 Well, why don't we get started? Let me begin the program. And then you begin by welcoming everybody. Welcome to the Future Transform. I'm so glad to see all of you here today. We have a fantastic guest and an absolutely essential subject with a lot to cover, and I'm so looking forward to it. This is now my pleasure to welcome Jeff Solingo. Jeff is a longtime journalist who has kept a keen eye and a sharp pen on higher education of where it's going. He's the author of multiple, multiple books that are very, very important reading, constantly writing important articles. His Twitter feed is essential. Now what we're bringing him on stage to talk about is his most recent book. And this is a book about admissions and college admissions called Who Gets In and Why? If you'd like to learn more about the book on the bottom left of your screen, you should see a kind of yellow tan colored lozenge. And if you press that, you'll get a chance to grab a copy yourself. So Jeff, welcome to the forum. Welcome back. It's great to be back, Brian. And I love the keen eye and sharp pen description. I might use that. I'll keep that. I'll credit you. Please do, please do. First things first. Are you well, safe and sound? Everybody okay? I am safe and sound. Like many people, I have not been on a plane since March 7th. I was coming back from Texas where I hosted a dinner with some college officials down in Texas and haven't been on a plane since, but the kids are back in school a couple of days a week and it's just been great to spend time with the family. Oh, nice. Nice all around. Well, I'm glad to hear all of that. And where are you based though? Where are you- Do you see? Not far from you. But it doesn't matter. We can't see each other. Well, I'm glad you're safe. And I gotta say that I think for both of us, not flying out of Dallas every three days is probably a good thing. Yeah. Especially on United, but I don't say anything. Yeah, that's quite true. When I ask people to introduce themselves, I don't go by the usual academic routine of saying, tell us about your education and your projects. What I do is ask you to look forward a bit and ask what are you gonna be working on for the next academic year? What are the big topics or the big projects uppermost in your mind? So the big projects for me are really gonna be around what is higher education going to look like post COVID? And what are the people, talent, processes and technology that is going to be necessary to enable that? I moderated a panel yesterday at the Milken Global Institute with Michael Crow and with Paul Quinn, Michael Sorrell, with Carol Christ from Berkeley. And so we talked a lot about what is the changes that are higher education is going through right now and what will mean post COVID. So I think everyone's writing about what's happening in the moment and I'm gonna start to work on what's happening after this moment. Excellent, excellent. Well, we'll need to bring you back. Yeah. As you make progress. Do you have a title for this book in mind? Oh, it's not a book yet. I don't know what I'm doing for the next book. The next book, I've written three books about higher education and I might wanna do something outside of education. So if I did another book, it would probably be outside of higher education. All right. Well, I'm still interested. I'm still definitely, definitely interested. And I think we all are. Well, that sounds like essential work to be done. And I hope we can learn more from it, whatever form it takes. Now, friends, if you're new to the forum, the way this works is they usually begin with an opening question to get our wonderful guest talking about his work. And then it's your turn to come in. I'm not gonna be the interrogator. I'm not gonna be the interviewer. I'm just the moderator. This is a platform for you. So if you have questions, if you have comments or thoughts, again, just use that, either the question mark box or use the raised hand button to ask more. And I promise I'll be nice. And I think it'd be nice most of the time too. We'll see. We'll see how that turns out. My first question for you, I just have to ask, and this is a kind of obvious question. Some will, you've been writing on higher education for 20 years, which is kind of outlandish to think. 23 actually, but yes. 20 years. Okay, so when you did this in-depth dive into admissions, what changed over that nearly one generation? What surprised you that was new? A lot has changed actually. And to be honest with you, I spent 16 years at the Chronicle of higher ed and admissions was probably one of the only things I didn't cover when I was there. So writing about colleges over the last couple of years and other venues, whether the Atlantic or the post or wherever, I would always get inundated with notes, mostly from parents who wanted to know why is college admissions such a black box, particularly at selective colleges, and why is it so different? Or why do we perceive it to be so different than when we went to college? And I think there are three quick pieces here that I wanna talk about, about what has changed in 20 plus years. And I went to college in the early 1990s and what has changed since then, or Jack Steinberg, as many people know, former higher ed reporter for the New York Times did a similar book 20 years ago called The Gatekeepers where he spent a year inside the process at Wesleyan. And before I even pitched this book, I reread that book and realized how much it has changed. And it's probably three big pieces that have changed. And again, we're largely talking about, and I keep reminding parents of this, thousands of colleges out there, average acceptance rate is 65%. What I'm talking about here is, the schools that unfortunately, I think sometimes occupy way too much of our breath every day and that's 200 or so most selective schools that accept fewer than 50% of students who apply. But three things I think have changed. One is that higher education institutions have become more nationalized, a set of them have become more nationalized and internationalized. So we're back in even as late as the 80s, as any of us know, right? Going to school from New York to California was seen as going literally across the country. It was much harder to fly. We didn't have the discount airlines, obviously much harder to fly now. We didn't have technology like this. We had a lineup at the pay phone in the hallway and a residence hall to call home. So it just seems so much further away. And what has happened over the last couple of decades is that not only at the