'Losing A Generation': Fall College Enrollment Plummets For 1st-Year Students
 

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/92583...bCybFBJ8MppYJg

The obvious question here on Greekchat is: what will this mean for Greek life in both the short and long term?

As with any life cycle, adaptability is key. Greeks are well-prepared to weather this long-predicted baby bust as well as the unpredicted pandemic. We will find solutions. We have plans.

Why all the dramatics from Mr Shapiro? He seems to want to complain of lowered expectations of students and more limited access to higher education rather than say collegiate curriculums are changing with the times.

Machines have long been taking over functions formerly accomplished thru jobs held by citizens of the world. New formulas and processes often mean civilization is PROGRESSING, and people need to ADAPT instead of cry foul because the old way no longer works.

Having more free time because we have freed ourselves from the burden of jobs now done by machines, what could we be doing to improve ourselves and mankind with all that free time?

Apparently, from the people that I know, watch Cat Videos....

I suspect they will skyrocket for Fall 2021. With all the uncertainty, a lot of kids took gap years. Who wants to pay mega tuition to stay at home and take courses online?

Many students I know were angry that they were paying full tuition to essentially teach themselves. I don't blame them. My 2 youngest sons had to take advanced foreign language courses online and hardly learned a thing.

My best friend is a university president and she told me that fear of taking out student loans, in the current economy, has also been a big factor.

A lot of these schools charging $35K+/year are going to be victims of their own greed.

Amen!!

My daughter coordinates state alumni interviews for W&L, and she has been inundated with interview requests from applicants this fall: full, current, annual price tag for W&L is $74,000. They have a huge endowment, offer very generous need-based and merit aid, and they've created a "bubble" this year where life has gone on as normally as possible with face-to-face classes and activities.

I think the only "winners" in this are going to be the pricy, highly selective, small liberal arts colleges who have the funds to create the safest possible space for students, can offer generous financial aid, and have small enough student populations to make it possible. They're going to attract more of the high achievers than schools with brand name recognition who are offering mostly online this year.

Most other institutions are going to feel the heat -- even the prestigious research universities haven't been able to provide the face-to-face, normal instruction.

A year isn’t a generation.

Yeah- a generation is a bit dramatic.

I took a gap year before gap years were a “thing”...as a working class person, I was ready to rush into college after a year of low paying menial jobs.

I'm glad others take issue with the title of the article, a year does not make a generation. Honestly if I was a incoming freshman now I would have probably waited too versus paying through the nose for tuition when basically I have to teach myself online.

I would imagine in the next year or two especially as the COVID vaccine rolls out there will be a significant increase in those enrolling.

It's this.

It's not necessarily a generation, but I am seeing a good bit of the Fall 2020 freshman class ask "WHY I AM I PAYING TO GO TO XYZ UNIVERSITY AND TEACH MYSELF WHEN I CAN GO TO XYZ COMMUNITY COLLEGE AND ALSO TEACH MYSELF FOR LESS MONEY?"

Then they transfer.

Especially if you paid and planned to go somewhere out of state and are now online.

Same for their parents. Let's say you paid for Molly to go to Beach State, got her a cool Beach State beachfront apartment back when things were slightly better, and she is now stuck inside and calling you every night stressed about teaching herself Calc. Your first suggestion after a semester of COVID is "HOW ABOUT COMING HOME TO SNOWBANK COMMUNITY COLLEGE WHERE YOU CAN STAY WITH US AND TEACH YOURSELF FOR LESS MONEY?"

KSU I can only speak to my daughter's experience, but her chapter is seeing retention issues in the sophomore class (her class). The freshmen who initiated Fall 2020 knew somewhat what they were getting into (limited experience) when they pledged, no different than their whole college experience, really. They are looking forward to perhaps better days in the spring. The sophomores, however, have paid dues for 1-1/2 years and have experienced one semester of sorority life. Everything they anticipated last year hasn't come to pass.

^^^ Similar to your daughter's experience, it's the older members I'm seeing who are going alum early. There were also some who disassociated when the year started, or didn't return. Every single one of our new fall members has signed a contract to live in the house next year -- they are eager for socialization! However, recruitment numbers were down, so we're going to see reduced total next year, I'm sure.

I just saw the latest enrollment and fall application report for my university, which our Admissions/Registrar's office produces monthly. Applications for next fall are slightly up...very slightly...the early apps were down compared to last year, but the fall 2021 application graph is almost identical to this fall's.

Enrollment for winter is down about 7% right now, and it's the juniors and seniors who have the largest drop off. The freshman are holding steady.

I also would like to put in a plug for my profession and say that the large majority of professors have worked really hard to adapt classes to the current context, with little time to prepare/pivot and little advance training and equipment to assist with different teaching modalities they're doing from home. The amount of time I spent preparing, recording videos to supplement synchronous instructions, and attending instructional technology trainings this past summer resulted in 12 hour work days almost every day. I never worked so hard in my life. This has been incredibly stressful, and the professors in my department have worked so hard, and they are anxious about students' welfare and learning. I've only fielded two student complaints all semester. All this to say that when I hear refrains of college students "teaching themselves," that has not been what I've seen as a professor or a parent. I think there's more self-direction and personal organization required, but not necessarily self-teaching.

You are not alone - I am right here with you!:)

My college offered four different modalities of course instruction this past fall and will offer the same four this spring.

