 Welcome, welcome to this week's Future Transform. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a guest that we loved before and we're glad to see back again today with an update, a topic that's crucial for higher education. We've been tracking enrollment in higher education since we began. After all, enrollment is crucial to how higher education works. It's a way of thinking, it's our main way of functioning as teachers, of course. And it's also financially our main revenue stream. So how has that been changing? What do we know about how many students are enrolled? How has that been changing since the pandemic or since the pandemic has begun to die down? I'm absolutely excited to welcome Doug Shapiro. He's the head of the National Student Research Clearing House Research Enterprise and he does fantastic work. This is where I go every semester to learn about enrollment numbers and enrollment data. Doug has a mind like a steel trap and he knows everything about his data and is willing to analyze it for us. Without any further ado, let me just welcome my good colleague and our wonderful researcher, Doug Shapiro. Hello, Doug. Hello, Brian. How are you? It's good to see you again. Oh, it's great to see you, pal. It's really good to see you. Where have we found you today? Are you at home? I am at home here in Brooklyn, New York. Oh, very nice, very nice. Good to see you. You know, Doug, we ask people to introduce themselves in a particular way to ask what they're working on for the next year. And I'm just curious, what are you gonna be working on for the rest of 2023? What are the big projects and what are the big topics that are gonna be top of mind for you? Well, you know, our focus has hardly changed in the last three years. We've been laser focused on trying to get the most timely information on enrollments and what's happening to students and institutions during the pandemic. And that's not changing. We're still focused on that over the next year. We do have some new interesting projects. So one of these is we're now a part of the arc what is it? This is a team of researchers, six teams of researchers actually, research projects focused on accelerating recovery in community colleges across the country. So they're really trying to figure out not only where is the recovery taking place, but also what can we learn from where it is and isn't to help more community colleges join that recovery and figure out how to bring students back and to serve their communities better. And so we're really excited about that. In fact, the latest enrollment report that we just released was enhanced in many ways. We added a lot of additional details specifically to help focus on the folks from community colleges to inform them more about exactly this topic. Thanks in large part to some of the funding from this project, which came from the Institute for Educational Sciences. We're very excited about that too. Oh, excellent, excellent. Community college enrollment has been clobbered for years. It would be great to be able to turn that around. Absolutely. Well, as always, we're just speaking on behalf of everybody in higher education. We are still leveled by your research, which is so timely and it feeds into personally my research and my teaching. And I'm just, I'm so excited by this. Friends, if you're new to the forum, I'm just gonna ask Doug a couple of questions to get the ball rolling. But then I'm gonna yield the podium over to you. So please think about the questions you'd like to ask. And I'll let you know when you can start doing that in just a minute. So my first question to ask Doug is, people have spoken of your fall 2022 data as shown a recovery from the pandemic enrollment declines. Is that accurate? No. You know, it was very much a good news, bad news kind of report. And, you know, the bad news was that the number of undergraduates in the US is still falling. So we really haven't started to recover yet at all by that one simple fact. But the good news is that, you know, they're falling at a much slower rate than they have been in the two previous years. So we only lost about a half a percent this year. And, you know, when you've been in free fall, essentially for two years, that kind of stabilization is a good thing. But it really is more of a move toward a stabilization. We're arresting the decline, but I wouldn't call it yet a recovery. So a half a percentage point. And that's good news, but still we're dropping. And we've lost a lot of students this 2012. Right, absolutely. And, you know, the other, I guess the other reason that some people want to call this a recovery is because if you focus on the freshman class, the incoming freshman. So what I've been, what I just talked about was total numbers of undergraduates are currently in school. There has been what looks like a, some signs of what looks like a recovery there. We saw about a 4% increase in the number of freshmen this year, across all colleges, community colleges and four year colleges, et cetera. About 4% higher than the number that we had last year in 2021. And that includes even a larger jump at community colleges, which had been the hardest hit as we were saying, was at 6% increase for community colleges and about a 4% increase at public four years, for example. So, you know, that's a very promising sign. I mean, the number of new entering students has been sitting for the last two years at about 10% below where they were in 2019 before the pandemic. So there's still a ways to go. We've got, we're still 6% below where we were in 2019 in terms of the number of entering freshmen, right? But a 4% increase from last year, that starts, that really does feel like the start of a recovery if you're focused just on those entering classes. Well, that's really good news. That's much better news than we've had. And just you were talking about undergrads. How was the graduate student