national scale but an international scale now, you have people now applying to, especially these big brand named schools from all over the place. So suddenly now you have the most talented students coming from Buffalo and going to California and they're all playing in the same pool at a small number of schools. So that's the first big change. The second big change is the rise not only of the Common App, which obviously started back in the 1970s, but then the idea that you literally compress a button and apply to multiple schools. So now, average student is applying to eight, nine, 10 schools where I don't know what it was like, Brian, when you were applying, but I know I had to type them out on a typewriter, put them in the mail and I didn't really want to do two or three. I didn't want to do more than two or three back then. And then I think the third piece here is something that's happening in society in general. And that's, we think opportunity is increasingly scarce. And when that happens, we tend to kind of husband our resources and keep them close to us. And I think for a subset of parents out there, largely parents who are in a certain income bracket in certain urban areas and suburban areas, they want to pull out all the stops for their kids. And they think that ending up on the right side of the economic divide means going to the most selective college you can get into, and thus they're going to do everything they can and their power to enable that to happen. And we saw in the diversity blue scandal, even willing to go to jail to do that. Those are great. Those are huge changes. And they mark, I went to college in the late 80s. And so that definitely is great. Very different, yep. Yeah, but I've seen as well. We have, no, I think those are three major, major changes, especially that last one, which tugs in so many questions of credentialing and professionalization and quality. We have a first question already out of the box. Wow. My gosh. I haven't even a chance to ask people to do it again. We have a question. This is from Rick Bryant of the University of Florida who asks, is the time of legacy admissions coming to an end? And is there a difference between public and private institutions there? I'm assuming the second part of the question is related to the first one. Yes, I think that for a certain set of institutions, legacies are becoming more difficult to defend based on our discussions about equity in admissions, particularly when it comes to low income students, first generation students, students of color, right? All students who are really locked out of a system that is largely built on legacy admissions. The other thing is that I am starting to see at some schools, not all schools, that they're getting better data around this and they're starting to find that maybe legacy doesn't matter as much as we thought it did, right? We know there is national research data on legacy doesn't necessarily bring the dollars that we thought it did, right? We thought it helped in development. But I know that another reason why many schools use legacy is around yield. They think those students are going to actually enroll. Not only do you admit them, but they're actually going to enroll because of that connection they have to the school. And some schools, I still think that's very true. But others, so for example, one of the schools that I followed was Davidson College and I talk a lot in the book about how legacy mattered to their likelihood to enroll of students that they admitted. They're actually reducing that in the coming years because they didn't see it giving as much help as they thought it would have in terms of enrollment. So we're starting to see that more and more across colleges and universities. Well, this is a fantastic question and a very, very important one. And Jeff, that's a very, very precise and rich answer. We have, thank you. We have a question that comes from Wisconsin from Michael Johnson and he emailed me this. He can't make it right now, but asks what do you think about credit portability in admissions now? How does that change? Meaning credit, I'm assuming portability between institutions. Yeah, okay. It's going to be, in my mind, it has to become more critical, especially during this pandemic, right? Because we're seeing, you know, we just saw the new numbers today around enrollments. Clearly students are making slightly different choices than they normally would have made outside of the pandemic. We have students taking some time off. We have students going to institutions closer to home. And we may have students who may be transferring institutions after that. Not quite sure what's happening in the community college market yet because those numbers really kind of, I don't know what you think, Brian, but those numbers kind of confuse me because they're just so, they're so far down and it's so counterintuitive than what normally happens in a recession. So I hope somebody's digging a little bit deeper into what's really happening there because my assumption would have been, including traditional 18-year-olds would have started at community colleges this fall because they wanted to stay at home less expensive and so forth. So credit portability is going to become even more critical, I think, in the future years. And it's something that I saw parents and students, particularly coming out of high school, don't think about because when you bring it up to them, as they think about, well, I'll start here and move here and I can always transfer and things like that. And I always ask, well, are you sure your credits are gonna transfer? And they say, well, what do you mean? Why wouldn't they? So I think there's this idea that we, that this is yet another piece of the higher education system that the average person in public doesn't understand. That's no connection to it all. Friends, Jeff and I were talking about this new report that came out this morning from the National Student Clearinghouse Center. And I did a blog post about this morning, so you can go there. I just put a little link to it in the chat box. But a key feature of it is not only is overall enrollment down about 3%, but the community colleges are especially hammered. I mean, a drop of something like 12 to 16. Yeah, and again, a number, Brian, I know you've done a lot more on this. Just doesn't quite make sense to me. I think there are a few explanations. One, Tom Hames, who works at the community college, pointed out technology issues where community colleges are under-resourced as are a lot of preponderance for