 All right. Well, why don't we begin? Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the future trends forum My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host your organizer and your chief cat herder for the hour I'm very glad to see you all here today We have a terrific topic with a great great expert and I'm really looking forward to our conversation Now I want to introduce this week's guest I'm delighted to be able to introduce Doug Shapiro He is the executive research director for one of the most important research outfits in the world focusing on higher education It's a national student clearinghouse research center And what Doug does is he looks carefully at data in order to understand What are today? Let me just welcome you Doug greetings Hi, Brian. How are you? Great good to see you and good to hear from you. How are you doing today? I'm doing much better now that you can hear me and I can hear you idea video conferencing So so glad to see you so glad to see you and where are you today? I'm very glad to be here. I'm really excited Great great. Where have we found you? Are you in Virginia right now? Yes? I'm in Herndon, Virginia. Oh, excellent That's right of DC This is the clearinghouse's main office Well in order to give people a sense of your work and to give the people a sense of the clearinghouse Let me just ask looking ahead to the next academic year 2019-2020 What are the big issues and the big projects that are looming ahead for you in the clearinghouse? well, we are One of our biggest projects that we're really excited about is a new report that we're going to be releasing At the end of this month actually that's looking at the An unusual topic for us. This is the second time we've done it. The first was five years ago when we we We plunged the depths of our enrollment database and degree databases and found all the students who had some Enrolled in college at some point in the last 25 years and had never finished a degree College no degree report Some college no degree. That's very very important. Those are some of the in some ways. That's the kind of the worst way to experience college Well, absolutely. I think it's one of the greatest fears nowadays when you talk to students and parents about the idea of going to college which today increasingly means taking on significant amounts of student loans and debt and The worst thing you can possibly do in that situation is end up with that student debt and no credential no degree or certificate or anything to help you earn a Better income that can help you pay off that debt. I mean that's really become the promise of higher education today It's no it you know for many students. I think it's not so much about what they learned. It's about what they're going to earn And that experience of having debt and classes, but no sheepskin It's gonna not gonna help them on either front That's a very looking forward to that report and maybe maybe in the next few minutes I can ask you for a few teasers from the report if possible But friends before I proceed Let me just say if you're new to the forum or if you haven't been here for a while Know that I have a lot of questions for our poor guests. I'm gonna just interrogate the important thing here It's for you to ask questions. So think about for example, what Doug can tell us about students today What put pointers to the future? What trend lines is he observing and how do those connect with your own institution? Be it a library a museum a college or university Please he's very very friendly and I'll be very nice to help out So think of the questions that you And as I say that we I want to actually begin with one particular question to start off with which is Thinking about your student database. What proportion of students now are Traditional age and what proportion or adult? Well, most students today are still traditional age But but what we see in our database is we've seen some pretty wide swings particularly over the past nine years since the You know enrollments we had one of the things that we've been tracking pretty closely is that Ever since the Great Recession enrollments in higher education as you know just Mushroomed for a few years and most of those growth that growth in Enrollment was among older students Makes perfect sense to any economist unemployment goes up You've got a lot of adults leaving the workforce either volunteer or unvoluntarily they flow into college to try and increase their their skills and and Qualifications so that when the economy improves they're ready for a better job And ever since then that that trend peaked in about 2011 And since 2011 college enrollments have been steadily declining about one and a half percent a year We've lost over two million students as of last fall and we expect us to continue this fall Since the fall of In the US and most of that about three quarters of that decline was students over the age of 24 and what's really interesting is that in that same time period the demographics of traditional students traditional age students have been changing as well and this has to do with birth trends 18 to 20 years ago and changing kind of changes in family income and Ability to pay for college increases in the Costs of college and what we're starting to see in just the last year or two is that traditional age students are starting to decline in numbers at an even faster pace than that long-running decline in older students in the last year First time traditional age students declined by over four percentage points from 2017 and that was compared to only about a two