population doing? Well, the graduate student population is actually declining and that's a reversal there. So very interesting that, and to me, this really suggests that we're entering a kind of a new era. If you think of what the pandemic did in devastated undergraduate enrollments, but it actually brought in an increase in graduate students. And that persisted for both of the first two years of the pandemic. And now in this second year, we're seeing that flip for graduate students for the first time, a decline of about one and a half percent in the number of graduate students. So certainly for the four year colleges in terms of their sustainability and revenue that the universities, that's a bad sign for them. But it doesn't affect the community colleges, obviously. Yeah, yeah. Well, I've gotten into fun arguments with Josh Kim inside the higher ed over this where he argued that the master's level, a PhD level, but especially the master's level is where there was a lot of growth. That seems to have been the case for a few years, but that's paused. Right, and that's very common in, you know, when we look at past recessions, for example, and many people are ready to forget that we did have a recession at the beginning of the pandemic as well. And the graduate student particularly, those enrollments in master's programs and shorter term graduate or post-baccalaureate certificates, even those programs all went up for those first two years that they're starting to back off again now. This is really, really good to know. And then I have one last question for myself and then I'll open the floor, which is what do you just change the terminology of one classification of institutions that are primarily or mostly online? And I think you folded that into a different category now. Right, we've combined that with what we call, sorry, what we call multi-state institutions. Because we found that there's a large overlap between those two. And particularly when we were in this report, we were paying a lot more attention to state by state analyses. And we realized that there are a handful of states out there who have or had very large online institutions that were kind of distorting the picture for the state itself. In some cases, it was a very, they were very small states in terms of their native students. These institutions were capturing students from all across the country. So we moved those out of the state analysis and put them into a separate kind of state category of multi-state and primarily online institutions. We also, there's another important category that we changed in the institutional analysis though. And that is the addition of this or the separation out of this group of what we call primarily associate granting bachelor's institutions. So A, Bs, these are essentially all the former community colleges who over the last decade or so, mostly in particular states have become reclassified as four-year institutions by the Department of Education because they've now gained the ability to award bachelor's degrees. So they're four-year institutions in that sense, but they're still mostly community colleges in the sense that almost all of their students are seeking associate's degrees and most of the, at least half of all the degrees that they're awarding are still associate degrees. And so they look a lot more like community colleges. And when we had put them in the four-year category because that's what iPads calls them, but by separating them out, we allow people to kind of think of them differently or if they want, they can combine them with the community colleges and come up with a more comprehensive look at just the community colleges. So that's been an interesting look and it's actually also a result of this ARC network that I was telling you about the integrating research in community colleges. One of the things that that group really felt was important was to be able to analyze those PABs, primarily associate granting four-year institutions separately from the other sectors. So are the, I know a lot of community colleges are poking up enrollment by doing dual enrollment of local high schools. Are these AB institutions also doing that? Yeah, they are, definitely, definitely. And some four-year institutions are doing that too, but their numbers are not nearly as large as they are for the community colleges. Yeah, and then, well, I'm gonna keep, I'll almost stop interrogating you because people have questions and thank you for all these good answers. We have one program question that came up and this is from Angela Spring. Well, I'll show if this is gonna be recorded for some that cannot attend. Yes, Angela, please, we'll post the recording to YouTube and it'll be there on top of our playlist. Also, Angela, if you go to the forum website, we have a link to the entire archive with chronological order plus a list of topics under that. Good question. And now we have a question that comes from Philip Wallace who is an enrollment manager who for whom enrollment is obviously from the center. And he asks, the first LookFall 2022 enrollment, is aggregated total enrollment by major fields, HBCUs, HSI's and POIs. Is there a way to get a breakdown for HBCUs and HSI's based on the CTEE? Now, I understand about 85% of that question. Yeah. The University's Hispanic serving institutions but I'm not sure if POA is or what the CTEE is. Yeah, so the CTEE is just the abbreviation for the current term enrollment estimate. That's the report that I've just been talking about, the one that came out a month ago. And unfortunately, the answer is no. So those categories we did not include in the current enrollment report this time. But we will be bringing them back in the fall. Oh, very good. Very good. Thank you for the question. Much appreciated. And we have a question from our excellent friend, Tom Hames, who is probably the last comfortable month in Houston before