their students. A second is I think that so many community college classes involve hands-on work and everything from culinary arts and diesel and medical print. But I think also one of the surprises of that report that they're losing ground to for-profits. For-profits actually increased. And so I think to some extent, for-profits are eating their lunch, which is something that we need to track. We have more, thank you for answering that. Michael is a great guest and a great participant. We have more questions just coming in like mad. And friends, if you'd like to join us on stage, again, just press that raised hand. And if you don't, I may just beam you up anyway because it would happen. So we have from David Stone at the University of Michigan. Will the budget impact of COVID-19 further reduce state funding for higher education? Is higher education funding a priority within state budgets at this time? So that's not so much an admissions question. No, but I got my start at the Chronicle of Higher Education as a state reporter. So I fancy myself a little bit of an expert on state funding of higher education. And first of all, higher education's never been a priority in state budgets for a very long time. It's always been the balance wheel of most state budgets because you can't really charge prisoners, tuition, public education, public K through 12 education, you can't charge tuition. So it was always the balance wheel because they knew they can always raise tuition for students at public colleges and universities. And that's exactly what's been happening, right? More than half the states today, students pay a bigger share of the budget or a bigger share of their tuition than the state does. And I don't see, unfortunately, that getting better in this pandemic. And one other thing that I worry about is that public universities in particular have balanced or have helped their revenue stream in recent years by going out of state and out of country. So international enrollment at public universities at some flagship publics, out of state freshmen, actually outnumbered in-state freshmen, because again, they wanted that bigger revenue that they were getting from out-of-state students and international students. And both of those numbers, we know what's happening with international students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, again from the national student clearinghouse report today. But also on top of that, I think that one impact of this pandemic is that students are going to be staying closer to home, looking for better deals in state. I have somebody I know who lives in New Jersey and goes to the University of Maryland. And I asked them, I asked this parent, I said, why wouldn't you just go to Rutgers? And I think you're gonna start to see more of that, right? You're gonna start to see more of those students who are leaving the state start to say, well, why wouldn't I just go to my state flagship or my state regional public? Makes sense, that makes sense. That's a really, really solid answer. And we have more questions just piling in. This is great. You just unlocked a storm here. And this is from Joel Bloom at CUNY, a hundred college who asks, how do you expect schools that have shifted to test optional to use test scores from students who do submit them? It's a great question. And I will tell you, I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago for the Atlantic because what I was seeing was that, we know from fair tests that more than 500 colleges now have gone test optional for this year because, or at least this year, in some cases three years, some cases permanently because the pandemic has made it almost impossible or very difficult for students to take the SAT or ACT. And the story that I did for the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago was how students were, and parents were going crazy to try to find a testing site. So they would drive hours, some people would gas, but even get on a plane to go take the SAT and ACT. And I kept asking them, well, why would you do that if you're gonna apply to a test optional school? And most, there's still a large, and this goes back to, I think, the trust in higher education and trust in institutions right now. They just don't believe this about colleges and universities. They say, well, colleges and universities say they're a test option and we don't believe it. And so again, it goes back to, I think, trust in higher education overall right now. Given the pandemic, I think higher ed has taken a big hit in the media. Brian, you see this a lot, right? The amount of coverage now of higher education and to be honest with you, not much of it is positive. So I think that what's going to happen is, and I keep telling parents and students, if you don't trust it, this is the year to trust it because in so many of these institutions, in an average weekend now, the SAT is canceling about half of the test registrations because they can't give those tests. So there are going to be so many students that you're not able to submit a test score. So even at selective colleges that might have been test optional and maybe 85% in a normal year, still submitted scores, you might only have 50% submit scores. So you might have, you know, and colleges can't pick their class only on half their pool, right? They have to look at that other half. So the question was, well, what will you do without test scores? Or how, I think the question was actually was, how will you use test scores? And I don't think they'll use them any differently than they used them in the past. And to be honest with you, after spending this year in college admissions, one of the things I found is that parents and students are much more in love with these tests than anybody in the admissions office, right? They, admissions offices, at least at the schools that I was at and many others I talked with, really use them as kind of a check against something else that might not make sense in the student transcript, whether it's a, you know, maybe they didn't take enough college prep courses or enough rigorous courses or maybe the grades were a little bit off or they're all over the place and they wanted to take a, they wanted to figure out what's going on with the student and the test score kind of provided a little bit of a counterbalance comparison that they could use or maybe they didn't know the high school well, right? I talk a lot in the book about how high schools matter, where they're recruiting students from, where these students are coming from and maybe they didn't