not surprising, if you think about the limited number of time spent in class, limited number of time spent studying, then limited gains in critical-thinking skills makes logical sense. Because you have to actually work and develop those skills. And if you’re not investing the time to do it, you’re not going to develop them.

Kirk: If you’ve listened to our other episodes from the season, and you’ve managed to pay for college, and now you’re hoping to develop critical-thinking skills and trying to figure out what you’re going to learn in college, where do you think, Jon, would be the natural place to start?

Jon: Hmm. The course catalog?

Kik: Yes. The menu, Jon. That’s why I took a long look at how course catalogs have changed and expanded over time.

A few years ago, I went out to Amherst College in western Massachusetts, where Catherine Epstein took me down to the school’s archives.

Catherine Epstein: We have the papers of some relatively famous alums, and then we have lots of information just on the history of the college.

Kirk: Epstein is dean of the faculty at the small liberal arts college. Amherst enrolls about 1,900 students and offers more than 850 courses, many of them small seminars.

Catherine Epstein: So these guys are interested in catalogs.

Archivist: Great. Yeah. We pulled the three that you requested.

Kirk: Sitting around a big oak table, Epstein and I dust off the 1966 leather-bound course catalog and compare it to the 2016 paperback.

Kirk: My catalog only has 223 pages, and that includes the index.

Catherine Epstein: This is the 2015-16 catalog. It has 591 pages.

Kirk: More pages means a lot more choices. In the late 1960s, Amherst and other liberal arts colleges responded to faculty demands and switched from a core curriculum, where students all took the same courses, like English, math, and the history of western civilization, to an open curriculum, giving students many options with very few requirements outside their majors.

Catherine Epstein: You can do anything that you want. If you never want to take a science class, you don’t have to take a science class.

Kirk: As we flip through the 2016 catalog. Epstein gives me a sampling of some of the history department’s offerings, like ‘Birth of the Avant-Garde: Modern Poetry and Culture in France and Russia, 1870 to 1930.’

Kirk: That’s not obscure?

Catherine Epstein: That is not obscure. No.

Kirk: Epstein defends every single course in the catalog.

Catherine Epstein: It’s all good stuff, as long as it’s taught in a rigorous way where students are challenged, where students can express their thoughts.

Kirk: With a $2 billion endowment and a $60,000 sticker price, Amherst can afford to pay faculty to teach all these courses. But as the cost of college continues to soar, critics are raising questions.

Michael Poliakoff is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which finds most of the country’s leading colleges don’t have rigorous general education requirements. Poliakoff keeps tabs on those courses that he thinks are foolish.

Michael Poliakoff: ‘Video Games and the Boundaries of Narrative.’ ‘Knowing Television.’ ‘Disney for Grown-ups.’

Kirk: Poliakoff has spent a lot of time studying the evolution of course catalogs.

Michael Poliakoff: What we’ve seen is the multiplication of course options, often without any real respect for the kind of intellectual nutrition that students need.

Kirk: He thinks too many colleges treat their students like customers. And he points to recent studies that found many college students finish their four years without learning much more than what they came in with.

Professors at Amherst reject that criticism. While some of their courses may sound soft, they say students are in fact learning hard skills.

Nicola Courtright: How to analyze a text. How to understand an argument.

Kirk: Nicola Courtright teaches art history at Amherst. She says the college’s open curriculum creates an ideal learning environment.

Nicola Courtright: Students know that they’re not just taking classes because they should, or they might get a job afterwards. They really have to take it out of fundamental interest.

Kirk: But, Jon, now sticker prices at some colleges like Amherst, Wellesley, Boston University and NYU are breaking the $90,000-a-year barrier. That includes tuition, fees, room and board and a meal plan, and maybe a fancy computer. Other schools aren’t far behind. So as college sticker prices have soared, more and more students and families have a justifiable interest in getting a return on their investment.

Jon: Ah, yes. The ROI. It makes sense. I mean, you can’t blame them. If you’re going to pay a steep price tag and take out loans and take on debt, you probably want to know what you’re actually getting for your money, and whether it will lead to a job where you can pay off those loans.

Kirk: New data show that how much you earn over a lifetime largely depends on your choice of major internships and getting a well-paying first job after graduation.

Jon: Yeah, but five and even 10 years after graduation, about half of college-educated workers remain underemployed, meaning they’re ending up in jobs where the degrees they earned aren’t needed. The research organization Burning Glass Institute recently tracked the career paths of 10 million people who entered the job market over the past decade. It found even 10 years out, the number of grads in jobs that don’t make use of their skills or credentials is 52 percent. Advocates want colleges to be more open about what students and their families get for their investment.

Jane Swift: Just like the college admissions process, it is not transparent. It needs to be more transparent.