the things warm up. And Tom asks, what can you tell us about which groups are driving community college enrollment? And how much of that has shifted since pre-pandemic demographics? Great question, yeah. So clearly we know that there's a lot of different groups here, but let me start with just ages. So older students have been most affected by the declines. So if we just look at under 24 and over 24 throughout the pandemic and including this latest year, those older students 24 and up have been falling at much greater rates than the younger students. And if you go even younger still to current high school students or dual enrolled high school students, we count those as basically anyone under 18 at the time that they start their enrollment. Those students have actually been increasing and in the last year quite dramatically, it'd be like a 12% jump, 10 or 12% jump in the number of dual enrolled high school students at community, almost all at community colleges in this year. And in fact, that's been almost the only source of enrollment gains in community colleges this year. If you take them out, the community colleges have actually declined. Wow. Yeah, so that's a big factor is age. Another factor is race and ethnicity. And when we look at, well, there's been a kind of a shift, a divergence here in terms of the beginning of the pandemic, the first two years and this last year. And in the first year there were black and brown students were far and away, the largest affected, the most affected community college students. So we saw some of the biggest declines among black and Hispanic students and Native American students. And in the second and third years though, we started to see some of those, well, let me back up a minute. So when I say larger declines, they weren't too far. They were most, really that first year of the pandemic in the community colleges affected almost everyone. Very similarly, but the declines were somewhat steeper for minoritized students and white students and fell a little bit less. But in subsequent years, we've seen increasing rates of losses among white students and much better results, less declines for Hispanic and Asian students in particular. And so those two groups in fact are almost, if you look at the entering freshmen, they've almost come back to where they were in 2019 before the pandemic, Asian and Hispanic students. Now, what's unusual about that or maybe expected is that demographically, those groups are actually growing whereas white students have been declining if you just get the numbers of high school graduates. So again, for focused on freshmen and you look at the projections that come from witchy, the Western Interstate Commission on higher ed, the knocking on college door. Those show pretty clearly that the number of white students are declining, the number of black students are about flat and the number of Hispanic and Asian students are increasing or growing. So in some sense, if you factor in those demographic forces and think about, well, Asian and Hispanic students should have been well above where they were in 2019 by now. The fact that they're just getting back to 2019 levels means there's still important declines, but overall there's a much bigger disparity between what happened in 2022 between black and white students which continued to decline in terms of freshman at community colleges and Hispanic and Asian students which actually rebounded in 2022. That's interesting. I mean, the enrollment may be roughly approximating the demographics where the white population declines, the black population is stable, Hispanic and Asian populations are growing and the overall general population. Exactly, and that also kind of feeds into my sense that we're kind of not really in the pandemic anymore. Again, that pandemic impact really hit all kinds of institutions and all kinds of students with almost equal force. But in this latest year, that this divergence by different demographics is really stark and it suggests that the pandemic is receding as a driver of these changes. And we're going back to some of the big underlying forces like demographics and economics, affordability. Yeah. That's, well, as always, Tom, thank you for one of your typically deep, deep questions. And Doug, thank you for that splendid answer with so much detail. Thank you. Friends, again, if you're new to the forum, those are examples of questions from the Q&A box. So please feel free to add yours. And if you wanna join us on stage, click the raised hand button and we'll be happy to do that. We have another question coming in that focuses on this community college aspect. This is from Amanda Burbage. This is what community college is drawing on K through 12 and with community colleges granting BABS degrees. Will the distinctions between the higher education sectors, community college, four year university, et cetera, begin to change? What might the benefits or drawbacks be? I think they will. Yeah, there's no question. I mean, as community colleges increasingly are able to grant bachelor's degrees, they will start to look more like four year institutions. The reverse is less likely though. I don't think we're gonna see many four year institutions awarding associates degrees, although what's really interesting to me is that many, when you look at the effects of the pandemic and the post pandemic now on four year institutions, many of the less selective among them, the smaller colleges, the regional colleges, they actually experienced the pandemic in many ways, not much different from the way that community colleges did. And when you, in fact, a fascinating shift, when I look at the shift, I was just talking about that divergence in the effect on different race and ethnic groups among students, you can see a similar shift of a divergence in terms of enrollment effects on colleges and universities, particularly four year