know the high school, they didn't know how rigorous the grading system was. And so they would use the test score in that way. And I think they're gonna use the same, if they have that test score this year and there's something they don't quite get on the transcript, they'll use the test score, I think, in the same way. That's a really, really rich answer. And Joel, thank you for the question, which would give us a kind of deep cut into where higher education is working in general, not to mention this. We have a video question from Steve at Campus Sonar. Let me see if I can bring him on stage. Let's see. I think we're there. Look at that. I think somebody has to be the guinea pig here. That's you Steve, welcome. Well, thank you for the opportunity to come up here. And Jeff, thank you for the book. I'm only in the reading section. So maybe this hasn't, the question I'm gonna ask is something you'll explain later in the book. In the introduction, one that you write specifically to students and their parents, you recommend that they don't fret about visiting colleges and instead your research schools on platforms like Reddit and YouTube in particular. I'm curious in the conversations that you had in putting this book together, what sense did you get from college administrators that they're aware that students can and are referencing them on these platforms that you mentioned? And are they concerned at what those prospective and admitted students might find when they're doing their research on those platforms? Yeah. So Steve, thank you. And by the way, I don't think I only recommended that they look there, but they are looking there. So this Bay, this is the reality. And I suggested it as yet another thing they could be looking at. So they are going beyond the normal channels and this is nothing new. I mean, ever since the rise of the internet, college has no longer governed kind of the marketing that students got to see, right? Think back in the old days and I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the history of direct marketing and in higher ad, they really control that channel and they don't anymore. And so in answer to your question, there are some college officials, I do know some people in admissions offices where they're savvy enough that person's usually also monitoring social media, they're monitoring YouTube, they're monitoring Reddit, college confidential, all those things. So they are aware of it and they do have something monitoring it and responding in real time. And in fact, in Reddit forums you will see sometimes college officials replying to things, but that's a tiny fraction of what's out there. And it is amazing the amount of content around college admissions on Reddit and YouTube. And by the way, many of them, many of the YouTube stars, in fact, I was just interviewed by one who has, 50, 60,000, and many colleges like their top YouTube person will be, 50, 60,000 followers or whatever they call them on YouTube. And these are people advertising that college for them. And I wish that college leaders would understand that's what's happening. Well, thank you. Thank you, Steve, for the really nice question. And thank you, Jeff, again, for the perfect answer. So if you're new to the forum, it is just that easy to get up on stage and in fact here, if you'd like, if it's too complicated to ask me, just press the teal color box and you'll be up on stage. And if you do it by mistake, it'll be entertaining, but it's very good to see and hear all of you. We had another question that came in from, actually, I'm from the Washington DC area. This came by email ahead of time. I wanted to make sure we got this in. What's gonna happen if COVID is not, if COVID means that grades are not an accurate measurement of academic potential? Students don't have access to the same amount of jobs and curricular activities. We have all kinds of questions about assessment and shifting to past fail and that kind of thing. I mean, what is COVID doing to the whole admissions process? Yeah, and I think that's Brian and I just wrote a piece in the Washington Post that I could add to your list of resources about I think that's where colleges, again, more selective colleges that have this ability because they're inundated with applications. I think that's where they're gonna lean into high schools, they know. And this was really a big piece of, this ended up being a much bigger piece of the book than I thought, where high schools really matter, not only where colleges and universities recruit every year where they get to know the counselors, sometimes even by name, where during the review process, they don't even have to look at the high school profile. So this is a document that comes with the application, telling the admissions officer everything about that high school, well, they know this high school so well, they don't even need to look at that high school profile. They know how many AP courses they offer. They know what the percentage of students who go to college are because every year they get a bunch of those students. So they feel so comfortable with those high schools because they take so many students from them every year. I think what they're going to do this year is to say, you know what, instead of taking 10 from that high school, we'll take 12, we'll take 15. So all of these big feeder high schools that they already have, they're just gonna lean more into in my opinion. And in fact, I'm gonna pull up a stat here to talk a little bit more about why, sorry, I'm just gonna pull up something from the book. So when human capital research, which is an admissions consulting firm that I use in the book as a character, they analyzed 130,000 applications, I'm quoting from the book here, to a brand name college over the span of a decade. It found that just 18% of high schools were responsible for 75% of applications and 79% of admitted students, 18% of high schools. We have 43,000 high schools in this country about public, private, small, large, rural, urban. So at a place like Emory, one of the universities I followed, maybe 8,000 high schools were represented in that admissions pool, but trust me, there were true feeder schools in that. And I think they're just gonna, all these schools are gonna lean more into those feeder schools. So 18% of high schools were less than a fifth. Yeah. Also for about- And that's one institution, but trust me, that is replicated over and over again. It's one of the reasons why, and I know you have written a lot about demographics. It's one of the reasons why many of