April 15, 2013, 6:47 pm
By Beckie Supiano
San Francisco — As state support for higher education has plummeted, public colleges have had to look elsewhere for money. That shift has brought changes, both good and bad, said Bradley Barnes during a session here on Monday of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ annual meeting.
Many public colleges act more like private ones in their pursuit of and reliance on tuition revenue, said Mr. Barnes, senior associate director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. “You may not want to admit it,” he said, “but it’s happening.”
On the positive side, tuition can be a more reliable form of revenue than state support is, Mr. Barnes said. That can give colleges a little more stability.
But as public colleges seek more students who can pay more, and especially those from out of state who are charged a much higher…
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April 12, 2013, 4:55 am
By Beckie Supiano
Admissions offices have fought for years against what they call the “summer melt,” in which a fraction of a college’s admitted students who have sent in deposits never show up to enroll. In some cases, students’ plans change because they have been admitted off the wait list at a top choice.
But melt can also mean something quite different, especially among lower-income students. Such students are more likely to melt, and studies conducted in several locations around the United States have shown that around 20 percent of low-income students who are admitted to and are set to attend a four-year college do not enroll anywhere.
Researchers at Harvard University tested two forms of outreach—text messages and near-peer mentors—that are meant to raise the enrollment of such students. The researchers’ findings are described in a new paper, “Summer Nudging: Can Personalized Text…
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April 9, 2013, 4:32 pm
By Beckie Supiano
Enrollment management has become more challenging and more important in the wake of the recession and as colleges stand on the precipice of sweeping demographic change. That’s what Don Hossler and David H. Kalsbeek argue in an update to an essay on enrollment management they wrote five years ago.
The original essay traced the rise of strategic enrollment management, or SEM. Mr. Hossler, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, and Mr. Kalsbeek, senior vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University, wrote about how enrollment managers use their expanding portfolios to balance their colleges’ competing priorities.
Today “the issues are becoming more complicated, not less,” Mr. Hossler says. Presidents don’t all have to be enrollment-management experts, he says, but they do need to make sure they have…
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April 2, 2013, 11:00 am
By Beckie Supiano
Consumer advocates have complained for years that financial-aid award letters are difficult for students to understand and compare, and have called for the letters to be standardized.
The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators opposes the idea of a standard aid-award letter, saying colleges should be free to design formats with their own would-be students in mind. But the association does say that the letters should contain standard elements.
To clarify which approaches seem to work best, the association hired the research firm JBL Associates Inc. to subject to a consumer test the federal government’s “Shopping Sheet,” a letter designed from the association’s own recommendations, and a hybrid of the two. A report with the results of that consumer testing was released on Tuesday.
“No single award-letter proposal is perfect,” the report says. The largest…
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February 28, 2013, 4:56 am
By Beckie Supiano
A greater share of prospective students are using net-price calculators, online tools that let them estimate their bottom-line price to attend a particular college, according to a poll released on Thursday by the College Board and the Art & Science Group, a consulting firm.
Forty-four percent of college-bound seniors, who were surveyed in 2012, said they had used a calculator on at least one individual college’s Web site, up from about a quarter the year before. Colleges have been required to offer a net-price calculator on their Web sites since late 2011.
Eighteen percent of students said one of their parents had used a calculator. But use of net-price calculators was more common among high-income parents than among low-income ones. For the most part, families that had tried out calculators found them fairly easy to use, the survey found.
Still, more than half of the high…
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February 27, 2013, 2:40 pm
By Beckie Supiano
Washington — Worries about debt are widespread among college students, but that doesn’t stop some of them from engaging in risky financial behaviors, according to a survey of 40,000 students released on Wednesday. Financial-literacy training can help, says a report on the survey’s findings, but to be effective it must be mandatory and occur at multiple stages in people’s lives.
A panel discussion tied to the report’s release used its findings as a jumping-off point to address students’ relationships with money and what role colleges should play in shaping them.
The notion that college students aren’t always financially literate did not surprise Steven C. Bahls, president of Augustana College, in Illinois, and one of the panelists. Mr. Bahls said that his own children lacked a great grasp of money issues during college. One son, an English major, “mastered the intricacies of…
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February 27, 2013, 6:01 am
By Beckie Supiano
While the average graduating senior who took out student loans leaves college with what should be a manageable level of loan debt—around $26,500—concerns about student debt are persistent and widespread.
The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators took account of that broad concern and decided to convene a task force of its members to comb through research and trends, and offer recommendations for improving the student-loan system.
On Wednesday the association, known as Nasfaa, released a report laying out those recommendations, which have been endorsed by its board.
The recommendations call for:
- Allowing aid administrators to set lower loan limits under certain scenarios. (Nasfaa also included a version of this idea in its white paper for the Reimagining Aid Design and Delivery project, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)
…
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February 26, 2013, 12:01 am
By Beckie Supiano
Parents are optimistic that they’ll meet their college-savings goals, but many of them are not on track to do so, according to a report released on Tuesday by Sallie Mae, the student-loan and financial-services company.
Families that are saving for college plan to put aside an average of $39,000 per child, according to the report, “How America Saves for College 2013,” which draws on survey results. Seventy percent of families that had set a specific goal said they expected to meet it.
But according to the report’s projections, they are being unrealistic. The report took what each family said it had saved so far per child, added that amount to what the family saved last year, and multiplied the sum by the number of years until the child turns 18. Sallie Mae found that the average family will have saved just under $20,000.
While a majority of families saw college as an investment …
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February 4, 2013, 4:55 am
By Beckie Supiano
As you may have heard, not everyone is convinced that college is a good investment. In his role as vice president for enrollment, W. Kent Barnds has to change some minds, at least about Illinois’s Augustana College, where he works.
Colleges have responded to widespread skepticism about their value in a number of ways. Some have cut their prices. Others have embraced transparency. One plans to show admitted students upfront what they’ll pay for all four years. Several explain to their students that they all get a price discount from donations to the institution.
Mr. Barnds took a different approach. He came up with a new publication that displays the facts he believes prospective students want to know but often cannot find—”the things other colleges don’t tell you.” “There is a desire on the part of families and students for some level of transparency,” Mr. Barnds says. Too often,…
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January 24, 2013, 1:17 pm
By Beckie Supiano
A coalition of higher-education experts, civil-rights organizers, policy makers, and others is endorsing a set of proposals to improve the student-aid system.
The group, organized by HCM Strategists, a consulting firm, is offering recommendations in three broad categories: making the system simpler and more transparent; dealing with the needs of all students, especially nontraditional ones; and asking colleges, states, and students to share responsibility for completion.
The proposals were released on Thursday in a report, “The American Dream 2.0: How Financial Aid Can Help Improve College Access, Affordability, and Completion.” The report is one of HCM Strategists’ contributions to the Reimagining Aid Design and Delivery project, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
HCM Strategists also released findings from public-opinion research about college affordability…
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