colleges, in terms of selectivity. And so when you look at that first year of the pandemic, and you split up the four year colleges by just look at the Barron's selectivity rating, so most competitive down to not competitive at all in terms of their admissions selectivity, almost straight lines across those categories, they all lost about the same percent of students in the first year of the pandemic. The pandemic just did not differentiate, everyone suffered, but in the second and third years, so 21 and 22, we started to see a huge divergence where the most selective, the elite colleges, the elite privates and the public flagships even recovered very quickly in terms of their enrollments, even in 2021. And as you went down the selectivity scale, the declines just got steeper and steeper and steeper in 2021. So just almost a 45 degree angle. And then in 2002, that got even worse. So there's this huge split like the elites, again, the most selective four year colleges, they're completely back to where they were and then some, they've got the kind of market power to attract as many students as they can possibly want. And even in that first year of the pandemic, they were able, when their freshman classes declined, they were able to reach down into community colleges and attract more transfer students to make up for some of that. But all the rest, even from the kind of middle of the scale all the way down to the least selective, again, they just lost proportionately more students and to the extent that those least selective four year colleges, as I said, are suggested are starting to look more and more like the primarily associate granting bachelor's degree associate institutions and the community colleges themselves. So that kind of divergence is really stark. Wow, that selectivity is a really, really strong driver. It sounds like fantastic question, Amanda. Thank you so much. And again, Doug, I admire just how much data you keep in your mind so clearly. Thank you. Building on this topic, we have a question from our good friend, Tony Simblar, who wants to know this, what about the missing students? What do we know about where they are going? Yeah, boy, I wish I knew. I mean, I think the assumption is that most of them are out in the workforce. You know, I think we don't know at the Clearinghouse. We only know who is in college. But if you look at some of the other sources like organizations that have actually surveyed students and what people are saying in the high schools and what have you, I think, again, in that first year of the pandemic, we heard a lot of stories about students who were staying at home, caring for children who were out of school, or they were working in very low wage, often essential workers' roles, trying to support their families financially through some very hard times. And in 2021 and 2022, we heard a lot about the improving labor market, particularly for low-skill, low-wage workers. Wages were increasing last year. They continued to increase this year. And I think that was very, looked very attractive, particularly for new or recent high school graduates. There were a lot of fears about the costs of college, a lot of fears about taking on student debt. That was very much in the news when there were all these debates about cancelling student debt. And so I think that seemed like a good time for a lot of would-be college students to sit out for a year or two and say, I'm gonna save up some money. I'm gonna get one of these jobs that is paying pretty well right now. So the workforce, I think, is the main place that the students are, the would-be students are, or the missing students. But some of those considerate, some of those drivers that I've just been describing seem to apply mostly to community college students who were willing to take those very low-skill jobs that were in many senses booming during the early part of the last three years. But when we look at the missing students, there's also been a huge shift from the beginning of the pandemic to 2022 in terms of what types of programs we would have expected those students to be in. So when we look at the first year of the pandemic, for example, like 90% of the missing students were from, came from community colleges. 90% of the missing students would have been seeking associate degrees. And that over the next two years, proportionately more in each year of the missing students were actually four-year, would-be four-year students. So that by 2022, in fall of 2022, we're completely flipped. 70, almost 75% of the missing students would have been seeking bachelor's degrees in 2022. So again, this huge change, huge shift, right? We're now looking at very different kinds of drivers of why students are not in college. And again, that doesn't tell us where they are instead, but that gives you a lot of clues about what kind of students they are, what they would have been doing in college and what that means that they might be doing now in the workforce. So again, that shifting force, that shifting force, and to me that also says, these missing bachelor's seeking students are probably moving further into say the middle class than that first year of the pandemic. And I think that says a lot about, about again, economic concerns, affordability concerns, even middle income families are feeling very worried about the cost of college and very reluctant to borrow money, not to mention this year, borrowing money. More expensive. Is much more expensive. Goodness, the interest rates on student loans this year, a huge difference from where they were in 2019, right? It's likely to keep up. Thank you, Doug, for a terrific answer. Thank you so much. And again, thank you for a really, really good question. Speaking of more questions, we have one that builds right on this, and this is from Elizabeth Mejopoulos, who asks this, some reporting suggesting all enrolled students came from a