these colleges in the Northeast and the Midwest are so stuck right now, because they're so dependent on a small subset of high schools out there. Well, there's a way to make that work. And the traditional way, and David Holma from the Harvard Business School has a question about that, which is about sports. What about the future of elite schools and sports recruiting? What direction might it take? And what about sports that are more niche? Squash, Nordic skiing, fencing? This is almost like the question on legacies. Sports, and again, I dedicate a whole chapter to sports. And as Brian knows, I think he had a chance to look at the book, right? I, you know, athletics, particularly at elite, selective division three schools in particular, you know, when we tend to think of sports, and it's interesting, even the editor of my book, I had to rework this chapter very much during the editing process, because I think when the average American thinks about college sports, they think about what they see on TV and they think about two sports. They think about basketball and football, for the most part, right? Now, everybody in the audience today who work at college universities know we're talking about a much bigger world here, but most Americans, that's what they think about. But at the average college, we might have 23 to 25 sports, and we have to fill those roster spots. And at selective colleges, that's even more difficult because they also have to pass muster with the admissions office. And that's where at highly selective colleges, they have to reserve spots. So for example, almost all recruited athletes come in early decision. They reserve spots for many of these students. They have the slot system where there are seats dedicated for athletes and at places, and I focus a lot in Amherst in the book, they are not only dedicating spots, but they're very explicit that those spots are for, some of those spots are for students who might be under the traditional academic profile. So there is not only a thumb on the scale, there's a whole fist on the scale. I'm a huge sports fan. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law actually coach athletics at the division three college, right? I've been getting some Twitter debates, Brian, with including my kid's babysitter who was a college athlete herself about this. I'm not, and I tell parents, if you want to take this pathway into a college, go ahead and take it, but understand by the way, you're getting a preference too. So don't complain about any other preference that somebody else might get in the admissions process. And at a place like Amherst, then let me just kind of end this because they brought up squash and these Olympic slash country club sports, right? That very few people, no offense to anybody who plays them, but very few people go to see, right? And they don't necessarily bring money in, but what they are bringing in are money from people going to see them. They are bringing in a class of student and because of where they tend to be played, they are bringing in maybe students from other parts of the country, which are important to colleges and universities, but they are bringing in largely affluent students who could pay at some of these colleges, pay the entire bill just to play their sport. And I make that point at Amherst, which has been on a strategy to try to diversify the student body, but among their athletes who make up a third of their student body, a third of their student body, more than 90% of their athletes are white and more than 90% come from the top income quintile, right? So if you need to diversify your student body and a third is essentially off the table because they play athletics, you're going to have to do a lot of work with the rest of that applicant pool to pull in a lot of first generation, low income underrepresented students. So as I point out in the book, if you're a, essentially, if you're a white upper class affluent student, you don't play sport, your chances of getting into a place like Amherst is not really good. And so we could talk about the fairness and unfairness and the supposed meritocracy of college admissions, but that to me is a great example of how it isn't fair and it's not a meritocracy. David, that's a great question. I'm really, really glad you answered this, or that you asked this rather, and Jeff, I'm really glad you answered it. This is something that, anecdotally, my students are really, really keen on and they're completely divided. They're on, they're an all, they- It's a hard, you know, and Brian, I think it just comes back to this idea that we have come to think, especially at selective schools, that admissions is a zero sum game. I got in and you didn't. The fact of the matter is nine of you didn't get in because I got in, right? And by the way, yes, colleges have priorities and they fulfill those priorities through admissions. And so they want more people from South Dakota. Yes, they want more African-American students. Yes, they want more low-income students. They want more men, they want more ex-major, whatever it might be, they want more full payers. So everybody in this process, not everybody, but most people in this process are preferenced in some way. And I think that, you know, before we start to argue in court about who gets an advantage and who doesn't, I think we have to be pretty, I think we have to be pretty honest with ourselves about how this system works and it isn't fair and it is not a meritocracy. Whoa, that's quite a sting at the end. It is not fair and it's not a meritocracy. We'll just let that sink in for a second. But then we also have a wonderful friend of the program that I wanted to bring on stage. And this is Sarah Sangrigorio, who is coming to us from the Northeast. Hello, Sarah. Hello, can everyone hear me okay? Yes, perfectly. Awesome. My questions about graduate programs. So anecdotally, I'm in my mid-30s and a bunch of my friends have all gone back to school to get their graduate work since the pandemic. Are you starting to see things with the pandemic affecting like an uptick in the graduate area as well as what you've been seeing in undergrad? Yeah, so my book only focuses on the undergraduate level, but because I cover higher education more broadly and I think Brian probably could add to this as well. But in fact, I believe and I didn't dive into the numbers from the Clearinghouse today, Brian, but I know the last time the graduate numbers were up actually, right, the biggest way, which actually also surprises me because I thought that, I mean, graduate