Kirk: Jane Swift is president of Education at Work, a nonprofit that helps match students with Fortune 500 companies that have workforce shortages.

Jane Swift: Both the people who pay — students — as well as people who hire you have a hard time qualifying exactly what it is that you gain. And I think that there needs to be better efforts to articulate that.

Kirk: Swift is also the former governor of Massachusetts, a state — you might have noticed — with a few colleges and universities. And she says while some of these schools are doing better than others, she’d like to see the federal government hold them all accountable under the so-called Gainful Employment Rule.

Jon: Right, the Gainful Employment Rule that sounds very wonky.

Kirk: Yeah, this long-delayed regulation from the U.S. Education Department is finally set to go into effect in 2026. And, basically, here’s how it works: Students who enroll in an academic program that leaves graduates with debt they can’t afford will have to sign a disclosure agreement. The agreement says that they understand their education might not lead to a well-paying job. The Education Department says the goal is to provide families with more information about the costs and risks, but it only applies to for profit colleges and non-degree programs. Jane Swift points out that colleges and the higher ed lobby strongly oppose it.

Jane Swift: I think they believe it’s a veiled attempt to regulate out for-profit education. And it’s, you know, all students need jobs no matter where you go to college. If it’s good policy, it should be good policy for everyone.

Kirk: By everyone, she means not just for-profit and non-degree programs, but all degree programs.

Jane Swift: I think there’s good players and value in degrees in both nonprofit and for-profit. I think what we really need to understand is what are the outcomes and how can you improve your ability to achieve a positive outcome? You know, I have a liberal arts degree. Two of my three daughters received a liberal arts degree and one received a math degree. But my aspirations for all three of them with that investment were the same. It was a j-o-b at the end of that investment.

Kirk: Swift says more college students need to have work-based learning opportunities, working both before they go to college and then during their college careers, so they can get a job. She says these experiences can give them skills that aren’t taught in the classroom.

Since his days as an engineering professor at Iowa State, Richard Miller has long advocated for more transparency about what students learn and earn.

Richard Miller:  I’m the former president of Olin College of Engineering, where I spent 21 years, and since leaving there, I’ve begun working with others to develop a coalition aimed at changing higher education more broadly.

Most students attend college with the objective of finding their first career. Something like half of all of them, if you interview them, will tell you, ‘The reason I’m here is for my first career.’ But faculty don’t normally think that way. Faculty think about, it’s deeper than that. It’s about changing your life. And that’s kind of a disconnect here in who’s hearing what message.

Kirk: That disconnect appears to be widening. Some students just aren’t going to college straight out of high school. And those who do enroll are increasingly selecting career-focused majors. Fewer college students are majoring in liberal arts subjects like philosophy or English and political science, like you did, Jon.

Jon: Yeah, or history, like you did, Kirk. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of students graduating with a degree in the humanities has fallen by half.

Skepticism about the value of a liberal arts degree is now pretty widespread. In his Netflix special, Kid Gorgeous, comedian John Mulaney riffs about the cost of his English degree from Georgetown.

John Mulaney: Yes, you heard me. An English major. I paid $120,000. How dare you clap? How dare you clap for the worst financial decision I ever made in my life? I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen. And then I didn’t.

Kirk: Despite this growing skepticism, college humanities programs have been found to still offer value. A 2023 report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences concluded humanities majors’ incomes are 40 percent higher than those with a high school degree. At the same time, humanities professors defend new emerging courses or fields, like ‘Taylor Swift and her World’ or the Environmental humanities. They say both are directly relevant to students’ lives and, of course, boost enrollment in their struggling departments.

Richard Miller, an engineer by training, is deeply skeptical of this approach.

Richard Miller: As the country and I think as the world is moving towards addressing sustainability, you can see lots of investments in this area. There’s going to be a lot of careers built on this, but most of those careers are going to require more than having read something about it. It’s going to require some science background and will require understanding how to use what we’ve learned to make an impact.

We’ve got a whole video, by the way, about the rise of the environmental humanities and what it says about the state of higher education, on the GBH News YouTube channel. So check it out. Okay, for now, Miller says too many students are being led to a buffet of college courses and then wondering, hmm, what’s on the menu?

Richard Miller: So they flip through the catalog and they say, ‘Oh, here’s a course in environmental science. It’s taught by the, you know, the Geology Department. But look, they have all these courses in chemistry that are required in mathematics. And I didn’t take a lot of that in high school. Be really hard to do that. Oh, but here’s a course in environmental humanities. Okay. It doesn’t have those science course backgrounds. What’s the difference? This is accessible to me. So I’m going to study this,’ which is great. But you have to realize that when they get to the end of the road, somebody needs to help them understand what career opportunities are with these different labels on them. And I think, personally, higher education could do a much better job of informing kids what the outcome is with these different fields.