Our four course modalities are: 1) online anytime, 2) online on a schedule, 3) hybrid-lab, and 4) flex campus.

Faculty received 'crash-trashing courses' for the flex campus modality since my college has never used this modality before.

We had 7 different possibilities! What is "flex campus?"

You really think that this will be only a little blip on the college enrollment radar? I can't help but think that mindset comes from a position of privilege. These students you speak of taking gap years, I would guess they come from middle-class families where everyone is still employed and no one died from COVID?

Are many young people able to say "Eh, I'll just wait a year and get the full college experience later"? Sure. But there are others who were already struggling to pay and now may look at it as not being a possibility for some time. As research has shown - and I believe the article even mentions - the longer young people wait to attend college, the less likely they are to attend at all.

There are also those in middle school and high school who are struggling academically with this "new normal". How many more kids will slip through the cracks? How many live in broken homes and don't have the escape of going to school for eight hours a day? How many young people already struggle with mental health issues, which are being exacerbated by the pandemic? There are many reports of school systems that have "lost" kids. The students haven't been enrolled in school this year, and while many are being homeschooled, there's still a question of where others are. The hope is that they're being educated somewhere, anywhere.

Ultimately, how much further will socioeconomic gaps widen? As the article states, "For graduates at high-poverty high schools there was a 32.6% decline in attending college, compared with a 16.4% decline for graduates of low-poverty schools."

And will there be a shift from students attending school out-of-state to instead going in-state?

Will enrollment in community colleges increase or decrease in the near future? If increasing, does that mean less tuition dollars for other schools that rely on freshmen and sophomores to start at their institutions instead? And again, as the article said, with potentially less money coming in from the government, many schools could be forced to raise tuition further.

When the pandemic started, we were halfway through spring. Students finished out the school year in a weird way. Now, we're just hitting the halfway mark of a full school year. How will this full year of hybrid schedules and online classes affect not just college students, but high schoolers and middle schoolers who may still be a few years away or more from graduating.

It seems it's still early to predict what will happen, but I would guess we're looking at major shifts in college enrollment over the next five years at least.

My niece is one of those struggling students. Just isn’t taking to online learning and she never had a problem with school before. We were talking about how she always cooks up a storm and that maybe she could go to culinary school. Then You think- oh. Restaurants aren’t doing so hot nowadays...

Which made me think, whole professions are suffering because of the COVID economy- this could be a reason some potential students don’t want to go to college. I’m sure the expense of college isn’t worth it to some if they know they will struggle to find work in their profession for years.

It really is driven by profession. I am going back to school for either nursing or social work- two fields experiencing a boom because of this situation. Sadly, when I was working in the homeless population, I said we’d have no shortage of clients in this era, and I was right.

The fact is, colleges have been out pricing many students for about ten years now, and this is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lower income students were barely hanging on since prices have risen over senseless things like studio dorms or new entertainment centers. It became more about competing for which campus could offer the most amenities and less about trying to educate the most students to transition people out of lower income statuses- isn’t that what state universities were partially designed for?

It really upsets me, because as a low income student who used college to get to where I am in life, I want to see others have the same opportunity. That’s part of the reason I mentioned joining the military in an earlier post- it certainly helped me pay for it, and it gave me experiences and veterans preferences that helped me land my first professional job.

I did an entire online master's degree and I absolutely did not teach myself. That's a misconception about remote learning. I had professors who were engaged and active with us. One of them even recruited me to work for him at my current employer because he knew me and knew what I was capable of.

Most elementary/middle/highschool kids are going to be somewhat "behind" at this point- but they are ALL behind together. Doesn't that really just move the bar for where they should be right now? Isn't that why a lot of colleges aren't requiring test scores now?

I would think the kids with scholarships and grants would be the ones who were still in school. It's the full pay kids who took a gap year- because they could. Can you even do that if you were on scholarship? I couldn't, but that was years and years ago. I had to be a full time student for the duration of the scholarship offer (4 year period). The money savings is in not staying on campus right now. And I would think students in tight financial situations would take advantage of that and get as many credits in as possible while not being forced to live on campus. I know several kids who beefed up their course load to graduate early (including one from Sciencewoman's university).

I teach high school face to face right now. My students are where they should be. According to many teachers in my field whom I know who have had to teach virtually or in hybrid mode (too long, I know), their kids are the ones who are lagging way behind. Some of the students had sloppy attendance, some did little work because they figured their schools would pass them anyway, some never tried until the last week...you name it.

One local teacher who teaches both F2F and virtually told me that she has let her F2F students take all open-book tests because she knows her virtual students are cheating their butts off on everything; why should they get all A's for nothing while the regular students get "real" grades? Unfortunately, I've heard many students at all grade levels through college snicker about their fake grades because they've figured out how to cheat even with cameras on them.

This times a billion. It wouldn’t surprise me to see some of these suites turned back into traditional dorms or even the perimeters of campi moved and these ridiculously OTT buildings turned into senior citizen living or something.

But that’s the thing, they’re NOT all behind together. Kid A whose mom has been working from home this whole time and making sure he logs onto his computer and is there to answer his questions is ahead of Kid B whose mom is working 60 hours a week at Target and sometimes sleeps through class, and is light years ahead of Kid C, who doesn’t even have internet in his home because his meth head parents didn’t pay the electric bill. This pandemic has separated the haves and the have nots big time.