demographic that did not traditionally enroll in post-secondary education. How might the increase in dual enrollment move the needle on traditional enrollment? Interesting. Yeah, because I normally think just the opposite that most dual enrolled students are, they're students who would not have traditionally enrolled in community colleges. So what's interesting is that they're taking classes in community colleges while they're in high school, but they're doing so in order to kind of accelerate their path to a four-year degree, right? And most of them, after they graduate from high school, they're taking those credits, not to the community college, they're taking those credits to a four-year college. And that is what we see in the data for the most part. But the public perception of dual enrollment, I think is different. And I think most people do kind of have this notion that dual enrollment is a way to help increase college access, accessibility to students who might not otherwise enroll in college or be thinking about college at all. And there must be, I think that is a real effect for some students, but not most in the dual enrollment space. Thank you. Thank you for the really, really good question. And I appreciate wrestling with it. The forum community, I'm so proud of always ask such great, great questions. We have two very detail-oriented questions that are almost clarification questions. One comes from our good friend, Charles Findlay, who asks, does your data include only domestic students or is there a breakout for international visa enrollments? Yeah, that's a good question and a hard one to answer. Up until this year, we did not include any international students in our current term enrollment reports. They are in our data, but not well represented. And so in the past, we've said, it's almost misleading to count them because so few colleges choose to report international students to the Clearinghouse. Over the years though, that has changed and we decided this year that we now do have enough representation of international students that we have included them in the current term enrollment estimates. And so you see them in the report, but you have to kind of treat those numbers with some caution because we don't actually have information on visas or actual immigration status or anything like that. All we have is what the colleges report as part of the race and ethnicity codes. The race and ethnicity codes are only supposed to apply to American students. And so they put in a code for international or non-resident, and that's what we use in this report. So you get some information there, but it's not 100% far from it. There's a new book on this called Classified, David Bernstein, which takes a look at the origins of American domestic racial classification system. American domestic racial classification systems in the 60s and 70s. Have you seen this yet? No, that sounds interesting. Yeah, yeah, it really does. Curious about that, but thank you for that very honest candidate answer. And Charles, as always, you asked really, really good questions. We have another question that is again more of a kind of a very detailed question. This is from Daniel Lucastro, who asks, are many colleges and universities considering offering degrees in Spanish? A previous college offered a certificate and associates 100% in Spanish. More than 80% of those students were older than 24 years. Wow, no, that's fascinating. I don't know, to be honest, but it's a great question, partly because of what we were just saying about the growth in this population, of course. I believe we don't even have that in our discipline codes. Someone else might know the answer to this. I think this, certainly what we use at the two-digit CIP code level for our reports is just gets you to foreign languages and literatures generally. And I don't know that they break out by specific languages. Well, that's a fascinating idea. I mean, especially Daniela, since so much of global higher education is moving towards English as language of instruction, it'd be fascinating to see that change in the US to more Spanish language classes. Thank you, thank you. And maybe Doug, maybe it's something to try out for your next video. We have more questions coming in and I'm gonna make sure everyone gets a chance to ask. And here's another one that goes back to my question about primarily online or multi-state institutions. It's from Sergio Alcosta, fully online institutions are reporting big increases in enrollment. Are, quote, we losing students or are they simply going to fewer competitors? I think it's a little of both. They've definitely, those institutions have definitely been notching large increases percentage-wise, but they're actually much, they're much smaller in terms of actual numbers than they were, say, six years ago. Really? And yeah, certainly the for-profits, that sector has shrunk a lot. And that's a lot, as I said, a lot of the online. But yes, the Western governors in the Southern New Hampshire, they're much larger. And they're still, though, attracting primarily the older students. There are very, very few traditional age students in those institutions. And very, very few new freshmen, for example, first-time students, almost all. They have very high levels of transfer in students. So students, so what you're really losing, I would suggest to those institutions is not new students, not freshmen. You're losing students who stopped out probably at least five years ago. And if you're really focused on trying to recover some of those stopped out students, and then yes, those institutions are where you should go to learn how to attract them. They're doing what it takes to get students out of the workforce who might have a year or even two years of college under their belts, but never finished that degree. And to figure out a way to entice them back with flexible programs that fit