Kirk: At the end of the day, these students will become graduates who are facing a job market, right? And they don’t all have the same market value.

Jon: Another way you can learn about the market value of certain degrees and programs is from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. This nonprofit does a detailed study about incomes and jobs for people with different academic backgrounds. We’ll also post a link to that on our landing page.

Kirk: Okay, let’s be clear here, because in many ways, Jon, colleges and universities are operating like large corporations that resist transparency. Corporations with bosses who need to make budget decisions based on customer demand. So if there’s a sudden student interest in, let’s say, Taylor Swift studies or sports management or climate change literature, they ditch those low-enrollment courses in 18^th-century literature or modern poetry and culture, and France and Russia, 1870 to 1930, after the old professor retires. Then they reallocate that faculty position to another department, like computer science or data analytics, which has growing enrollment.

Jon: Yeah, and this is happening everywhere, as colleges try to balance their budgets and make their courses more relevant and more marketable.

Kirk: Sure. But more old-school faculty think students and families are too focused on their return on investment. And higher education should take this opportunity, when it’s under so much public scrutiny, to reimagine general education. They say academic programs should broaden students’ understanding of the world and strengthen their critical-thinking skills, write clearly, speak with confidence and consider differing viewpoints.

Andrew Delbanco: We really want to be careful about losing the broader purpose of college, which in this country has always been an institution that gives young people an opportunity. And that kind of gray space between adolescence and adulthood gives them an opportunity to think about who they are, and more particularly, who they want to be.

Kirk: That’s Andrew Delbanco. He teaches American studies at Columbia, and he’s president of the Teagle Foundation, which is helping dozens of colleges reimagine their curriculum.

Andrew Delbanco: Our country, after all, claims to be different from all other countries because we tell our citizens, you have freedom. What it means to be an American is that you can decide for yourself by what means you wish to pursue happiness. That phrase that is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. And so college has been a very important institution for hundreds of years, by which we try to make good on that promise.

Kirk: That promise to pursue happiness sounds amazing, right? But what specifically are college students learning, and how do we know it will lead to a career?

Andrew Delbanco: We know, frankly, way too little about what students are learning. We give our diplomas out on the basis of earned credits. But we have very little idea what those credits really represent, in the sense of what what’s actually happened to the student’s mind in the course of earning those credits. I mean, every teacher likes to think that they’ve got some reasonable evaluation system in place, which is called grading. But we all know that we have rampant grade inflation. So even the grading system tells us very little about whether students are learning a lot or a little or nothing much at all. So this is a big problem.

Kirk: It’s a huge problem for the higher ed industry. I think it’s safe to say everyone agrees on that. But Delbanco and other academics worry that colleges are cheating young people and the country if they focus too much on job training and gainful employment and don’t give them the chance to pause, learn and then think deeply.

Andrew Delbanco: We want to have democratic-informed citizens in our country, people who are thoughtful about history, have some idea of what the big issues of the day are about and what our democratic institutions are about, why we have checks and balances [in] government, where all the power is not concentrated in one branch or another. We want young people to reflect on their responsibilities as citizens, not just their opportunities as consumers.

Kirk: Delbanco says colleges shouldn’t tell students what to think or believe, but challenge them and ask them hard questions.

Andrew Delbanco: That’s what a college should be, and we need colleges to continue to be that for the sake of the students and for the sake of our democracy.

Kirk: And, Jon, for the record, Delbanco defends the incredible growing course catalog at Amherst and other colleges.

Andrew Delbanco: One reason has gotten so much larger than it used to be is because there’s more knowledge, right? I mean, especially in the sciences, the proliferation of specialized knowledge is mind boggling.

Kirk: To stay relevant. Delbanco says more and more schools are placing a special, renewed emphasis on the importance of general education.

Andrew Delbanco: Which is the term we use to describe that moment at the beginning of college, before the student has decided which specialty is right for him or her. The college has to put up in front of incoming students a serious general education experience so that they’re not plunged immediately into this bewildering, overwhelming, you know, endless menu of choices.

Jon: One of the schools tweaking its gen ed courses is Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where the sticker price is now approaching $100,000 a year. Remember, Kirk, the Chivas Regal effect?

Kirk: Oh, yeah. Well, if you’re charging that much for your whiskey or your degrees, you’ve got to do some quality control from time to time, right?

Well, so colleges and universities now reimagine their curriculum every 20, 25 years. It’s like, I don’t know, the cicadas or something like that.

Jon: Sarah Igo chairs the American History Department at Vanderbilt and is an intellectual historian.

Kirk: Intellectual historian? What does that mean?

Sarah Igo: What that means is I study the history of ideas rather than, say, public policy or economic development or wars or that kind of thing. I study the stuff of culture and ideas and how those change.

