My youngsters are youngsters now, 16 and 13. In recent times, weight units have changed Lego units, video video games have changed board video games and pins on Pinterest have changed chalk on boards. Whereas my spouse discovered almost each transition emotional and vital, it was not till it got here to boxing up and donating our image books that I started to ask, with a tear or two in my eye, “Is it me, or is it dusty in right here?” To be clear, I’ve nothing in opposition to the younger grownup style and nonetheless personal my previous copies of each Animal Farm and The Lord of the Flies, however, candidly, I miss the simplicity, poignancy and imagery of fairy tales and kids’s tales, maybe as a result of the previous adage is true: An image is value a thousand phrases.
And so, whereas a whole lot of hundreds of phrases have stuffed on-line and print publications during the last decade in an effort to explain the numerous challenges going through American greater schooling enrollment, the reality is we may sum it up with three footage and a brief story: the Cliff, the Pandemic and the Hurricane.
The Cliff
As soon as upon a time, there was a demographer named Nathan Grawe who lived within the far northern reaches of our honest land. At some point, in his map-filled examine at Carleton Citadel, he appeared into his crystal ball and noticed one thing disturbing. As he peered intently, he realized that there was a Cliff far within the distance that posed a menace to the dominion’s schools. So, Sir Nathan bubble-wrapped his crystal ball, rolled up his maps and commenced touring the countryside warning leaders about what he had seen.
In board rooms crammed with fruit trays and cheese platters, he introduced to trustees, presidents and legislators, “Watch out for 2025 and past! The Cliff is coming! The beginning dearth is actual! That you must change your methods now if you wish to shield your campuses. There is not going to be an countless provide of conventional college students sooner or later. The highest of the funnel is shrinking!”
Whereas some buried their heads of their arms or the proverbial sand and have been sluggish to make modifications, many deans and administrators of admission unsheathed their quills and commenced drafting fancy paperwork known as Strategic Enrollment Plans to forestall their faculty from falling off the aspect of the approaching cliff. Whereas these plans diverse from campus to campus, they usually included urging leaders to spend money on some mixture of the next ways: sturdy switch articulation agreements, dual-enrollment applications and partnerships, an enlargement of on-line programs and levels, worldwide pupil recruitment, and enhanced service to graduate and grownup learners.
The Pandemic
Within the spring of 2020, whereas campuses fortified their gates and enrollment sentries saved their binoculars targeted on the Cliff, a horrible illness struck the land. Like a thief within the night time, COVID-19 got here with no warning and introduced chaos, confusion and controversy to schools, in the end altering postsecondary plans for hundreds of American college students. Lecture rooms, dorm rooms and board rooms have been evacuated, quads grew to become ghost cities, and the identical leaders who had been making long-term plans to climate the Cliff now needed to make real-time selections about how you can maintain college students wholesome and protected whereas juggling the numerous budgetary implications of on-line course supply and plummeting auxiliary revenues.
In the end, nevertheless, whereas time was in brief provide, cash was not. Distant within the nation’s capital, Congress handed magical scrolls just like the Coronavirus Support, Reduction and Financial Safety Act, which included a Greater Schooling Emergency Reduction Fund. In complete, HEERF offered greater than $14 billion of emergency funding to greater schooling, together with greater than $6 billion on to college students within the type of emergency grants.
In consequence, honest reader, opposite to the apocalyptic rhetoric you’ll inevitably discover at the hours of darkness corners of the interwebs, nonprofit faculty closures (executed and deliberate) have averaged just a bit over one per thirty days since 2020. Unbeknownst to kingdom sages, nevertheless, extra challenges loomed.
The Hurricane
As campuses welcomed their college students again in fall 2023, darkish clouds started to crest the horizon. The winds picked up and introduced with them phrase of a slow-moving kind—nay, storm—known as FAFSA.
College students and households waited patiently. October got here—however no FAFSA. Halloween and Thanksgiving gave solution to the winter break and nonetheless no FAFSA. Alas, it was not till the day of our Lord, Dec. 30, 2023, that the FAFSA arrived. And with it, turbulence, disturbance and perturbance from all corners of the land.
All through the spring the FAFSA storm raged. Expertise failed, the Division of Schooling flailed, monetary support administrators wailed and no pupil support provides have been mailed.
In extremely ranked, well-resourced, nationally distinguished establishments, orders have been despatched posthaste: “Leverage the endowment! Make means for the CSS Profile! Preserve the oil lamps lit for weary monetary support employees members!” Nonetheless, within the universities serving the best numbers of low- and middle-income college students, money reserves and monetary support employees members have been in brief provide. Regardless of the noble efforts of the weather-weary crew, the storm waters continued to rise and the onslaught of federal failures and foibles dampened morale and enrollment prospects.
Compounding and confounding the issue, this occurred simply as COVID aid {dollars} have been drying up, and in contrast to throughout the Pandemic, there was not one other injection of federal money to offer college students with well timed monetary support.
And that brings us, reader, to as we speak …
The Eye
Summer time information protection described one thing known as “a closing FAFSA completion hole”—from a year-over-year deficit of 40 p.c within the spring to current studies placing that quantity underneath 10 p.c. But information of hope and lightweight might merely be an indication we’re within the Eye of the Hurricane, as a result of simply as there was a major time lapse between the FAFSA opening and schools receiving pupil knowledge, there’s a comparable chasm between FAFSA completion and a pupil truly receiving support and subsequently gaining the boldness wanted to start faculty. In consequence, I concern regional public schools and extra accessible personal schools are almost certainly to see vital enrollment declines when census totals are printed later this fall.
On the point of the Cliff and with the federal {dollars} from the Pandemic now gone, the Hurricane is more likely to be the accelerator of drastic measures within the 12 months forward (layoffs, furloughs, gross sales of property and extra) as we emerge from the Eye into the winds and rains once more.
Storm Preparation
Jeremy Singer, at the moment on mortgage from the Faculty Board to the Division of Schooling, has said that this 12 months’s FAFSA will once more not open to all college students on Oct. 1, however he guarantees a Dec. 1 launch on the newest. But at this level, most monetary support administrators in our story have one eyebrow raised in suspicion at any assertion emanating from the Schooling Division’s heralds.
What ought to the 12 months forward maintain?
- On the campus degree: The final 12 months has proven the pressing want for establishments to spend money on their monetary support data programs and employees. (See: monetary support administrators’ raised eyebrows on the prospect of a clean support 12 months.)
- On the state degree: Continued efforts to incentivize FAFSA completion for graduating seniors and evaluation of upper schooling appropriations, significantly surrounding complete monetary support applications.
- On the federal degree: Continued advocacy to extend the worth of Pell Grants and elevated funding to the Workplace of Federal Scholar Support.
- On the Division of Schooling: In true fairy story type, lock whoever is working to repair the FAFSA in a tower and throw away the important thing till it’s performed; spend money on the combination of programs to ease the burden of making use of for federal monetary support; combine AI help inside the FAFSA to facilitate accuracy and timeliness.
Whereas our story began with a demographer wanting into the long run, historians are more likely to look again on the confluence of the Cliff, the Pandemic and the Hurricane because the story of how the panorama of upper schooling modified without end.
The excellent news is I’ve a field filled with lighthearted kids’s books in my storage if you wish to borrow one.