percent decline in older students So we're still seeing a slow decline trickling out of adult students But suddenly the demographics of traditional age students are starting to Take over and we're seeing a decline in in younger students as well This is enormously enormously important for I would say the super majority of colleges and universities the ones that are dependent on enrollment for tuition Much less for the very foundational purpose teaching and learning How far down are we from 2011 about eight percent? It's about ten percent actually Yeah, so we have a long boom starting in the early 80s It just kept trucking and trucking along and then around 2008 we had a little spike and now we're we're just nosing down Yeah, yeah, and a big part of that increase going back to the 80s was actually increasing college progression rates or enrollment rates So if you think of a share with a percent of high school graduates who actually went to college That had been steadily increasing for for a generation and That that trend has in my view pretty much maxed out There may be slight increases But I think we're more likely to see start seeing slight declines in the percentage of high school students Going to college But what's more important is that there are simply fewer high school students graduating today, right? Yeah, and that's uneven across the United States, but absolutely So some regions of the country are still seeing growth particularly in the South and West But if you look across some of the traditional Kind of historical strong areas of higher education institutions in the Northeast and the Midwest That's where we're seeing the biggest declines simply in demographics of traditional age students We have a quick question. Let me just flash this on the screen from Jen Obando That's a clarification about that and Jen must know is there a significant difference between the decline in undergrad versus grad school Yeah, very and in New Jersey Stevens, too. Yeah, that's an excellent question, Jen And your and the answer is there's a there's a big difference what we're seeing is actual increases in the numbers of graduate students across all different types of institutions public and private That is partially offsetting the declines today in undergraduate students. So almost all the declines are in undergraduate students So we have a Kind of maybe think of this as a shift in enrollment where the amount the proportion of students who are undergrad is being a decline The proportion of our grad is being to increase right so though for those institutions that offer graduate programs that is helping to To mitigate the effects of the enrollment declines, but of course for community colleges and two-year institutions That's where you see the biggest overall declines because they don't have the ability to attract those graduate students and and I think it's interesting that the the What that says about the value of college today a lot of people look at these overall declines in college enrollments And their first reaction is well, that's because college isn't worth it anymore, you know, there's all these you know PhDs driving taxis and that kind of thing What we're seeing really is is more about that can not be a cop the sorry the unemployment rate Graphics then about any real perceptible shift in the the the value or the notion that it's important to go to college and to maximize your education in order to maximize your Your opportunities in in in the workforce today So our value is still we still value higher ed more or less the same way. There's just fewer of us Exactly, that's a really really important point Again friends I have a whole stack of questions If you'd like to press for clarification like Jen just did very nicely or if you'd like to ask for more details say Geographic or racial or having to do with different institutional types This is a great time to ask or if you have any other questions About students in higher education again, Dr. Shapiro is one of the great great resources on this And meantime, hello to folks who would just come in like Lena and lose Good to see you all here Let me ask another question while people are fulminating and thinking You're looking ahead a bit The demo demographer Nathan grove says that around the year 2024 2025 we should see the high school graduation population just fall off a cliff Those are his words That the reason being that the 2008 financial crash prompted a lot of people to not have babies that year following years So do you looking ahead? I know forecasting is a very difficult enterprise But do you see that decline? You know say 1% every semester Continuing and then around 2025 2026 the decline accelerated. I Think that's pretty likely. I mean in in in this respect You know the old demography is destiny is pretty powerful You can't create new high school graduates out of thin air now the high schools have been Working harder to make to try and increase their graduation rates and all sorts of Organizations are out there trying to increase the share of high school graduates who go on to college But I think the bigger effect of that decline in high school graduates will be An extension a continuation of the trend that we're already starting to see in terms of the behavior of colleges and Universities in how they respond to those declines So one of the first things that we see colleges doing when they're having a harder time finding new students is to Turn inward and say well What can I you know, I've got to keep my my tuition revenues coming in and my seats filled What can I do to to increase