Kirk: When it comes to ideas, what kind of ideas are students learning in college and why don’t we know?

Sarah Igo: It’s a great question. A hard question to answer. Students are learning all kinds of things, of course, in college. And we don’t know because we probably haven’t been as attentive as we should be about evaluating and assessing what they know and how they know and how they learn, as I would argue, what is more important than either of the things: how to ask questions to get them further along the path toward either of those objectives.

Jon: As an intellectual historian, Igo says, historically, what students learn can’t be captured in a single answer or data point.

Sarah Igo: Because universities and colleges offer such an incredible wealth of options — electives, majors, minors, small credential programs. It’s the wealth of what is offered. And then the number of pathways through is really quite astonishing and would have astonished someone looking at college, or who went to college 100 years ago, or honestly even 75 years ago. The big explosion in electives and kind of choose your own adventure really happened after the mid century, mid 20th century.

Kirk: Okay, Vanderbilt has been around for 150 years. Why is the university reimagining its general education now? What’s the goal?

Sarah Igo: We are, I would say, part of a kind of movement. I won’t say back because it’s not back. It’s definitely forward. But a kind of move toward a more common understanding of what students need from their college education, and particularly what they need to understand is the value of a liberal arts education, which, you know, has gotten kind of battered in public culture in recent decades, and maybe especially in the last year or so.

Jon: Kirk, I went to a conference recently of higher education people, and they had a panel about this. And they concluded that two of the most unpopular words in the English language right now in America are ‘liberal’ and ‘arts.’ That’s why Vanderbilt a few years ago committed to taking a hard look at what students and graduates really need to succeed today. But Igo says the committee charged with reimagining gen ed quickly ran into a brick wall.

Sarah Igo: We didn’t actually have an idea of what general education was or what it should be. We actually didn’t even have a vocabulary for it. And so, our first effort was to kind of figure out, you know, for students in the 21st century, what is a meaningful liberal arts education? How do we help them, see that value? How do we help our own faculty articulate what that is? And what does it mean? We need to reform about how we’re doing things.

Jon: Igo says she and other university leaders decided students needed some common intellectual experience.

Sarah Igo: It doesn’t need to be a canon. Doesn’t need to be western civ. Doesn’t need to be a kind of older model of a foundation or a core. But students actually would really benefit from faculty designing a program, especially in the first year, that all students take in common, to get a chance to understand the richness and breadth of a liberal arts education. Right? Read something from philosophy, read something from economics, read something from neuroscience, that are circling around the same question perhaps. That’s how our new curriculum is designed. And mentor them in small groups where the idea is to think about big questions, but also to learn how to read and write in ways that will serve them well for the rest of their college career and beyond.

Kirk: Chemist Renã Robinson is one of the Vanderbilt faculty mentors.

Renã Robinson: I teach the science, technology and values core course for undergraduate freshman students. But I also teach upper-level chemistry courses and graduate-level chemistry courses and things like mass spectrometry.

Kirk: Do you teach organic chemistry?

Renã Robinson: Absolutely not.

Kirk: Okay, so what do students get out of this new program? Like, if I’m a chemist or chemistry student, what why do I need general education?

Renã Robinson: I think what general education does is it causes you to question the history behind some of the things that you’re learning. It gives you an opportunity to ask questions about how does the way that I’m being taught and the material that I’m being taught provide value to me or provide value to society? And, I think, for our students to learn how to think critically. General education is a great space to do that because when they get into courses like chemistry and upper-level chemistry courses, we want them to be critical thinkers, especially around data that they’re generating or data that we’re providing them in classes and these hard, sometimes abstract phenomena. And so if they have the skill set to already think critically, then they can do well when they get to these classes.

Kirk: Robinson says reimagining gen ed helps, but what’s really important is a good evaluation mechanism, something to understand what students are learning.

Renã Robinson: So in this core pilot course, there is an assessment of what students know and what they’re thinking about, the topic, generally before they come into the course, and then there are surveys that are given to the students throughout the course and at the end of it. And there are also surveys that are given to faculty who work piloting and teaching these different types of courses throughout, as well as some of the faculty that are helping to coordinate the courses across different sections.

Chloe Whalen: My name is Chloe Whalen, and I am a communication of science and technology major. It’s the new kind of arts and science program at Vanderbilt.

Jon: Whalen is from a small town in Illinois. The daughter of a teacher and a firefighter, she received generous financial aid to attend Vanderbilt, and her parents are helping her pay the rest. She and her parents want a return on that investment — a j-o-b at the end. So Whalen says academic quality in choosing a college was extremely important to her.

Chloe Whalen: Like, at the end of the day, you know, you go to college for the academics. Yes, you know, you want there to be good sports teams, if you’re into that. You hope that the dining food isn’t too bad. But at the end of the day, like, if the college doesn’t have good academics, what are you spending your money on? It’s basically just a summer camp where you go to a few classes.