into adult lives, online convenience and promises of relatively short paths to completion. They'll accept a lot of the credits, et cetera. So a lot of things that are really important to serving the needs of older students. And when we look at the possibly the continuing declines in the numbers of traditional age freshmen, demographically, you know, if you wanna get back to, we saw it like I said, we saw it, we saw it a long way to go to get back to total enrollments of where we were in 2019. That's not likely to happen just from new, growing freshmen classes alone. There aren't that many high school graduates that are gonna be coming out in the next few years. And transfer enrollments as we've been reporting as well in our transfer reports have also been falling even more than freshmen. So, you know, looking to transfer students to make up, to get back to where you were is not looking very promising either right now. The big source potentially is some college no credential students, which, you know, we're now actually reporting an annual accounting of some college no credential population. We'll have another report coming out in the next couple of months that quantifies how many of these students there are, what they look like demographically, how long it's been since they last enrolled, how many of them are returning in the last, in each year. And we've had an awful lot of interest in that. Yeah. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for that answer. And friends, we're somehow coming up towards the end of the hour. So I'm trying to get as many of the questions out as possible. This is a great deep subject and Doug is bringing an enormous amount of data to bear as well and make sure that we get everything addressed. We have a great question here from Greg Schuchman who cuts the data or cuts this topic in a different angle, which is really, really important. What are you seeing with enrollment trends when you look at geography? Are the New England schools continuing to hemorrhage students while the schools in the South continue to grow, for example? Yes, absolutely. I mean, well, hemorrhaging, certainly in the regions generally, the largest declines have been in the, some of the New England states, but the Northeast generally is not the worst off. I think the worst off is actually the Midwest right now. They're pretty close, those two, Northeast and the Midwest. And I think part of the problem about New England is the number of, not just the geography, but the structure of the institutional marketplace there. They have a lot of very small private colleges and many of them are the ones that are really suffering a lot, whereas the larger publics are not doing much worse than other regions. How's the West Coast doing? The West Coast is very mixed. We've seen declines in California and Washington, but better results in, you know, but in some, actually, I'm not sure about all of them. But the West generally is certainly doing better and the South is doing the best. And again, I think most of that is demographics. And a lot of that is driven, I think by internal migration as well. Good question. Thank you, Greg. And again, Doug, thank you for that tour. I was not able to describe it state by state. One thing I might add there, just one more point, when we look at transfer students in particular, we're seeing a large decline in interstate transfers. So it used to be that there were a lot of students, say, from community colleges in one state who were transferring into four-year institutions in another state and that's really fallen off quite a bit. So are transfers becoming more local, more in-state? Well, transfers overall are falling and so some of the students who are transferring to other states tend to be going into those more selective elite institutions. And so they've actually done okay. But there are fewer overall because that sector is very small, the most selective elites, so. Understood. That's very interesting. I think that the map you produced for this report was really, really useful. I'd love to see people draw down on that. We have a question which might take you to a little speculation and I know you're careful about that, but just give us a try. This is from John Henry Stites. Will the combination of declining college-age students and the need for massive retraining of the adult workforce due to digitization force a reckoning on public funding of post-secondary education? Wow, a lot to unpack there. Back on the screen there. That's hard, I'd be hard pressed to say that. I think it will certainly force a reckoning on the institutions themselves. I think schools really need to find ways to address the shifting needs of the population, meaning the declining younger population that might be going to college and the growing numbers of older learners that need to be going to college. Whether that will lead to any kind of shift in the, call it the willingness of the public to support those institutions or those students. Wow, I don't even wanna speculate on that one. I would say I'm not optimistic though. Okay, okay. It's a great speculative question, which I really appreciate, and Doug, I appreciate your very candid answer. We have a few more questions and I think we have time for at least a couple. This is from Shane Daly at Pearson, I think. And Shane asks this, well, in missing the students, has your organization looked to certificates or certification to see if the shift is in there? We don't have, well, outside of higher ed itself, we don't have data on certificates, like industry certificates and certifications, but certainly within higher ed, there are a lot of certificates that are awarded and we've seen a large shift there. In fact, some of the biggest areas of growth are in students who are, we categorize them as other undergraduates. They're not associates or bachelor's degrees, but they're generally, while