The Shrinking of Higher Ed In the past, colleges grew their way out of enrollment crises. This time looks different.

Higher education is in crisis. This is not hyperbole. This is real.

"In many ways, the pandemic’s effects on enrollment have been specific and unique. Higher education is typically countercyclical; that is, people enroll in college when the economy goes south, to get skills or because they can’t find a job. Despite a small recession in 2020, enrollment has fallen throughout the pandemic, bucking that tendency."

Demography, combined with increasing costs, appears to hold college's destinies. Another way to think about this that is obliquely referenced herein is that this is an after effect of our country's historic and ongoing lack of underinvestment in educating people of color, particularly Latinos, its largest demographic (Contreras, 2019).

We were reminded of this in my Foundations in Education Policy class yesterday evening with the viewing of Stolen Education that I highly recommend viewing. It documents a horrible, decades-old practice in Texas of retaining children in first grade for up to three years in school as a unique feature of segregation in Texas schools that you can also learn about in this story, "Oct. 30, 1956: Texas School District Found Guilty of Discriminating Against Mexican-American Students." 

The community successfully challenged this discriminatory practice in Hernandez v. Driscoll CISD. It represents the first case where the Brown v. Board of Education decision was applied to Mexican American students. Not unlike segregation and educational malpractice for the Black community, this was a horrendous practice that oppressed our community for decades too numerous to bear. Hence, both the short and long arms of discrimination haunt the viability and future of higher education today.

As thorough as this piece is, it still needs to look more deeply into our history's discriminatory past and present. Reviving Affirmative Action and Free college for all (Kelderman, 2021) strike me as ways to stimulate college-going for the masses, especially considering the clear, consistent positive economic returns to education to individuals that represent a key, consistent finding in the research literature. After all, we won't stop needing the skills that the economy and a rapidly-changing world need.

This is a long, but very worthwhile read.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Contreras, F. (2019). Becoming “Latinx Responsive”: Raising institutional and systemic consciousness in California’s HSIs. Publication of the American Council on Education and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, 1-9. Retrieved: http://www.equityinhighered.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Conteras-Essay_FINAL.pdf

Kelderman, E. (2021, November 3). Free College Is Dead in Congress, but It’s Alive and Well in the States, Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved: https://www.chronicle.com/article/free-college-is-dead-in-congress-but-its-alive-and-well-in-the-states

The Shrinking of Higher Ed In the past, colleges grew their way out of enrollment crises. This time looks different.

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by Karin Fisher | AUGUST 12, 2022 | Chronicle of higher education

Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic, raising alarms that the enrollment emergency projected to arrive a few years from now is already here.

High-school seniors uninterested in studying online chose to defer. Working parents strained by the demands of full-time pandemic child care put their studies on hold. International students couldn’t get visas. Those in majors with hands-on practicums or lab work found they couldn’t register for courses required for their degrees.

Enrollment numbers continue to look bleak as the pandemic drags on, even though in-person classes have become the norm and consulates have reopened. College attendance among undergraduates has fallen almost 10 percent since Covid emerged in early 2020; this spring, enrollment dropped 4.7 percent from the year before, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a deeper-than-expected decline.

The persistence of the enrollment contraction has sparked fears that many students are not simply missing but gone for good. Research shows that if students stop out, or take a leave of absence, they may not continue with their studies, and that’s particularly true for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. “We have to act now,” said Courtney Brown, vice president for impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation. “This is a crisis moment.”

The pandemic enrollment slide has heightened worries at colleges about finances, especially among those dependent on tuition revenue to meet their bottom lines. Even before the Covid outbreak, the financial resiliency of a third of American colleges was poor, according to a new report from Bain & Company.

Plunging Graduation Rates Signal Long Recovery | Sarah D. Sparks — Aug. 29, 2022

As a consequence of the pandemic, many students are facing difficulties earning sufficient credits and good grades sufficient enough to graduate. This is a helpful read on what different states are doing. 

I'm not sure how I feel about a 13th year of schooling since this could feel like a demotion for high school students. Volumes of research on grade retention should give us pause, especially since it coalesces around the best option of not retaining youth, but rather promoting them with resources. How about a stipend to attend a local community college and make that, in effect, their thirteenth year.

One could argue that this would encourage some students not to graduate so that they can get financial support to go to college, so this could get counter-balanced with other proposals incentivizing high school graduation.

How about, for example, allowing students to graduate early should they choose coupled with stipends for early graduates? The mix of options as covered in this piece opens up a rethinking of high school in imaginative ways.

For example, the idea of states moving more toward mastery- as opposed to seat-time based credit sounds promising for the long-term goal of academic recovery. 

