Jeff Selingo Profile picture
Aug 19, 2019 6 tweets 3 min read Read on X
1/The talk of an impending recession this past week has me wondering about the impact on #highered. Traditionally, recessions have been glass half-full/half empty events for colleges. Enrollment went up at institutions serving working adults; but state $ and parental $ tightened
The question is will this recession be different. For one, it's not like the last 10 years of this "economic expansion" has been terrific for most of #highered. It has for the "haves" but not the "have nots."
3/At same time, if this recession comes, it will arrive just as a demographic storm around 18-y-o's is approaching in much of the U.S. with a high density of colleges.
4/And just when colleges are already discounting their product substantially and parents are sharing more of the loan burden.
5/The economic expansion we know hasn't benefited most Americans, including those who send their kids to college. If you want to know the reason for those last two graphics, it's this one. (h/t @JonBoeckenstedt).
@JonBoeckenstedt 6/How many college's strategic financial plans have a risk assessment for a recession and what do they project given all these other pressures? Not to be a downer on a summer Monday, but if a recession is more likelier now than it was a year ago, how should colleges get ready?

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More from @jselingo

Jul 28, 2022
1/ The College Board is out this morning with a report on 51 public and private colleges that were test optional for fall of ’21 and impact on admissions. Quick 🧵 on some of the interesting findings. research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ARC-…
2/ Not surprising apps were up across all segments of higher ed, but most at highly selective privates (admit rates <25%), yet they admitted fewer students and their enrollment basically flat. One note: year before (Year 1 Covid) those schools put out a lot of offers.
3/While top line numbers show that URM and low-income enrollments were basically flat, this shows why I don't think highly selective privates at least are going back to testing. They are up in most numbers that are institutional priorities for many of them.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 15, 2021
1/ THREAD on new paper on post-pandemic job market co-authored w/@mattsigelman of @Burning_Glass. It has ramifications for #highered. We found when job postings started to fall off last spring, those that required bachelor's declined more than jobs for high-school graduates. Image
2/ Entry-level jobs for bachelor's holders dropped the most. Colleges should ready their students for job market that will be stuck in neutral for several years and a reshaped workforce later on. If not, they put at risk how this cohort of students come to view their alma mater. Image
3/ As @Wharton's Matthew Bidwell has found jobs requiring a degree tend not to be open at the entry level. With new graduates now competing with millions of experienced workers who have been sidelined, the pandemic seems to be accelerating this phenomenon further. Image
Read 7 tweets
Sep 29, 2019
THREAD: Yesterday, in Louisville, something happened that could have a profound impact on #highered in the coming years but likely won’t get much more coverage than this in @WSJ and similar articles in @chronicle @insidehighered.
wsj.com/articles/colle…
@WSJ @chronicle @insidehighered 2/ Delegates at annual meeting of admissions officers and high school counselors voted to remove significant sections of its ethics code to resolve a two-year antitrust investigation by @TheJusticeDept. The code had some teeth and the provisions protected students. Not anymore.
@WSJ @chronicle @insidehighered @TheJusticeDept 3/ Three provisions were deleted, effective immediately. Colleges were prevented from: 1.) Offering incentives for early applicants. 2.) Recruiting students already committed to other colleges post-May 1. 3.) Soliciting students as transfers from previous year’s applicants.
Read 11 tweets
May 2, 2019
1/Spent #CollegeSigningDay today at rural Pa. HS. This is first year it had an @AdvisingCorps adviser. Excitement about what was “next” was palpable among seniors, something they said was missing in past when counselors focused solely on social/emotional. chronicle.com/article/Why-20…
2/This is a school where the median household income is $31K. Average SAT score for those who actually take it is 935. And only about 50% of students have historically gone on to post-secondary education. In other words, not much of a college-going culture.
3/Students wore shirts declaring college choice. Yet several told me they’re worried they ended up with too little aid. A few are going to regional Pa. publics, where on-campus expenses are $25K. Leaves some with a gap of $10K. That’s 1/3 of their family income. @dan_greenstein
Read 7 tweets
Jan 8, 2019
1/When @johnshopkins said it would go need-blind permanently after the $1.8B Bloomberg gift, @JonBoeckenstedt noted they already had the money to do that from their surplus. That figure piqued my curiosity.
2/So I spent the last few weeks trying to answer this question: What are the annual surpluses of the top 25 national universities? If I didn’t stop looking, you’d never see me again. Turns out there is no single answer.
3/Here are the surpluses of the top 25 privates (in USN&WR rankings) from the IRS Form 990. The number includes realized investment gains/losses, which inflate the numbers. Still, the total sum outstrips the endowments at all but a dozen colleges.
Read 13 tweets

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