Kirk: In her first semester on campus, the new gen ed class she enrolled in was called ‘Being Human: Encountering Others.’

Chloe Whalen: When I signed up for it, I was, like, this sounds like I’m just going to be sitting around, like, thinking, just like an old, like, Greek philosopher. And I was kind of, like, I feel, like that’s going to get a little boring. Like, am I really paying to go to college just to sit and talk about, like, the meaning of life? You know, I don’t really know how I really felt about that. I came in thinking it was going to be my least favorite class that semester, and it ended up actually being my favorite.

Kirk: Why was it your favorite?

Chloe Whalen: The level of discussion we had in that class was really good, and I felt like every time we were all very engaged in it. We all had thoughts and opinions to share, and it really did make me think a lot about kind of why I was here. Like, not just on earth, like, at college and, like. what that says about my future and what I want for it. And also, just, like, human nature, what sets us apart? Why are we the species that, you know, wears clothes and has, like, different languages and also, you know, does things like go to college —what makes us do that?

Kirk: That’s a great question.

Kirk: That’s a great question. And it’s one that I had to spend a lot of time thinking about last semester.

Kirk: So why did you go?

Chloe Whalen: I kind of felt like it’d be a missed opportunity to not go to college, just because I’d always done well in school. You know academics always came easy to me. So I was, like, well, I got to go to college, and I guess I just decided, like, once I got past that sense of, like, obligation that I had felt and really thought about what makes me want to do this and not just the feeling that I have to.

Jon: It’s easy to say kids today don’t learn as well or as much as they used to. Sarah Igo, the intellectual historian, says she does think we’re in a moment where a whole lot of things are conspiring to make traditional learning more difficult.

Sarah Igo: Beyond Covid, beyond mental health crises, which are, of course, related, I think I would put first the war for attention on students’ brains. It’s really clear. And students are quite frank about this. You ask them, you know, about the reading for a class. They’ll say that they don’t read, they can’t read uninterrupted, that they can’t sit and read for a chunk of time. And that chunk of time, I think, is getting smaller and smaller. Too many things whistling, buzzing, etc. And there are some steps we can take to deal with that. I mean, one of the things we’re experimenting with, which I’m most excited about, is devoting some of our classes in the first-year class sessions to reading. I mean, this whole period for an hour in 15 minutes, all we’re going to do is read together.

Jon: And that brings us back to Maitland Jones, the organic chemist we heard at the top of this episode, who reportedly was fired for being too tough on his students. Jones says reducing digital distractions and increasing in-person attendance really matter.

Maitland Jones: Absolutely. Here’s an experiment: Give an exam on Friday. It’s graded that night. The students get their grades either late Friday night or Saturday morning. So they all know. The first lecture, Monday or Tuesday, you pass around a yellow pad and ask the students to just write their score. No names, nothing like that. Just the number, right? So you can get the average score of the people in class. And since you know the overall average, you can back out the average score for those who are not in class. And there’s a 20-point difference. So yes, it really matters whether you have your body in that classroom.

Kirk: Jones says it’s increasingly tempting to say, oh, you know, students are just struggling with the effects of Covid and mental health. But he says that’s not right.

Maitland Jones: The decline in student attendance and students’ ability to read and answer the right question was happening well before that. Covid was important because the sort of gentle decline and how things were going fell off a cliff. But it was happening before. And for 10 or 12 years, many of us noticed that not only were student grades going down and student attendance was going down, but their ability to read a question and to answer the right question was going down. There was an epidemic in answering the wrong question.

Kirk: So what was happening 10 years ago? Jones says the decline coincided with the widespread adoption of the iPhone.

Maitland Jones: It’s unbelievably seductive, and like social media in general, it’s so seductive that it seems to have dragged students away from certainly the classroom and, in a way, from the notion that learning requires pretty serious effort.

Kirk: Today, at 86 years old, Jones is retired and living in rural new Jersey in a renovated barn.

Maitland Jones: It’s got a great big room and a very good piano.

Kirk: With his newfound free time, he organizes jazz concerts, and he recently co-produced a six TV set of the complete works of Thelonius Monk.

Maitland Jones: Which, by the way, is absolutely great, thanks to the musicians.

Kirk: Do you miss the classroom and the lab? Would you still like to be teaching?

Maitland Jones: I would. On the other hand, how many years was it? Forty-three and 15? That’s a lot of years.

Kirk: A pretty good run.

Maitland Jones: I wouldn’t say that I didn’t have a good time doing.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsconnect@wgbh.org, or leave us a voicemail at 617-300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate.

This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza. …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor. Ellen London is executive producer. Production assistance from Diane Adame.