Student portfolios and "allowing students to get credit for multiple content areas from the same course" as Ohio is currently pursuing is innovative and makes sense. Here's a link to the state law that goes into effect in January, 2023: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-3313.603

One can certainly bet that Ohio's approach will feel more fair with students as opposed to any new ways our policy makers might devise to retain youth in grade. 

What needs to factor in the mix is that the pandemic didn't shut down students brains and they learned tons, like we all did, about the world, life, and their place in it. Many of us are already looking back and realizing just how much we learned about ourselves, our families, and values in the process. Acquiring a sense of what really matters, albeit frequently mediated through trauma, is nevertheless extraordinarily valuable. They just didn't quite learn all that schools taught. But they did learn. These were perhaps the most valuable, important lessons of their lives and that should count for something.

What the authors describe at the moment as a "long recovery" to dramatically lower graduation rates arguably holds possibility for constructive systemic change in the long run. All is not lost. We can and should be hopeful even as we collectively work to enact positive systemic change that works for teachers and teacher's work, as well.

-Angela Valenzuela

Plunging Graduation Rates Signal Long Recovery

By Sarah D. Sparks — August 29, 2022 | EdWeek

Marcia Oliveira, left, and her son Angelo, 18, talk with a graduation advocate in Charleston, S.C., about how to 

schedule credit-recovery classes around the new restaurant job Angelo had to pick up during the pandemic to 

help his family. Henry Taylor for Education Week

The last few years have presented a “perfect tornado of reasons” for 

students to leave high school, and states and school districts are starting 

to see the fallout. At least 31 states saw declining graduation rates for the 

class of 2021 overall, more than twice as many as in the previous year.

Low-income students and those with disabilities have been the hardest hit, with year-to-year declines for low-income students in 33 states and for students with disabilities in 22 states—more than twice as many as for the class of 2020, according to an analysis of state data by the EdWeek Research Center. The ongoing pandemic disruptions are rolling back years—and in some cases, a decade—of states’ progress in boosting graduation rates for students of color.

(A nationwide graduation rate total is not yet available. Though states are required to report disaggregated graduation rates to the federal government every year, many are behind, and full national data are not expected until next year. Not every state provided Education Week with data for all student groups in every year.)

Remote learning and repeated outbreaks and quarantines have led more students to miss school and fall behind in classes, while increased family illnesses and economic instability have given older students more reasons to leave school and start work early, according to Terri Martinez-McGraw, the co-director of the National Center for School Engagement, which studies and works with schools to prevent students from dropping out. At the same time, overwhelmed teachers and school staff have had less time and energy to track down students who are slipping through the cracks.

In the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, “kids have had a much longer time to be absent, fail classes and lose credits, have behavior problems,” said Robert Balfanz, the director of the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. “High schools tend to be pretty mechanical [in response]: You fail a class, you don’t get credits; you don’t have enough credits, you don’t get a diploma. So we are seeing the first downward trends in graduation rates in 15 years in 2021, and there’s a good chance that continues … because we know kids just still aren’t back.”

Graduation Rates Sink for Second Year, Especially for Vulnerable Groups

Graduation rate declines have accelerated in many states as the pandemic continued. An analysis of state data by the EdWeek Research Center finds 31 states saw drops in graduation rates for the class of 2021, compared to 14 for the class of 2020. 

At-a-glance: Public School Graduation Changes Between 2019 and 2021

Hover over bars to reveal data for each state.

Graduation Changes for Vulnerable Student Groups

The number of states that saw declining graduation rates for students with disabilities and low-income students more than doubled from 2020 to 2021. 

States losing hard-won ground on diplomas

Graduation-rate progress held steady for the class of 2020, whose members had mostly completed their requirements by the time the pandemic began to shutter schools in March 2020. States and districts also offered broad flexibility to students in meeting credit hours and seat time, course and testing requirements, and other graduation requirements.

The graduation flexibility states provided in 2020 “held students harmless” for academic disruptions, but they also may have given educators a false sense of security with regard to high school students’ progress, Balfanz said. State flexibility was intended to be temporary, but students in the subsequent high school classes became more disengaged, not less.

“In Arizona, we’ve lost 10 years of attainment; there’s been such a huge slide,” said Stephanie Parra, the executive director of ALL in Education, an Arizona nonprofit that works with districts to improve graduation rates. “We are going into the third school year still navigating a pandemic, and now we do have clear data that schools are struggling and our students are definitely going to need a lot of support to bring them back.”

The Grand Canyon state saw the biggest graduation declines in the nation. It graduated only 75.7 percent of its students on time in 2020-21, less than it has at any time since the state began calculating four-year cohort data in 2011. The decline has hit students of color particularly hard; graduation rates have dropped 5 percentage points for Black students, 4 percentage points for Hispanic students and nearly 6 percent for Native American students since 2018-19. The state board of education also has found rising student mobility among schools since the pandemic.