my chances of holding on to the students? I already have instead of you know trying to attract more new students can I can I increase my retention rates and keep more of my current students and We've seen this already starting to have effects in in our most recent Reports that's that track student retention and persistence rates and student completion and graduation rates So what we're seeing is more students staying in Thanks, largely. I think to the efforts of institutions particularly in terms of Analyzing data and data analytics and and trying to understand in a much deeper way the reasons why students are dropping out or transferring or moving around and and trying to implement Interventions and systems and early warning signals all sorts of things to Help students stay in so we're seeing in our last completions report last last December We saw some of the highest Completion rates so of all the students who started college six years ago. How many of them have completed a degree? Anywhere in the US that's how we define completion as opposed to just Graduation rates at the same college where you started and we've seen some of the highest completion rates Since we've been tracking them And and partly that's attributable to these demographic changes But I think a lot of it has to do with these efforts on the part of institutions And I think I think those efforts are if anything just getting started so there's There's a shift in a way from the quantity of students towards their increased quality of experience Yes quality of experience. I Was afraid you were gonna say quality of students and that's a much harder In fact well on a related note a George Washington University announced that they would deliberately shrink their total student body but in order to do but they're by doing so they would Increase their quality and that's admission So think about your test scores SAT that connect from a class Frank But also that they would devote more resource to improving their throughput So you know shortening time to degree and increasing their students who graduate that kind of thing Yeah, this is a revolution in higher education as we know it. It's a very very different campus strategy Absolutely, and it's also countering another trend that we have been tracking in our data for some time one of one of the key advantages of the Dataset that the Clearinghouse collects from Institutions across the US is that it allows us to see students who are Enrolling in more than one institution whether that's simultaneous Concurrent or simultaneous enrollment Which might be online it might be you know taking a course at it two different community colleges in the same same vicinity or all sorts of Behave concurrent enrollment behaviors like that and also students who are transferring more so anytime a student changes institution we are able to track that and identify what had been a Dramatically growing trend of students who are incorporating more than one institution into their kind of educational pathway So so the kind of new normal was not just you know the the old ideal of going to a Leafy green four-year campus and staying for four years and graduating but Students starting at one school taking courses at another school Transferring to another school going to two or three and even more institutions to cobble together a program of study or a degree So student mobility generally has been a steadily growing trend more and more students Even are taking the traditional route of starting at a community college completing an associate's degree and then Transferring to a bachelor's degree, but the reverse is also true students starting at a four-year institution deciding that's not for them transferring to community college and completing it an associate's degree and That that trend is now as I was saying starting to Perhaps max out perhaps even taper off because of again these increased efforts on the part of institutions to hold on to the students they have and of These transfers and or dropouts those Students are trying to do more to hold on to their students and we started to see that in our last Completions report also that a higher percentage of students were actually graduating from the same institution when they where they started from As opposed to you know We had seen for years a pretty consistent across the board about 13% of all students were graduating from a different institution From where they started and that start to taper off. So it sounds like we're seeing Increased competition between campuses. I think there's certainly increased competition for first years for starting students. Yes, and Yeah, I think that's fair to say there's a follow another question here from Genovando who is awesome and Jen wanted to come back to the demographic question and flesh out one key detail She asks the do you think that the decline in the northeast midwest the decline 18 year olds is due to a decline in the birth rate or something else? Well, I think it's it's definitely a Birth rate demographics trend. So we're seeing that decline coming from every, you know, you can go back to The size of kindergarten classes first grade second grade the whole path To college to high school graduation and college those declines are consistent across the board and the other part of that is increasing Racial and ethnic diversity of the class and Certainly in terms of the the traditional representation in higher education and kind of those trends are Compounding the effect. I think of some of these over declines in overall numbers Do you was good question Jen? I mean, this