Jon: Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. All of our music is from college bands. The theme song and original music in this episode is by Left Roman out of MIT. Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

Kirk: College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 8 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

For Janelle Bell, a 39-year-old working mom, completing her degree wasn’t financially or personally possible. Her priority was providing for her family on an annual salary of just $30,000. Drowning in $40,000 of student loan debt, she was forced to drop out of college and work full time.

Janelle’s story is all too familiar throughout the U.S. — stuck in a low-paying job, struggling to make ends meet after being failed by college. Roughly 40 million Americans have left college without completing a degree — historically seen as a golden ticket to the middle class.

Yet even with a degree, many fall short of economic prosperity.

Data from 1 in 4 higher education institutions shows that, a decade after enrolling, the average salary for college attendees is less than the average salary of high school graduates.

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

A majority (56 percent) of Americans don’t think that a college degree is worth the cost, a recent survey found. College enrollment dropped by 8 percent from 2019 to 2022, and Americans are sending a clear message: They need and want more options than just a college degree to make a good living. With the average price of tuition and fees across private and public universities increasing over 130 percent in the last two decades, who can blame them?

These factors prompt Americans like Janelle to seek alternative paths into the middle class.

As college enrollments fell over the last decade, the number of apprenticeships increased by more than 50 percent, and nearly half of American workers now say they have some form of alternative credentials. Clearly, Americans want affordable, fast, flexible options with a high return on investment.

Policymakers must respond to this overwhelming shift in public opinion and start helping Americans pay for these college alternatives.

One approach: Expand the federal Pell Grant program in order to give Americans greater ownership of their education journeys and the financial freedom to pay for alternative programs that lead to a better life.

Since its authorization in 1965, Pell has awarded need-based federal financial aid to more than 80 million low-income students to pay for college. In the 2022-23 academic school year, 34 percent of undergraduate students received a Pell Grant.

Yet, research shows that Pell students graduate at a rate of 18 percentage points less than their non-Pell peers. In short, the large number of Pell aid recipients is not leading to a significantly higher number of lower-income Americans earning college degrees.

In its current state, the program is not meeting its founding goals. That’s why it’s time to update this nearly 60-year-old federal program to meet the educational needs and demands of Americans today.

During his State of the Union speech, President Biden signaled his intent to “continue increasing the Pell Grants to working- and middle-class families” and ensure that college remains affordable. His fiscal year 2025 budget proposal includes a $2.1 billion increase in federal funding as part of the administration’s plan to double the maximum Pell Grant award by 2029.

But this doesn’t go far enough. We must also expand this access to Americans like Janelle, who need to be able to pay for short-term, nondegree education options.

Related: OPINION: Here’s why a costly college education should not be the only path to career success

Thankfully, the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, expected to be up for a full vote in the House of Representatives this year, would expand the Pell Grant program to include affordable and flexible short-term career education programs.

The bill would also create standards for these programs, to ensure that they provide the training necessary for today’s most in-demand industries and meet employer hiring requirements.

Giving Americans more access to educational routes without the high price tag of a four-year degree would create a new, more diverse and skilled talent pool that we could easily connect to employers looking to fill in-demand jobs.

This modern talent pool would benefit the entire economy. Manufacturing, for instance, is still recovering from the pandemic and is hungry for skilled talent. The National Association of Manufacturers recently projected that roughly 2.1 million manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2030.

Many of these jobs require training beyond a high school diploma, and short-term programs have proven successful at filling that gap. This is particularly important as more sectors become increasingly tech driven. For example, there is a pressing need for data analytics and digital skills that we know can be quickly taught by nondegree programs.

The median salary for U.S. high school graduates with no college experience is a little over $44,000 — which doesn’t cover the roughly $4,300 a month that a single person needs to afford today’s living expenses.

Americans who completed programs at the national workforce development nonprofit we run are earning wages that are higher than those of U.S. high school grads without a college degree, according to our latest Wage Gain Analysis.

In a study of 2018-22 program completers, University of Virginia researchers found that three-plus months after completion, our learners’ average annual wages had increased from $26,000 to $50,000 — more than 92 percent.

These are life-changing wage increases that can help a family afford long-term housing, allow a parent to go from working two jobs to one or enable these Americans to pay for basic medical care.

After Janelle completed her training with us and landed a job, her annual wages increased by 66 percent, and today she’s a successful technical project coordinator earning $50,000 a year. Her career promises continued upward mobility, opening new financial opportunities that seemed unattainable just a few years ago, so that she and her family can thrive.

Moving Americans from low-wage jobs into family-sustaining careers is possible. Imagine how many more lives could be changed if we gave more people the power to use federal Pell aid to pay for these pathways.

