Want to Solve the Enrollment Gap? Focus on Students We Don’t Serve Well — Or At All
The return of fall brings our attention back to enrollment — and a crisis in the making.
For years, enrollment managers and administrators have anticipated a “demographic cliff” where schools could expect more than a 15 percent drop in traditional freshman prospects. COVID-19 sped up enrollment concerns — not just for recent high school graduates, but also for students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, and working adults, who were making promising gains before the pandemic hit.
Now higher education simultaneously faces an enrollment and equity crisis, one partly of its own making. And it comes at a time when the demand for educated workers exceeds supply. But it’s one that institutions can solve if they focus on the students for whom the traditional university was not designed, like the part-time learner and single parent who works 40 hours a week or the first-generation student from a low-income background who is unfamiliar with the higher education system’s (often unnecessary) complexities.
We need to pay more attention to these prospective — and promising — students, because they are the key to resolving this crisis. More importantly, they are necessary for creating a more prosperous and equitable future for more people in an economy that’s hungry for skilled and diverse talent.
Read more in my piece for the Gates Foundation U.S. Program about what colleges and universities should do to honestly consider how to reach millions of people who have the grit and talent to go to college but can’t — either because of societal pressures or roadblocks traditional universities (often unintentionally) put in front of them.
Dale Whittaker is a Senior Program Officer in Postsecondary Success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A former executive at several of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing public research universities, he now works with other rapidly growing institutions with national and global footprints to help them innovate at scale to provide more degrees for more people with greater equity.