is this is a huge social Transformation that's that we're living through the anti-tributing to beyond education itself Oh, we have a question from Ken Soto who wants to come back to another point We are talking about how college and universities respond to this trend one response is to recruit aggressively from other countries and Ken Soto asks can Dr. Sure, can Dr. Shapiro discuss the drop in international students and what factors outside of politics contribute to this Yeah, that's a great question We don't actually do the best job at tracking international students in our data Not and the reason for that is that not all colleges Submit information on their international students most do but we don't have a come as complete a picture there as we as we do for Domestic students, but I think from other sources. There's no question that the number of international students studying in the US has declined in the last couple of years Also after many many years of steady increases And and that's certainly having an effect on Surprisingly wide kind of range of institutions. I think it used to be you know, we tended to think of only the more Prestigious or or prominent institutions that we're attracting able to attract foreign students particularly for graduate programs, but One of the things that we started to see in recent years was, you know institutions of all kinds all across the country even You know midwestern community colleges that had Significant numbers of international students. So those trends are are not Isolate not not limited to just the select few not that institutions So beyond it's another extraordinary development that you know paralleling the overall growth and enrollment until about 2011 We had this growth in international students up until about 2017 but then Ken's question is very for precise Ken asks, you know, is there something besides the Politics that's responsible. I Wish I knew I don't I don't have any from any kind of data that would Support an answer to that question unfortunately Yeah, all I'm hearing just two things. I'm hearing that there's depending on the nation and the population of course that there is Nervousness or outrage about various US moves against immigration either the Muslim ban or the situation of the sudden pooter and Secondly, there's fear about school shootings Most of which are not happening in higher education, but nevertheless, which are quite photogenic and quite concerning Good question. So again friends, if you're new to the forum These are two different ways you can rapidly pass questions on through me to our esteemed guests So as we as we pull apart these these numbers as we do a collaborative picture of where students are today Please help us alone by asking your questions or offering comments. For example, are you seeing this where you are? If you're say in Michigan or Iowa, are you seeing that decline in the number of high school students? Or if you're in North Dakota or Texas, are you enjoying the boom in the number of teenagers? Or do you have any do you see other implications for colleges and universities as Ken and as Jen mentioned Again, while people are thinking hard about this and this is a lot to take in Let me just ask a couple more questions to follow up and help unfold things a bit Thinking about What students study What is your sense of some of the changes in enrollment? You see for your data either in terms of majors what's what people are granted degrees in Or if you can drill down even further to what classes students tend to take I mean is the big shift towards stem continuing to happen or are there details we should know? Well, I think there's definitely a big shift towards more career Oriented programs That's not always stem, but certainly stem is an is an attractive part of it. I think there's there Well There are some there seem to be some kind of natural limits in the in the number of students who are who have the aptitude and the and the interest in real stem majors So there was some increase there, but What I think we've seen more in in terms of increasing percentages of Majors and degrees is in things like health services or business and and marketing and Majors that students can see a direct path to a career right That seems to be what's driving them and again it has to do with you know that that need to to start earning Earning a good wage right away, so you can pay back those loans. I think and start getting ahead There's a whole raft of questions that just bubbled up that I need to put these out Which is tremendous. It's one of the real pleasures and delights Communities this wide range of ideas. Let me put up a couple of these Let me ask by the way if any of you are in a position where you'd like to speak out loud if you're on the stage Just let me know just click that raised hand it and you can join this on stage So one question. This is from Doyle At Kentucky who asks are the trends that we see nationally in the US? similar worldwide That's a very good question, and I'm I do not have a sense of these How these trends are playing out in other countries unfortunately I mean there's there's the general picture that Moderna the tends to lead to a Dropping of fertility rates a couple of weeks ago Bloomberg reported that South Korea's fertility rate was now 0.9 You know that the average couple had less than one child each But beyond that so this is a fantastic question that we should explore Thank you for raising this and Doug. Thank you for being so straightforward We have another question that comes in from Evan Englander who received Dayton