some of those are the dual enrollment students, but most of them are students who are seeking certificates or other short, shorter term programs. And we've seen a big shift there. As we've seen generally in the students who are enrolled, kind of shifting away from longer programs and towards shorter term programs that offer lower cost at a quicker path to a better job. And I think that's pretty clear that what students are voting for with their feet is those kinds of programs. Again, that strong presence of debt and cost. Exactly. Good question and thank you, Doug. I think that would be some fun research for someone to pursue. Now we have a question after my own heart from Michael Meeks, Professor Meeks, and I wanna just put this up here. What is your intuitive opinion on enrollments five years and 10 years out? And who do you think would be the big winners and the big losers? Again, I know this is speculation, extrapolation. Well, five and 10 years, that's a long way out. I think it will certainly be, I think it's gonna be institutions that can do what I was just saying, that can find ways to repackage their offerings into shorter, smaller, more affordable and more digestible chunks of credentials and skills that are in demand by employers. I think students are increasingly reluctant to make the kind of long-term investments even in their own education. And we've seen in the generation. Partly it's about cost. Partly, I think it's also just about increases in the level of anxiety about being able to earn a living wage, a middle-class income. As the income distribution has stretched, if you will, there's a wide, the middle-class gets hollowed out. The level of anxiety of being left behind by that as the richer getting richer and the poorer getting poorer, you wanna make sure you're on that rich side. And that's all about getting a good job fast before it becomes out of reach. And I think students really feel that, particularly younger students today. In the chat, Doug, Greg Schuchman adds, so the value proposition has changed. Explain what you mean by that, Greg. I think it means that at least the perception of the value proposition of higher education has changed. That we look more expensive, I think, is what he's adding. I think students still feel that higher education is very valuable. I mean, that dual enrollment, that surge in dual enrollment for high school students, high school students really want college degrees. There's no question. They're not saying we don't think it's valuable anymore. They're saying we think it costs too much and it needs to be much more instrumental. It needs to be much more instrumental. And we need to see that return on investment very quickly. It's too risky otherwise. We've seen too many peers, other students, friends, relatives who spent two years in college piled up a lot of debt and never earned a degree. And now, where are they? That's very frightening to a lot of students, I think. I hate to pause it on that note, Doug, but that's a great answer that helps us rethink a lot of where we're headed. Professor Meeks, thank you for that great question. We are, I'm afraid, Doug, completely out of time. This hour has just blazed past. You've been so generous with your thinking, with your research. I wanted to thank you, first of all, for being a fantastic cast again. And then the second, what's the best way for everyone to keep up with you in the Clearinghouse's work? Well, nscresearchcenter.org. We have all of our latest reports are posted there and you can also sign up for alerts and blogs when our new reports come out. Most of our reports, in fact, when you go to the website, you will find interactive dashboards in Tableau that enable you to really pick your own disaggregations and drill down wherever you think it's most important in our data. And so I highly encourage you to check out the website. You'll also find their downloads of the underlying data in simple spreadsheets for all of our reports. So if you want to actually do your own calculations and recombine and do whatever you like, they're all there. It's great stuff. I strongly recommend it, Doug. Thank you for this great work. Please keep up the great work and give our best to the rest of the group at the Clearinghouse. We really appreciate it. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your time with me and all of the discussions, such terrific questions today. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Take care and be safe. But don't leave yet, everybody. Let me just point you out to how we continue and let me just second, Doug, thanks for all these great questions. You all are awesome. If you want to keep talking about this, hit us up on Twitter. Use the hashtag FTTE or tweet at me, Brian Alexander or at Shindig events. Here's my master.link where you can find me or go to my blog where actually I blogged about this in the most recent report. If you'd like to go back into our previous sessions or keep an eye out for our recording for this, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. If you want to look into the previous topics, just go to forum.futureofeducation.us, click on the forum topics and you can see those there. If you'd like to dig into this research even further, go to our FTTE report at ftte.us and subscribe. And if you'd like to join us on Patreon, just go to patreon.com slash Brian Alexander. If you want to see our subjects coming up, just go to our forum site. And if you want to share your own exciting work, just email me and I'd be glad to share your work with our community. In the meantime, thank you again for a terrific session. You all provided such great perceptive questions. I hope you're all doing well. And as here in the Northern Hemisphere, summers or winter starts to give way to spring, I hope you're all safe and sound. Take care and we'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.