My kids are teenagers now, 16 and 13. In recent years, weight sets have replaced Lego sets, video games have replaced board games and pins on Pinterest have replaced chalk on boards. While my wife found nearly every transition emotional and significant, it was not until it came to boxing up and donating our picture books that I began to ask, with a tear or two in my eye, “Is it me, or is it dusty in here?” To be clear, I have nothing against the young adult genre and still own my old copies of both Animal Farm and The Lord of the Flies, but, candidly, I miss the simplicity, poignancy and imagery of fairy tales and children’s stories, perhaps because the old adage is true: A picture is worth a thousand words.
And so, while hundreds of thousands of words have filled online and print publications over the last decade in an effort to describe the significant challenges facing American higher education enrollment, the truth is we could sum it up with three pictures and a short story: the Cliff, the Pandemic and the Hurricane.
The Cliff
Once upon a time, there was a demographer named Nathan Grawe who lived in the far northern reaches of our fair land. One day, in his map-filled study at Carleton Castle, he looked into his crystal ball and saw something disturbing. As he peered closely, he realized that there was a Cliff far in the distance that posed a threat to the kingdom’s colleges. So, Sir Nathan bubble-wrapped his crystal ball, rolled up his maps and began traveling the countryside warning leaders about what he had seen.
In board rooms filled with fruit trays and cheese platters, he announced to trustees, presidents and legislators, “Beware of 2025 and beyond! The Cliff is coming! The birth dearth is real! You need to change your ways now if you want to protect your campuses. There will not be an endless supply of traditional students in the future. The top of the funnel is shrinking!”
While some buried their heads in their hands or the proverbial sand and were slow to make changes, many deans and directors of admission unsheathed their quills and began drafting fancy documents called Strategic Enrollment Plans to prevent their college from falling off the side of the coming cliff. While these plans varied from campus to campus, they often included urging leaders to invest in some combination of the following tactics: robust transfer articulation agreements, dual-enrollment programs and partnerships, an expansion of online courses and degrees, international student recruitment, and enhanced service to graduate and adult learners.
The Pandemic
In the spring of 2020, while campuses fortified their gates and enrollment sentries kept their binoculars focused on the Cliff, a terrible sickness struck the land. Like a thief in the night, COVID-19 came with no warning and brought chaos, confusion and controversy to colleges, ultimately altering postsecondary plans for thousands of American students. Classrooms, dorm rooms and board rooms were evacuated, quads became ghost towns, and the same leaders who had been making long-term plans to weather the Cliff now had to make real-time decisions about how to keep students healthy and safe while juggling the significant budgetary implications of online course delivery and plummeting auxiliary revenues.
Ultimately, however, while time was in short supply, money was not. Far away in the nation’s capital, Congress passed magical scrolls like the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, which included a Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund. In total, HEERF provided more than $14 billion of emergency funding to higher education, including more than $6 billion directly to students in the form of emergency grants.
As a result, fair reader, contrary to the apocalyptic rhetoric you will inevitably find in the dark corners of the interwebs, nonprofit college closures (executed and planned) have averaged just a little over one per month since 2020. Unbeknownst to kingdom sages, however, more challenges loomed.
The Hurricane
As campuses welcomed their students back in fall 2023, dark clouds began to crest the horizon. The winds picked up and brought with them word of a slow-moving form—nay, storm—called FAFSA.
Students and families waited patiently. October came—but no FAFSA. Halloween and Thanksgiving gave way to the winter break and still no FAFSA. Alas, it was not until the day of our Lord, Dec. 30, 2023, that the FAFSA arrived. And with it, turbulence, disturbance and perturbance from all corners of the land.
Throughout the spring the FAFSA storm raged. Technology failed, the Department of Education flailed, financial aid directors wailed and no student aid offers were mailed.
In highly ranked, well-resourced, nationally prominent institutions, orders were sent posthaste: “Leverage the endowment! Make way for the CSS Profile! Keep the oil lamps lit for weary financial aid staff members!” However, in the universities serving the highest numbers of low- and middle-income students, cash reserves and financial aid staff members were in short supply. Despite the noble efforts of the weather-weary crew, the storm waters continued to rise and the onslaught of federal failures and foibles dampened morale and enrollment prospects.
Compounding and confounding the problem, this occurred just as COVID relief dollars were drying up, and unlike during the Pandemic, there was not another injection of federal cash to provide students with timely financial aid.
And that brings us, reader, to today …
The Eye
Summer news coverage described something called “a closing FAFSA completion gap”—from a year-over-year deficit of 40 percent in the spring to recent reports putting that number under 10 percent. Yet news of hope and light may merely be a sign we are in the Eye of the Hurricane, because just as there was a significant time lapse between the FAFSA opening and colleges receiving student data, there is a similar chasm between FAFSA completion and a student actually receiving aid and therefore gaining the confidence needed to begin college. As a result, I fear regional public colleges and more accessible private colleges are most likely to see significant enrollment declines when census totals are published later this fall.
On the brink of the Cliff and with the federal dollars from the Pandemic now gone, the Hurricane is likely to be the accelerator of drastic measures in the year ahead (layoffs, furloughs, sales of property and more) as we emerge from the Eye into the winds and rains again.
Storm Preparation
Jeremy Singer, currently on loan from the College Board to the Department of Education, has stated that this year’s FAFSA will again not open to all students on Oct. 1, but he promises a Dec. 1 launch at the latest. Yet at this point, most financial aid directors in our story have one eyebrow raised in suspicion at any statement emanating from the Education Department’s heralds.
What should the year ahead hold?
- At the campus level: The last year has shown the urgent need for institutions to invest in their financial aid information systems and staff. (See: financial aid directors’ raised eyebrows on the prospect of a smooth aid year.)
- At the state level: Continued efforts to incentivize FAFSA completion for graduating seniors and analysis of higher education appropriations, particularly surrounding comprehensive financial aid programs.
- At the federal level: Continued advocacy to increase the value of Pell Grants and increased funding to the Office of Federal Student Aid.
- At the Department of Education: In true fairy tale style, lock whoever is working to fix the FAFSA in a tower and throw away the key until it is done; invest in the integration of systems to ease the burden of applying for federal financial aid; integrate AI assistance within the FAFSA to facilitate accuracy and timeliness.
While our story started with a demographer looking into the future, historians are likely to look back at the confluence of the Cliff, the Pandemic and the Hurricane as the story of how the landscape of higher education changed forever.
The good news is I have a box full of lighthearted children’s books in my garage if you want to borrow one.