Expect to the increase in completion rates. Is there data from the clearing house that shows that involved in clubs and Organizations is aiding in degree completion And I should say Evan's the director for charity and sorority life. So there's a particular background to his question. Good That's a great question. You may have more data than I have to support an answer to that question We we don't know I mean we don't We don't track any of that kind of data at the clearing house So we don't we have no way to know which students are more engaged on campus There's certainly a lot of other sources that campuses can turn to to help them answer questions like that with on their own Within their own students, but on a national basis. I don't know of any any results Well, it's a good question and even if you want to follow up with any of your analysis based on your position on seriousness, please do please do It's a really good question and we have Jen Obando who is just a wonderful wonderful source of energy here and She has a comment rather than a question and it's a she reveals a concern that I share myself Which is that it's scary to think this overall decline in traditional age students might lead to even more aggressive recruiting strategies Like going after students who have already committed to a different institution Yes, Jen, I can tell you've been watching the news of what's been going on with the the National Association of College admissions counseling Absolutely, I think that I think that Those developments raise a lot of concern and there's no question that Colleges are under a lot more pressure to recruit students from anywhere They can find them and whether those kind of norms of the profession will will be able to survive these changes in In the legal climate around around recruiting and admissions is a is an important important question Well, that's that's definitely a good one. Thank you for thank you for asking this And we have another question and the question is just pouring in and friends you can see how Questions this is really where the heart of the form is community discussion We have one from the excellent Michael Haggins long-time friend of the program and at Georgia Tech That's Center for 21st century universities. This is that your groups focus on completion of retention is very important What does your work say about the mode of instruction such as online or off campus? That's a That's a really great question. We have until very recently not had The ability to track what type of instruction what mode of instruction students are engaged in I Will by way of a teaser in our next about that next report that I mentioned at the very beginning what That's some college. No degree report will provide some of our first results that separate out students who completed degrees at online campuses versus kind of bricks and mortar campuses, but again again not at the Perhaps not at the level that you're looking at, you know, one thing that we know nowadays is that it's it's not really enough To say well, is it an online institution or a traditional institution because what's what's more interesting is all the online Instruction that's taking place and blended instruction is taking place across the board and we still can't in our data set pick apart Course by course what type of of instruction or what mode is going on? But what we can do and what we have done in this report that's about to come out is Identify institutions where They're considered predominantly online and and talk about which students are Engaging in those types of institutions particularly among this some college. No degree population That would be interesting to find out That kind of research should be critical. It's one of the one of the tools in the toolbox a campus has Is to be able to change up how it how it conducts teaching? Yeah We just please go ahead, please. No, it's just going to comment I'm impressed with your your your participants. They're asking really hard questions I wish I could answer with our data But you know, basically our data set has traditionally been limited to just basic enrollment facts and completion facts and degree facts And we're we've got a number of projects underway to expand that One of those is an effort to collect more information about course level progression and enrollment in individual courses pilot going on with Something over a hundred institutions now, I think that we're expanding And really looking forward to the next few years when we will we would we hope to be able to say a lot more about What's happening in between? enrollment and graduation what types of courses what types of major selections and Better going on in between. That's going to be essential essential information Well Michael wanted to follow up in person Turn your mic on That work it works perfectly so good to see you good to see you I'm Michael hi Yeah, your work is really important. I think for folks to understand and I had asked that question about the balance between online and offline Or on campus Instruction There is data that's captured In the databases the NGMs database Concerning percentage of courses in any particular year by institution that are rough Where credit is being earned online so You're coordinating all of that Data or is your organization separate from that data source? Yeah, completely separate from that data source To but to follow up on that if we were taking a look at the same time period For comparison purposes, then it might be possible to Basically walk between those two To the extent that the time periods overlap