programs are expensive. The huge amount of student loan debt is actually in the graduate area, not in the undergraduate area when we look at those numbers. I really thought that it's not that I didn't think people would wanna be upskilled or reskilled in this recession, but I thought that they might look for alternative types of programs. And maybe we just kind of keep going back to what you tried and shrewd and that is the graduate programs, the traditional graduate programs and maybe we still think that the graduate degree, the master's degree, whatever it might be, still provides us that signal, it goes back to the signaling thing for the workforce. So yes, we are seeing that. I'm surprised by Sarah because Sarah, right? Yeah, I'm surprised by because I thought this would have been the moment where kind of alternatives and what do I mean by that? Certificates, other types of alternative credentials, the stuff that Google's doing and everyone else is doing MOOCs and everything else. I thought this might be the time when people would start to flock to them instead of flocking to traditional graduate programs. And maybe we're just early in this process right now. It may be in six months or a year, we might see that, but I was kind of surprised by those numbers. Thank you. Oh, it's a good question. Thank you. And another really good answer. Campus Clearinghouse or the Student Clearinghouse data had an increase in graduate school enrollment, although it was less of an increase than previously thought. And again, the super majority, something like 85% of that increase is in not in master's or PhD, but in graduate certificate programs. Oh, okay. So there we go. I actually might prove my point a little bit that they're not interested in full-fledged degrees. Correct, correct. Which is where I think the future is going in that I think it's expensive, full-fledged graduate degrees are expensive. And unless you have a specific return on investment of that, I think that's where graduate education, again, that may not lead to a PhD in a faculty job or on the research side, where I think kind of the professional master's programs are going to be moving. Well, thank you. And we have a couple more questions about graduate enrollment, but I think Brian Bond, let me know if we address that. You can follow up if you like with another question. We have another long-term friend of the program, Tom Hamers, and I'll see if I can ambush him and bring him on stage from Texas. Yes. Yes, it looks like we got him. Good afternoon. So as a holder of two graduate degrees in the liberal arts, I can say it's a proven moneymaker. So, yes, it's worth going into huge debt for. So I got out of my undergraduate with no debt whatsoever, going to UT Austin, which was a stupendously good deal in the late 80s, but that has nothing to do with my question. So my question is going back to an earlier discussion about enrollments. And I know you do a lot of work with colleges around adapting to new realities of education and so on and so forth. And I was wondering how much of the dip in enrollments do you put down to colleges unwillingness to be flexible on some of their systemic things, things like standard-length semesters, things like credit hours, things like degree programs, completion, success initiatives that tend to box students in and make them go, oh, wait a minute, I don't know if I want to get into this. It's kind of relates to my earlier point about community college students. I think that there was a fair chunk of them who chose not to go to take classes this semester because they didn't feel like they could handle the tech aspects of it in the sense that they didn't have reliable wifi or a computer that they could work on and so on and so forth. And I made the observation in the chat as well that I have far fewer students. I teach at a community college. I have far fewer students that are tech challenge this semester than I did in the spring because I think- The tech challenge students just left. Yeah, they just chose not to sign up for classes. So my question is to what extent do you see colleges being willing to bend in order to meet the circumstances around that? I think it's a very variable question, but I feel like a lot of colleges are leaving enrollment on the table because of the fact that they're not meeting the students where they are at this point. Yeah, I mean, I think that's actually been true even before the pandemic, right? Yeah, sure. That most institutions were unwilling to bend on those things. And in some ways they did bend on them. I might push back a little bit on kind of the academic calendar and obviously they went online on a dime. I think the biggest thing that they didn't bend on is tuition. So it's interesting, I think I mentioned earlier that I did a panel with presidents at the Milken Global Institute yesterday and one of them was Thomas LeBlanc, president of George Washington University. And he was talking about how they discounted tuition slightly when they went online. I think he said 10%, but don't quote me on that. And I said to him, well, how did you come up with that number? And he said, well, it wasn't scientific. It was essentially what we can afford. And if you ask most students about their experiences in either in a residential or face-to-face education, they will talk about the relationships, they will talk about the mentorships, they will talk about the peer learning. They will talk about all those things that are obviously not as present in a underdeveloped online experience. And we all know in this forum, we know what good online education is and we know what bad online education is and much of what's happened since the spring in remote education has been on the bad side, I think. It just hasn't taken advantage of the technology. So where I think this is coming down to is that parents and students are saying, yeah, you're giving me a 10% discount, but I actually think the on-campus experience is or the residential experience or the face-to-face experience is worth a lot more than 10%, right? I think it might be worth 50%. So I think where you left enrollment on the table and colleges, the model just doesn't provide this is I think colleges should have been honest about and many colleges can't because they haven't even figured this out. Like how much is the in-person, in-classroom experience worth or how much does it cost? And then how much does all that other stuff cost? Because if we're going online and we're taking away everything from the outside the classroom experience, that