College degrees should remain one of the many learning options available to Americans wanting to further their education. But it’s time for policymakers, workforce development leaders and businesses to advocate for lower-cost, short-term education opportunities, and that starts with passing the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act.

Connor Diemand-Yauman and Rebecca Taber Staehelin are co-CEOs of Merit America.

This story about college alternatives was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post OPINION: Americans need help paying for new, nondegree programs and college alternatives appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The students were the last to know.

On April 29 – just a week before finals – Wells College announced that it would close. The last-minute decision by the 156-year-old liberal arts college in upstate New York sent students rushing to find new colleges for the fall. And it threw newly accepted students, who had already put down deposits, into a frantic scramble to see if the colleges they had turned down would take them back. Faculty members, having missed the academic hiring cycle, were left facing unemployment. 

But there is mounting evidence that Wells administrators knew for months that the college would close, even as they made public assurances that all was well. 

Wells quietly made student transfer arrangements with another college last fall, according to Wells’ accreditor. And Wells agreed earlier this year to convert the land-use zoning for the campus from institutional to mixed use, which would allow the buildings and land to be used, and sold, for non-educational purposes.

Wells joins a parade of colleges that have been closing this year at a rate of one per week, as enrollment dips and pandemic-era aid dries up. The process is never easy, throwing students’ lives into chaos, ending employment for faculty in a field where jobs are scarce and, in some cases, adding extreme stress to small-town economies. But abrupt closures put this process on steroids.

“What concerns me here is that there’s no accountability,” said Anna Anderson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center and a Wells alum. “The students were given just days to pack up and leave … if an institution that’s this respected can do something that’s so horrible, what’s to stop others from doing the same thing?”

Wells has struggled with enrollment declines and budget crunches for years, but recently administrators had assured faculty and local leaders that it was in fine shape. 

In late February, two months before announcing the closure, Wells president Jonathan Gibralter wrote to the board of trustees of the Village of Aurora, where the college is located, that rumors about the college shutting its doors were unfounded. 

“Let me assure you that we are accepting enrollment deposits for the fall semester — our fall to spring retention rate for our students is higher than it has been in several years,” Gibralter wrote in a statement. “We are hiring staff and we are developing an operating budget for the next fiscal year. We are full steam ahead.”

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One week before the college’s board of trustees voted to close, Wells posted a message on its Facebook account encouraging new students to visit the college for an “admitted students’ day.”

Faculty members say they were never told that the college was in danger of closing, even though they asked regularly about the state of the college at monthly faculty meetings.

“When the budget was presented to us, if you looked at the numbers, it was pretty grim,” said Laura McClusky, who has been a professor at Wells for 23 years. “But if you listen to the narrative, it was, ‘We’re doing great. Retention is up, the number of applications is up.’”

Even as administrators were assuring faculty that the college was in good shape, Wells was already making arrangements as early as last November with other institutions for them to become what’s known as a “teach-out” partner. That designation signals to a student that an accreditor has approved a college as an appropriate place to continue their education when their current college closes.

“There seems to be evidence that they were preparing at that time,” said Nicole Biever, who is the chief of staff at Wells’ accreditor, Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

At the same time, the Village of Aurora’s ad hoc zoning committee was working alongside Wells administrators on a proposal that would convert most of the college’s campus from institutional to mixed-use zoning. The move would allow the use, and sale, of buildings for purposes not related to the college. The village board of trustees voted in favor of the change in March and has submitted the plan to the state for approval.

Wells officials acknowledged its previous agreements with other institutions.

“The College, over the course of many months, prepared itself should the Board make the difficult decision to close the institution,” Kristopher LaGreca, Wells vice president of marketing and communications, said in an email. “The Board and senior leadership worked out confidential agreements with other institutions to support our students in the event of a closure.”

In response to questions about the re-zoning, LaGreca said that Wells had “continuously looked to divest in non-academic properties in order to bridge gaps in annual budgets.”

He added that the decision to close was “centered on what was best for our students, our prospective students, and their families.”

 “Wells College faces significant financial challenges,” Gibralter wrote in a letter announcing the closure. “We conducted a comprehensive review of the institution’s financial health and future sustainability, including an independent analysis, which has led to the necessary conclusion of closure.”

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The college told faculty earlier this semester that there was a new articulation agreement with the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, which would bring in online students. But the deal collapsed and with it went the hope of an enrollment boost.

Members of the board of trustees declined, or didn’t respond to, requests for comment about why the decision was so last-minute, but the vote was not unanimous. The board has agreed to meet with faculty to explain the timeline next week, according to two faculty members with knowledge of the planned meeting.

Abrupt closures can make it much more difficult for students to earn a degree.

“You often see these domino precipitous closures, where students will go to a school that closes and then they’ll be funneled into the school that most wants their money,” said Jessica Ranucci, a supervising attorney for the New York Legal Assistance Group. “The school that most wants their money is a school that’s teetering on the brink, and then that school closes.”