and the rigor of the data collection From both sources can be said to be Approximately equal is that a fair? Yeah, it sounds yeah, I'm not familiar with that data set, but it sounds like from what you said that would be a Reasonable approach for a follow-up strategy on this work What we what we used I will tell you is the just the iPads Institutional characteristics definition of a predominantly online institution, which is a pretty high bar It says it's it's it says 90% or more of the enrollments at that institution or online, right? Yeah, the more difficult thing to get at of course is the extent to which folks are learning The courses are being taken essentially online predominantly or Significant portions of the course are right. Yeah Yeah Well, thanks. Thanks very much To you and for Brian. Thank you For the extra information Michael's excellent Friends if you're if you're new to the forum, that's how we easy to just ask a video question Just let me click the button Let me know I beam you up on stage The only thing missing is a great Star Trek transporter effect and I just have to imagine that in my head We had a couple of questions from Charlene Mu on Chat box and she asked a couple of Related questions, so let me put them up one at a time But I can't display these these came in the chat. She asks first How do you see colleges and universities trying to retain students? So more lucrative aid packages more perks more career services more robust alumni programs I think all of the above I mean again, we don't actually see that we see the effects of that in our data But we don't track what institutions are actually doing in terms of programs and services I think the only thing I would add to that list that that she offered it is is The kind of data analytics that we're seeing or I'm reading about that colleges and universities are increasingly using kind of a big data Assessments of what students are doing on a day-to-day basis on campus to try and create early warning systems for students who might be struggling and to to Kind of predict based on patterns from Existing students What types of supports might help? That's I appreciate again your your straightforward gender about what That's in your data Yeah, it's one of the reasons our data are great at and other things that we just gonna throw up our hands Say wow, I wish I had data to help answer that question You are expending and what you gather Charlene had a follow-up question, which is related and ties back to Michaels Which is how was the growth of certificate programs played in colleges and universities growth? Yeah, that's a question. I I do have some things to say about so excellent question. There's not we that we we've seen a Steady expansion and certificate programs and and what's really interested in interesting in there is Not just that more students are earning certificates at colleges and universities, but that they're They're not just getting them to to take straight out into the into the workforce. They're getting them as kind of stacking credentials that lead to Degrees so we're seeing more and more associate degree earners for example who have earned certificates along the way One or two certificates and then an associate's degree more and more Bachelor's degree earners who have earned a certificate and then an associates and then a bachelor's or just certificates and bachelor's more and more bachelor's degree earners who are going On to earn certificates post baccalaureate certificates often at community colleges again So so these are all things that we can see very clearly in our data the numbers of students who are stacking credentials they're looking for shorter term kind of markers or or Value ads on the way to a degree and What's interesting there one part another aspect of that that's very interesting is that it goes hand-in-hand with a Trend of increasing times to degree. So if you just count how long it takes to get a bachelor's degree today Or an associates degree that's been growing steadily and Part of that is because students are moving around and transferring and stopping out We know that every additional institution that you enroll in actually lengthens your time to degree And so that makes it you can you can imagine that that makes it much more valuable and important to have some kind of Intermediate credential, right if it's take it's going to take you six years to earn a bachelor's degree you've got to have some way right to to Kind of establish some progress and maybe have something that can help you in your part-time employment To pay the tuition during those six years, right? But it also can have a Kind of accelerant effect that Earning a certificate might actually kind of divert you slightly so that it adds again to the time that it's going to take you to get that bachelor's degree It's a it's a project management question You're expanding your your tool set you're spending the multiple areas of where you're spending resources and that there's a friction There's a cost in doing that Terrific question and thank you very much for the great answer Building on that we have another great friend of the program the awesome Roxanne Risken who has a related question Oh, I'm not sure if the font came out. Let me just read this to you if he doesn't Do you see certificate types of credentials increasing in higher ed as a response for filling a gap providing upscaling and Overall to build on what you just said. This is a positive and favorable trend that will continue Who wad in that question? Wow, I definitely think upscaling is a part of it. There's