A Chronicle Reporter Wrote a Book About the Higher-Ed Crisis. These 5 Things Surprised Her the Most
1. Higher education has become highly stratified.
From 1980 to 2011, undergraduate enrollment nearly doubled, to 18.1 million. During the same period, the number of students with Pell Grants grew from 2.7 million to 9.4 million. In effect, the size of the undergraduate population got bigger mostly because more needy students joined.
But in contrast to the period before 1980, when six out of 10 Pell Grant students enrolled in a four-year college, many of the new students enrolled in community colleges and for-profit colleges.
The view through the racial and ethnic lens paints a similar picture. White students are overrepresented at more-selective four-year colleges—the institutions that spend three to five times more per student, have higher graduation rates, and send more of those students on to graduate school.
2. The many hidden costs of intercollegiate athletics often go unscrutinized.
Thanks to USA Today and Indiana University’s National Sports Journalism Center, we know that even among the Division I powerhouses, only about two dozen of 228 public universities take in more from tickets, licensing, broadcast deals, and donations than they spend, according to the latest data.
3. Higher-education data are often lacking.
You write a book with the data you have, not the data you want. I had never fully appreciated the ways different organizations—and academic researchers—tailor their data collection for their own purposes. For a news reporter covering specific reports or studies, that doesn’t matter so much. You can acknowledge the limitations and write the story.
But when putting together a book that required me to synthesize other people’s work, I found myself searching—often in vain—for studies that I could draw upon to compare trends over similar periods of time.
For all the problems higher education faces today—not least of which is a shrinking pipeline of 18-year-olds for the next decade, with a growing share of those students expected to need more academic and financial help—lots of promising developments are also emerging.
5. That potential is fragile.
Despite the fervor over innovations in higher education, there is also the very real risk that some of the same forces that still make it hard for lower-income students to complete college, or even attain the "college knowledge" they need to qualify and apply to top schools, may also undermine their ability to take advantage of those innovations.
For example, something as seemingly simple as broadband access, a necessity for most distance-education courses, isn’t ubiquitous. Only about half of adults with annual incomes under $30,000 have high-speed Internet access in their homes, compared with 88 percent of adults with incomes over $75,000. Similarly, the few studies that have been undertaken on the efficacy of online education and other kinds of courses with less structure or academic support, and fewer opportunities for social connections, found that students tended to become more frustrated and less likely to return to continue their education.