Unfortunately, being an accreditor-approved teach-out college doesn’t necessarily mean an institution will stay open. Middle States had designated Wells as a teach-out school for Cazenovia College and Medaille University, both of which closed last year – forcing students who had just arrived at Wells in the fall to find a new college for the second time. 

“To take on students from other places that have closed when you yourself might be closing is just horrible,” said Meghan McCune, a Wells alum and former trustee who is also a professor at Northern Michigan University. “Not to mention, faculty and staff. It’s really hard to find other positions, and it’s completely out of the academic cycle. There’s no way that most people are going to be able to find something. All the hiring is done now.”

Students were stunned by the announcement.

“You don’t think your school is going to close down when they’ve given you a lottery number to choose your room for next year. They’ve let you pick out your classes for next year. They’ve let you order your gowns for next year,” said Olive Blair, 20, who just finished her junior year and is the class president. “It was a shock to say the least.”

A paper proposal for a fall conference was due two days after the announcement was made and she spent the week scrambling to find another college where her credits as an art history major would transfer, not to mention ensuring that the finances would work.

Last year, 82 percent of Wells’ roughly 350 students had federal student loans and close to half received Pell grants, federal aid that goes to low-income students. 

“It doesn’t make sense to me that they had to wait until the week before finals,” said Blair. “Did you just realize we don’t have enough money?  You can’t be that dysfunctional. Something must have been known prior to this.”

People with an inside track were well aware of the problems.

“It was the elephant in the room. We’ve been talking about it for 15 years,” said Bonnie Bennett, who was mayor of Aurora from 2010 until 2022. “But whenever anyone raised the issue of Wells closing, they would deny it. They would say, ‘You’re anti-Wells.’”

Related: Getting a college degree was their dream. Then their school suddenly closed.

Wells was put on probation in 2019 by Middle States, requiring that, among other things, it show evidence of “adequate fiscal and human resources” and proper financial planning. The following year, in the height of the pandemic, a letter was sent to alumni saying that the college could close if it didn’t raise money quickly. The fundraising appeal worked – alumni donated millions of dollars. The college also received $3.5 million between 2020 and 2022 from pandemic-related federal funds. 

In light of the college’s financial struggles, some faculty members and students are upset about the money spent on President Gibralter’s compensation. In fiscal year 2019, just after Wells was put on probation, Gibraltar collected more than $78,000 in bonuses, bringing his total compensation to more than $386,000, according to federal tax filings. The following year, as the college was begging for donations, he took in more than $345,000 and in fiscal year 2021, the last year for which figures are available, his total compensation was more than $368,000. (The college declined to comment.)

CNYCentral first reported Gibralter’s bonuses.

Middle States took Wells off probation in the summer of 2021, despite enrollment having cratered to about 330 that year from about 420 the previous one. 

An independent audit of the college in 2022 also showed that it had been dipping into its restricted endowment earnings. And it was discounting its tuition at an average of 70 percent in the 2021-22 academic year.

When asked why Wells was taken off probation, given its ongoing financial troubles, Biever said Middle States continued to monitor Wells over the next four years, sending teams to visit the college.

“In addition, the Commission required the institution to submit reports including financial information multiple times,” Biever said in an email. “When institutions submit reports, the Commission examines the evidence submitted by institutions and considers that information as part of the multi-level decision making process.”

After Wells announced it was closing, Middle States put it back on probation, citing the abrupt closure and its failure to make plans to ensure the well-being of its students. But the move will have no impact on current students or faculty.

Middle States has yet to approve any of two dozen teach-out colleges announced by Wells even though the college held a campus fair on May 3 with some of the institutions.

The New York State Department of Education said it wasn’t notified about the closure until the weekend before it was announced.

State Sen. Rachel May introduced a bill last week that would require colleges to provide notice of closure at least a year in advance, host public meetings about the decision and provide students with teach-out agreements at least six months in advance.

Students from closed schools usually don’t make it to graduation. Fewer than half of students at closed colleges end up transferring to other institutions, according to a 2022 study, and more than half of those who did transfer left their new college without graduating.

Faculty and staff are scrambling to find jobs, but at this point it’s almost impossible for them to find an academic position for next year. They will lose their health insurance coverage at the end of June (they have an option to pay a COBRA to extend the coverage). The college has said it doesn’t have the money to give them severance payments, although some faculty are wondering about the millions of dollars in assets in the property the college is sitting on. 

“Someone would ask about the financial health of the college at every faculty meeting, but they never said there was any danger of closing,” said Andrew Hunt, who was a visiting assistant professor of theatrical design and technology at Wells. “That’s the complaint many of us have. You should have said something.”

This story about Wells College closing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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