no question when you when you know all that I've seen in kind of the labor market indicators of what employers are looking for it's increasingly about skills and And wanting to see specific evidence of the ability to perform specific skills rather than just show me your bachelor's degree And I'll assume that means you're competent at whatever I throw at you So so so there's definitely a big part of what's driving this whether that's a good thing I'll leave that to you Well, that's a good thing for all of us to to think about Thank You Roxanne we had a Question about one of the Clearinghouse's tools you have a service called student tracker I think and that helps talk universities follow student Progression can you speak a little bit to that to how that helps us understand students today? Sure, so Student tracker enables any college or university to submit a cohort of students that they're interested in and The Clearinghouse will match that up against our database and provide back Essentially directory information that says here's where those students have been enrolled at any of the institutions that submit their information to the Clearinghouse and what that what what that does is Well, when you if you think of this this trend of student transfer and mobility It's really important for an institution to understand if students are are transferring out or transferring in from other institutions where what what those pathways look like which students are transferring out what types of institutions are they going to What are they majoring in? and and how can that information help me on my campus to either better Adapt my own programs to help retain those students and maybe prevent them from transferring if I'm thinking Competitively or or on the other hand you many institutions are taking the position that look It's not about You know student transfer and mobility is just a fact of life It's not necessarily something you can prevent Students are transferring for all sorts of reasons. It might be economic. It might be about family responsibilities or move, you know a spouse or a parent is moving to a different city for a better job and you've got to move with them and So the question then becomes how do I make sure that I'm doing all I can to support those students? when that Life event happens and making it easier for them to transfer their credits So it doesn't add a year to their to their degree time, right making it easier for them to Yeah, construct a coherent pathway that's still going to meet their educational goals so Student tracker again if you're a strategic enrollment manager or a student advisor Helps you to understand based on the patterns of your existing students when they've transferred What kinds of supports and what kinds of programs can better meet the needs of today's mobile students? Well, thank you. It sounds like a great effort a great service And people have more questions to follow up that that go along the same by the way Friends we're in about six minutes. We'll approach the end. So we're coming to the to the very close of this session So make sure you get me your thoughts before it's too late We have a really good question here from Patrick Dixon from Eastern mission. I'm sorry from Michigan State It says if enrollment by male students rose to eat a lot of female so 50% Wouldn't that help close the forecast decline the number of students? Well, I think mathematically that's an absolute yes Whether that can happen I was a very good question. I don't I wish I knew That is a tricky one But definitely what's what's the breakdown overall for total enrollment is about 55 percent female 45 percent now Yes, it's right around there 54 55. That's the first time in history. That's a switch Again, thank you Patrick for that question And speaking of which We have a question from Charles Finlay at Northeastern It appears that students who are being recruited are less prepared to exchange for college level work Can colleges provide the additional support which is costly to prepare students? Yeah, that's a great question. I think and again, that's one that I just don't have an answer to I do know though that Going back to our that student tracker service That's another really important value of that of that service. So for example, we provide student tracker not just for colleges but also for high schools and Thousands of high schools and districts across the country are able to essentially through the Clearinghouse see where their graduates are going to college and How they whether and how they succeed and get real insights into which students appear to have been well prepared for the colleges that they entered and which ones didn't and that kind of information what we see the the the the The data savvy high schools in particular doing is using that to inform their own preparation and programming For high school students. So they if they can see that, you know, a particular track or or curriculum or Preparation is doing a better job of Preparing their graduates for Success, let's say in a local community college or the state flagship Whatever type of institution they're they're concerned about They can use that information to strengthen their programs and make sure that they're doing all they can to make sure that their students arrive at college ready for college work So that's another way of collaborating across the secondary post-secondary area. Absolutely We have a forward-looking question from live or leave. So let me put this up. This is an interesting one We're going a little different different direction Leave