Across states that provided data, Asian students were the only group for which fewer states saw declines in graduation rates in 2021 than in 2020. In the same time, graduation rates have declined for Native American, Latino, and white students in the majority of states, and for Black students in 24 states.

How Have Graduation Rates Changed in 

Your State?

More states saw drops in graduation rates for students of every race except Asian students in 2021 compared to 2020, according to an analysis of state data by the EdWeek Research Center. Below, see a breakdown of which states and demographic groups lost the most students. 

At-a-glance: State Graduation Changes, by Race

‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college by Collin Binkley, Aug. 9, 2022 | AP News

There is no question that there is going to be a marked impact of the pandemic on levels of academic preparedness for college students. I wonder if this is in part what's also contributing to historic low enrollment numbers into colleges and four-year universities this fall. As noted in a recent publication of the Hechinger Report:

"There are 4 million fewer students in college now than there were 10 years ago, a falloff many observers blame on Covid-19."

This is unfortunate, not just for the future of higher education, but particularly for young people that may be structuring themselves out of a college degree for reasons that could additionally include an actual or perceived lack of preparedness given the chaos that tended to accompany the pandemic for so many.

Clearly, as college and university faculty, we have to be sensitive to this and not make students feel badly about being underprepared. Surely, these youth still learned a lot during this "down time," just not what we might have wished for them to learn. 

Yet, what they have learned about themselves and the world throughout these many months of lockdown and uneven schooling is invaluable, an education in itself. Expressed differently, how the future plays out with this demographic entering our colleges and universities right now is in no small part also in our hands as college and university faculty. 

We should relax our presuppositions about what a prepared students looks and sounds like and get about the business of teaching. We'll get through this, but it'll require some shifts in focus and ongoing sensitivity that all is still not as things were prior to the pandemic. How we respond matters as higher education staff, faculty, and senior management matters so very much. 

I hope and trust that our educational leaders bring resources to the table for these youth so that a college education can continue being the positive, transformational experience that we know it can and should be.

-Angela Valenzuela

‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college

By COLLIN BINKLEY  Aug. 9, 2022 | AP News

Why People Are Acting So Weird? by Olga Khazan in The Atlantic

I've asked this question myself, numerous times. According to this piece, so much of this tracks back to the pandemic in combination with other factors like “high-stress, low-reward” situations associated with the loss of jobs, well-being, and tragically, loved ones, in combination with greater drug use and drinking, mental illness and trauma. Fewer services for mental illness and addiction have been costly. 

At the most general level, the pandemic itself has impacted societal bonds and established a kind of unsettling, "anomie," or normlessness, as once theorized by sociologist Émile Durkheim whose work pointed to the impacts of rapid social change in society. Check out this incisive quote herein:

"The turn-of-the-20th-century scholar Émile Durkheim called this state anomie, or a lack of social norms that leads to lawlessness. “We are moral beings to the extent that we are social beings,” Durkheim wrote. In the past two years, we have stopped being social, and in many cases we have stopped being moral, too."

I trust that we will have all learned the massively important message of this pandemic that no one is an island and that we all need each other and how that's not only a good thing, but part and parcel to what it means to be human. The good news is that these manifestations of not just "weirdness," but violence, will subside as the pandemic itself subsides. Like you, I hope and pray that we don't have to go through this again as the pandemic's impacts will no doubt reverberate for decades to come.

-Angela Valenzuela

Why People Are Acting So Weird

Crime, “unruly passenger” incidents, and other types of strange behavior have all soared recently. Why?

By Olga Khazan | MARCH 30, 2022 | The Atlantic

Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But if you look closely, people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. (The gate agent looked like he was about to punch back, until his female colleague, bless her soul, stood on some chairs and said “no” to the entire situation.) That wasn’t even the only viral asshole-on-a-plane video that week.

In February, people found ways to throw tantrums while skiing—skiing. In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area of a Canadian resort, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate. Separate footage shows a maskless man on a ski shuttle screaming, “There’s nobody wearing masks on any bus in this goddamn town!” before calling his fellow passenger a “liberal piece of shit” and storming off.

During the pandemic, disorderly, rude, and unhinged conduct seems to have caught on as much as bread baking and Bridgerton. Bad behavior of all kinds —everything from rudeness and carelessness to physical violence—has increased, as the journalist Matt Yglesias pointed out in a Substack essay earlier this year. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Early 2021 saw the highest number of “unruly passenger” incidents ever, according to the FAA. In February, a plane bound for Washington, D.C., had to make an emergency landing in Kansas City, Missouri, after a man tried to break into the cockpit.

Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently; at one point, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. Schools, too, are reporting an uptick in “disruptive behavior,” Chalkbeat reported last fall. In 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. Car thefts spiked 14 percent last year, and carjackings have surged in various cities. And if there were a national tracker of school-board-meeting hissy fits, it would be heaving with data points right now.