is worth a lot more than 10%. And that's where I think parents and students said, you know what, I'm just going to take the year off. And I'm just not going to pay any, I'll pay whatever it is, maybe a fee that I have to be to remain kind of currently associated with the university. So where I think maybe colleges left money on the table then is like, well, how about you take one course, right? And maybe you do other stuff that kind of keeps you, that's where I would bend more, if you can't offer them a 50% discount. Are there other things of value that you can give them in order to keep them associated with the college or university? Well, what about non-elite colleges though? Like, you know, again, like community colleges, we were kind of scratching our head over the drops there. I agree with you, I expected, I actually expected community college enrollments to go up because I figured some of the people who would otherwise go off to the public for your institutions would say- Who would have gone to community colleges? I might as well sit at home and go to a community college and pay a third as much. And where I think that, and I agree with you, that's what I actually- I think that happened by the way. I didn't see that happen either, and I expected that. And I think partially because, and I could tell you this when I talked to parents and students and counselors, they didn't even think of that as an option. So this is where I think kind of an underdeveloped recruitment process for community colleges, mostly open enrollment institutions, you come to them, they don't come to you. Like, could you imagine if community colleges had a marketing effort in their region, that was, and maybe somebody did, I don't know, but was focused on like the class of 2020 and said, hey, you know, come here instead of, going online to state university or come here and go online, even if we can't meet in person. You know, they have underdeveloped marketing, recruitment because of the types of institutions they are. I think if they did, they might have been able to grab some of those students. Yeah, although I will push back a little bit and say that my college, I mean, I'm at Houston Community College, does market pretty, spend a lot on marketing and advertising also because we're in a large urban area in competition with other community colleges like Lone Star that are in San Jacinto, which are close by. But yeah, I just, you may be right. I mean, I mean, that people simply didn't consider that as an option, but I just feel like colleges in general, including community colleges, and they're not being flexible enough in meeting students where they are on a lot of these things and that they're missing huge opportunities, both online and in person, whenever in person comes back because of that. And it's exacerbated by the pandemic. I just like the way your voice dropped when you said Lone Star. It was like, yeah, compared to Lone Star, you know. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Their enrollment didn't crater as bad as HCCs, which is interesting. I think I do. Tom, thank you. Thank you very much. That's a great question. Thanks. This is the part of the program where we nudge our guests into thinking more and more about the future if we haven't already been talking about that. And so now we've got a great question from a great friend of the program here from Raj, coming to us from Sunil Westchester, who, I'm sorry, old Westbury, who asks, will you comment on the suitability, future and sustainability of standardized tests, especially as they relate to underserved populations? Yeah. I think they're on their way out for a much more. We already had over a thousand, I think it was like 1,000, 1,200 colleges that were already test optional before the pandemic, add another 500 or so that were added in more selective colleges that were added because of the pandemic. Some of them have said that they're doing three-year tests or three-year pilots of that. And I think they'll kind of study their data and they'll say, you know what? We admitted a class they're doing as well as any of our other students in college and we didn't have a test score for them. Why do we need one? I think you'll see the super selective colleges go back. I think you'll see some of the state flagships go back because there's political pressure. We're even seeing that now. It took Georgia, for example, forever to go test optional because there was political pressure there. I think Florida still hasn't gone test optional. I moderated a panel at the NACAC, all the admissions officers and counselors a couple of weeks ago and we had the president of UCF on there and he was getting bombarded with questions about why they haven't gone test optional. And it was really out of his hands because again, it's usually a political calculation and some of these states, and I'm not trying to get political here, but in some of these states, it's just really hard to go test optional from some of people in the standards movements who think that testing is important. But I think we're gonna see a lot of colleges not go back. Now, what's gonna be interesting is that I keep talking about this panel I moderated yesterday because it's- Sounds great. My brain. So next week if I'm on, I'll remember the panel I moderated the day before. But Carol Christ, Chancellor Berkeley was on. And California is involved in litigation now. The University of California had gone test optional. Now they're test blind because of this litigation there. And she keeps saying, this is not over yet. We're still going through this. She keeps talking about another test that measures actual learning rather than kind of an achievement-based test. I'm skeptical of that. And by the way, I'm not quite sure Raj's, a lot of tests have issues obviously with equity and I'm not quite sure this idea of developing yet another test. I kind of wish that we would kind of reduce our reliance on testing in a lot of places. And so, but you know, that worried me yesterday when she said that that, well, we might do away with the SAT or ACT, but God, we're gonna develop another test and you know what happens when the University of California will develop something. And if they do develop something then everybody else will follow them. So we're never gonna get rid of testing that way. So anyway, that's where I think it stands. Good answer. So she didn't have a specific test already in mind. It was one that she'd like to lead the development of. Yeah, they may lead the development of, they may use some of the K through 12 testing, but anyway. Okay, this is good. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you Raj for the very good question. Eric Stokes from the University of Memphis had a related question, which is advocates argue against the use of tests with good intentions, removal of tests or result in more subjective review and could work contrary to intent. How do you think about impact access and diversity? I mean, you kind of answered this just now, but I wanna make sure that. Yeah, you know, it's a good question. And I think that, you know, testing is one of, it reminds me of these fights that, you know, we get into where, you know, mass versus non-mass, going back to school versus non-going back. So I mean, people get into their camps. Trust me, I've just spent a couple of years inside this process. And whenever you bring up testing, there are people protesting and anti-testing and boy, they don't like each other. And they will never seed any ground to the other side. And so one point about testing that I saw is that there are diamonds in the rough that colleges find, right? In fact, one of the kids I followed in the book was from rural Pennsylvania, went to a high school where the average SAT score was 950, he hits it out of the park, 1300 plus, he ends up, you know, going to a school he would have never gone to otherwise. I even saw that at the schools I was embedded in, right? Where they found students, quote unquote, they would never have found without testing. So you take testing away, what happens to those students? Do you find them? Are you, even if you're not more subjective but you're objective and still look at the high school grades and high school transcripts, you're gonna say, well, you know, this kid went to high school where they don't offer any APs, we don't really trust it, you know, things like that. So it is going to be, I think it is gonna have an impact on diversity. So this is the problem with this testing debate, is it is shades of gray? And I wish there are elements of testing that we could save. This is a great answer. And we're running low on time and I know you have a hard stop and I wanna make sure I get as much Jeff Selengah goodness out of this as possible. I'd like to combine two questions and squish them together. So these are, because these are almost two parts of the same question here. This is one from Terry Givens who asked about tuition. So hold on to that for a second. And Terry is awesome, a great guest. So about tuition in this, and then Brian Bond adds to that the question of scholarship models. So looking ahead in admissions, how are we gonna see the tuition scholarship model of processing and ingesting students change? Thanks to both Brian and Terry for a good question. Well, the pricey model and Brian, I wish that somebody would really kind of lean into this. We need to develop a new pricing model in higher ed. I mean, this idea of high tuition, high aid, if you look at the budgets, really get inside the budgets, which I've been able to do at a number of colleges that have been continuing to discount year after year, you will see, if you look at the last 10 years over their net tuition revenue, you will see this or this. They are just not bringing in enough revenue in order to really sustain their operations or invest in new things, right? So, and yet every year they're continuing to raise their tuition because they have to raise their discount rate and they're just not bringing in any new real dollars. So it's not sustainable. And so a couple of years ago, colleges started to kind of do tuition resets, right? Where they just basically dropped their tuition, or their published tuition down to what their discounted price was to anywhere. I think that, I haven't seen more recent studies on it, but I think in most cases it helped for a year or two, but it really didn't change the trajectory of those schools. I really hope that coming out of this pandemic, some smart economist out there, some smart CFO comes up with a whole new pricing model for higher education. And I think part of it is we have to get our costs under control as well. So I guess I'll just leave it at that. That's good. About 10 years ago I had this epiphany where I was trying to figure out how to explain high red pricing to people not in high red. And I realized that the closest analogy was really American healthcare. And then I thought, oh man, we're in serious trouble. Speaking of serious trouble, I think you are our guide out of that trouble. Jeff, thank you for this fantastic hour. You've been just a terrific, terrific guest. How are the many ways people can keep up with you? And obviously they have to get your book. But are you on Twitter the main route or? Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter and LinkedIn. I'm trying to figure out Instagram and Facebook. So any of those channels, you could sign up for my newsletter called Next at jeffsalingo.com that I put out, probably I should put out more frequently but put out about every other week. And those are about the ways. I've been kind of in book, as you know, Brian, when you put out a book, you're kind of, you're buried deep in that for a little while. And now I'm starting to come out of that and starting to think about what's next. And your next project could take any number of forms. Yeah, exactly. Well, again, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Joe. No problem. It was great to be with you and thank you for your great audience and their great questions. This is a great community. Thank you all. But don't go away yet. I just need to point out where we're headed for the next few weeks. And I mean that. Thank you all for really, really good questions throughout. For the next month or two, we're gonna be diving into a whole set of subjects and everything from accrediting agencies and pedagogy, educational technology, work-life balance, augmented reality, a whole series of approaches. You can keep talking about these issues across all of social media, especially on Twitter using the hashtag FTTE. And we're always glad to keep this going. If you wanna go into the past and look at the previous sessions where we've looked at a whole series of topics, including Jeff Zlingo's first appearance in 2017, just go to tinywereld.com slash FTF archive. And there's more than 220 videos there right now. And above all, thank you again for a great hour this time. I really wish you all the very best during this extraordinary semester. Please stay safe and we'll see you online next time. Take care. Bye-bye.