us. Can you please discuss the needs for physical campuses in the future? It seems there is persistent development of student housing, etc In spite of the rise of online programs and decreased in a hundred. Will these trends continue? So, you know, if our campuses are more and more online, will our campuses actually look different? Wow, that's a great question for forward-looking. I Think I don't think online will ever replace on campus I think there will always be a need and I think what it what it's going to do is Through these kinds of increasingly detailed data analytics colleges or students and universities are going to start to learn in much greater detail What parts of the post-secondary experience? Can be transferred online? Effectively and what parts really need on campus experience and they'll do better at kind of blending and and taking advantage of the You know the benefits of each mode of instruction where they're best where they're best used Well, thank you. I was kind of blended campus in a sense We have a one final question and it's really appropriate that it comes from Jenna Bonda because Jen opened these questions And she was just on fire and I'll give her the last room. This is a tricky one She asks is there any difference in your data between ethnic groups and decreased high school graduates? i.e. Is there data that students can use to market or incentivize smarter? Well, there's certainly a Shifting demographics within the high school graduates population and shifting demographics within the post-secondary population and So Yeah, there are There are very different rates of progression and success and different patterns of enrollment among different different Subpopulations of students Particularly, you know when we think for example about the the traditional access or institutions like community colleges Black and Hispanic students for example are far more likely to start their enrollment in post-secondary at a community college and we we've we've often considered in our data that If you were in that, you know the lower graduation rates at community colleges would have would Therefore affect those students the most, but if you allow for the students who Don't complete a degree at the community college But transfer before graduation and complete a degree at a four-year institution that that might be a pathway that could demonstrate A kind of closing of some of those gaps of access for underserved populations and Unfortunately what we find in our data is that that is not the case In fact, it's just the opposite that every kind of step even transfer and mobility For students who start at community colleges only seems to serve to widen the gaps In attainment and completion Wow That's That's really daunting It comes back to your earlier theme where where a lot of the the more moving parts we include in the higher education machine the More challenging and the more complex the process becomes Yeah You know, we can only think about this process and complexity with the help of your kind of research I've got to say we're at the top of the hour. We have blazed through 60 minutes and I can't thank you enough for being so generous with your time and so generous with your answers to all of our questions Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much for this opportunity to engage with these Amazing participants and all the great questions. I've been it's been a very stimulating conversation a lot of fun Well, we'll have to have you back next year, especially when you have another release of Report or some data. I think this would be a great crew to give you a working over Looking forward to it. And then one last question. What's the best way to keep up with the clearing houses work? Oh well just Come into our website nscresearchcenter.org and we have all of our publications and reports You can sign up for a blog or our blogs or notifications about when new reports come out But you can also just browse through our catalog and download any report you want any time for for free You don't you don't have to do anything for that. That's terrific. Well, thank you so much And as we could talk for another hour, I'm sure but in the meantime, thank you so much. We'll talk to you again soon Thank you. Take care. Bye. Bye Now the rest of you don't leave because we have to tell you about what's coming up next week in the forum So next week our guest is Dr. Amy Novak Who's the president of Dakota Wesleyan University and her focus is on innovation? Specifically at rural institutions. She has some terrific ideas some really great plans Just go to shending comm slash log in slash event slash Novak and sign up for next week in the meantime Recording for this session and recent sessions in all of our sessions is available Tiny world comm slash FTF archive You can grab our discussion about all kinds of issues including students and data If you want to keep talking about all these issues with the role certificates and transfer all of this We have many ways for you to do so we have a slack group We have groups on Facebook on LinkedIn and we're continuing to talk on Twitter using the hashtag FTTE So in the meantime, please keep the conversations going and thank you once again We just echo our guest's praise your questions and comments for terrific. It's a real pleasure to work with you Well, we'll see you next week and I'll stick around here for a few more minutes if you have questions until then. Bye. Bye I'll leave asking question. What was the tiny URL for the archive? That's tiny world comm slash FTF archive Thanks for the question