What on earth is happening? How did Americans go from clapping for health-care workers to threatening to kill them? More than a dozen experts on crime, psychology, and social norms recently walked me through a few possible explanations.

We’re all stressed out

One likely explanation for the spike in bad behavior is the rage, frustration, and stress coursing through society right now. When Christine Porath, a business professor at Georgetown University, collected data on why people behave in rude or uncivil ways, “the No. 1 reason by far was feeling stressed or overwhelmed,” she told me.

The pandemic has created a lot of “high-stress, low-reward” situations, said Keith Humphreys, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, and now everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breaking point. Someone who may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic might be pushed over the edge by an innocuous request.

“When someone has that angry feeling, it’s because of a combination of some sort of provocation, their mood at the time of that provocation, and then how they interpret that provocation,” said Ryan Martin, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay who studies anger. Not only are people encountering more “provocations”—staffing shortages, mask mandates—but also their mood is worse when provoked. “Americans don’t really like each other very much right now,” he added.

Rudeness can be contagious. Porath has found that at work, people spread their negative emotions to their colleagues, bosses, and clients—even if those individuals weren’t the source of the negativity. “People who witness rudeness are three times less likely to help someone else,” she told me. She thinks people might be picking up on rudeness from social media and passing it on. Or they might be logging in to a Zoom meeting with their overwhelmed boss, getting yelled at, and then speaking a little more curtly to the grocery cashier later.

Seven Texas Teachers on the State of Education: “I’m Tired of Getting Punched.”

Interlocking crises are ruinous to public education. Teachers are burning out. There is way too much stress and pressure on our teachers—to the point of unreasonableness. No, this isn't at all a true year of what teaching is. However, that's of little consolation to overly-stressed teachers who are bearing the brunt of two years of a pandemic.

If we can do one thing, based on what we read here, let's stop testing these students and let's refocus on the relational, healing, uplifting aspects of education. All of our youth are capable of achieving at high levels. What they need, however, is for their needs to get attended to. So many are traumatized and they need how to move forward in their relationships, make friends, and resolve problems. Let's indeed tackle the hard problems so that our youth and teachers can get on with learning.

-Angela Valenzuela

Seven Texas Teachers on the State of Education: “I’m Tired of Getting Punched.” After two years of hell, Texas teachers are burned-out, angry, tired—and sounding the alarm about public education.

By Forrest Wilder and Maya Mojica | TEXAS MONTHLY

March 17, 2022

Illustration by Texas Monthly; Getty

March 17, 2022

Even in the best of times, teaching is a challenging profession. In Texas, K–12 educators have long contended with relatively low pay, a Byzantine school finance system, high-stakes standardized testing, and indifferent politicians. But the COVID-19 pandemic—now in its third year—has introduced extraordinary new obstacles. There’s severe understaffing, heated debates over critical race theory, and plummeting standardized test scores, not to mention the slew of difficulties that accompany remote learning. These interlocking crises can sometimes make the classroom feel like a pressure cooker. And yet teachers—most of them, at least—keep showing up. To understand the toll this is taking, Texas Monthly spoke with a dozen current and recently departed teachers about burnout, COVID fears, learning loss, the upcoming STAAR tests, staffing shortages, the effect of the pandemic on students, whether to keep teaching or to quit, and the future of the profession. They are a diverse bunch, representing a racial and ethnic cross section of Texas educators. They teach at elementary, middle, and high schools at school districts across the state. What follows are lightly edited versions of the stories of seven teachers at the education front lines.

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I. On Burnout

“This year is like none other for me.”

It’s no surprise that many Texas teachers are burning out. For two years, they’ve been asked to do far more than just juggle the usual demands of classroom instructions; they’re also counseling students reeling from the pandemic, breaking up fights, and giving up their planning periods to cover for other educators who are out sick or have quit. Teachers are also stressing about the full return of the STAAR exams in May, after they were canceled in 2020 and made optional in 2021. Many say they are being pushed to the breaking point. 

Alex Marquez, formerly seventh- and eighth-grade special education, Northside ISD, eleven years of experience: Beginning in 2020, I saw levels of anxiety I had never seen before. I ended up having to start medication just to build up the courage to walk into the classroom every single day, not knowing what circumstances I was going to be walking into—not even knowing, in many cases, if any of my students were sick; always wondering about my colleagues; always wondering, “When am I going to finally get sick? When am I going to bring COVID home to my family?” And always having that over your head in addition to the demands from administration, demands from parents, trying to also be there to support students. It made not only emotional and mental impacts on my life, but also physical and physiological ones—stomachaches, headaches, anxiety, insomnia, lack of appetite. It was just not a good state to live in. At the end of the day, I can’t pour from an empty cup. I can’t be there for my students if I can’t even be there for myself.