ENSURING THAT THE U.S. NEWS PROBLEM WILL PERSIST.

I've long been on the case.  "Cold Spring Shops has called attention to the folly of admitting unprepared students and calling it access."  For all the good it has done.

According to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, roughly 70 percent of all U.S. undergraduates enrolled at public four-year institutions attend RPUs. Yet declining enrollments and years of austerity measures have left these workhorse universities particularly vulnerable. Writing about the difficult financial decisions many of these campuses have already made, Lee Gardner warns that “if many regional colleges cut at this point, they risk becoming very different institutions.”

But those who work at regional public universities will tell you that they are already very different institutions. Rarely, however, have these transformations been the subject or result of open campus discussion and debate. Often, they are not even publicly declared by the administrations spearheading these shifts, though it’s not always clear if that is by design or because administrators are unclear about their own priorities. An unsettling likelihood is that we no longer know what these workhorse universities should be working toward.

My position has consistently been that the regional comprehensives and the mid-majors and the like think of themselves as being in the same business as the Ivies, which these days might mean offering a better value proposition than the Ivies can.  "[T]he U.S. News problem exists in part because some potential students, and more than a few of their status-seeking parents, would prefer their spawn not be trapped in academic gulags or subprime party schools."  When Harvard introduces remedial math, perhaps there's an opportunity to brag on having something resembling standards.

What might have happened, instead, is the revelation of the regional comprehensive universities as the stroads of higher education.  "The challenge for the state institutions in keeping up their perceived quality is two-fold. Administrators would like to put the failures to keep up on stingy legislatures, ignoring their own complicity whenever beer-'n-circus or access-assessment-remediation-retention crowds out calculus and statistics and economics and chemistry."

But perhaps, to continue the stroad comparison, the strip malls aren't what they used to be.

Higher education is navigating a significant demographic evolution. The once predominant “traditional” student is now part of a broader, more complex picture known as the “New Majority learner.” This diverse cohort is not an outlier but rather a core component of our academic communities. For institutions committed to meaningful reform and fostering student success, understanding and proactively supporting this group is a fundamental imperative. We are being called to truly equip, empower, and encourage all who are a part of it.

Put another way, what I refer to as the Wayne State model, with all its shortcomings, might be the future.

A third of a century after I left, and they're still pushing their urban mission and first-generation, non-traditional, all the rest, with the same dismal results.  And a new slate of deanlets and deanlings.  I mean, what is a Senior Assistant Provost of Student Success without a Junior Assistant Provost and a Division of Student Success without assorted Special Assistants and Assistants To?

We used to do better.  Once upon a time, Wayne State, and its counterparts, e.g. the City Colleges of New York in New York, and Temple in Philadelphia were unapologetically all about providing strivers with the same sort of intellectual challenges their more privileged counterparts were getting at the more famous destinations, whether in Ann Arbor or Ithaca or on the other side of the tracks in Philadelphia.  These days, at Temple maybe the athletes get that kind of nudging.  Everybody else?  Not so much.

Perhaps, Wayne State and its urban counterparts elsewhere had little choice.  During my seven years there, I heard from some of the old heads how the Ivies were able to diversify their faculty by hiring the right sort of faculty away from Wayne.  That might have happened at Temple and the City Colleges.  Meanwhile, they could diversify their student bodies (a little bit) by waving scholarships at selected graduates of Cass Tech or Bronx Science.

In that Minding the Campus essay, author Dave Tucker, who appears to be in the educational consulting business, the tables and charts that follow his calls to "equip, empower, and encourage" look a lot like the enrollment breakdowns Wayne State's administrators called attention to in their state of the university messages to faculty and their budget requests to Lansing.

To the extent his analysis is correct, he's seeing something different from the more conventional chin-pulling about "gap years" or the higher education lockstep that might commit youngsters to a career path they dimly understand.

[F]ar too many young people attend college right out of high school. Most enter college with not the slightest idea of what they want to do with their lives. Attending college to “get the college experience” or to “find your passion”—I see this nonsense in college recruiting advertisements—are very poor reasons to invest four, and more commonly now, six years of one’s life and spend buckets of money or accumulate mountains of debt.

Far too many young people graduate with degrees that have provided them with little in the way of marketable knowledge or skills. I am not the first person to point out that university should be reserved for those students who are prepared for a rigorous education, full of mentally challenging coursework, whether it is in the liberal arts, social sciences, or STEM fields. Perhaps 20 percent of high school graduates are prepared for such an experience, a percentage I suggest hasn’t changed since I was a university student in 1979.

The fact that so many high school students are funneled into university by both parents and high school administrators is, in my opinion, unforgivable.

That's another Minding the Campus contributor, retired research recruiter Robert Humphreys, who might have a different perspective from Mr Tucker on how best to equip returning adult students, whose life experiences, whether it's starting a family at a young age, or serving in the military, or finding out that getting on the career ladder at an entry-level job might not be edifying, might make them more inclined to appreciate, and dig into, mentally challenging coursework.  In that, he might earn agreement from Inside Higher Ed's Scott Reznick, whose lament about the regional comprehensives opened this post.

I am in no way opposed to robustly supporting student success in the multitudinous ways a university must these days. I routinely invite learning center specialists into my classrooms, I refer students to the advising or counseling centers, and I have worked with our accessibility office to ensure my supplementary course materials meet all students’ needs. What concerns me is the lack of substantive, broad-ranging discussion about what terms like “student success” or “student-centered education” even mean, and the dearth of guidance from administrators about how the various campus constituencies should work together to achieve them. That guidance would require a much clearer and more well-communicated vision of what our ultimate purpose—and product—is.

As much as I admire [Seth] Godin’s mindful emphasis on “building things worth noticing right into your product or service,” I wonder if some core element of the liberal learning that resides at the heart of higher education is a product that can’t be endlessly innovated. What if higher education is a product similar to, say, the process of drawing heat or energy from a natural resource such as firewood or sunlight? Yes, we can refine these processes to a great extent by building energy-efficient woodstoves to capture more heat from each log or solar panels and storage devices to wrest more energy from every beam of light. But eventually there will be diminishing returns for our efforts, and some so-called improvements may simply be cosmetic changes that really have nothing to do with—or may even detract from—the process of heat or energy extraction, which, at its foundation, simply entails intimate contact with these distinctly unchanging natural elements.

Indeed, Professor Reznick noted the implicit denigration the usual "first-generation-non-traditional" rhetoric makes of his students.

That very elitism was broadcast at my own university when an administrator suggested in a conversation with me that our students often work full-time and thus are not as focused on exploring big questions or reading difficult texts. When I pushed back, asserting that my classroom experience had demonstrated that our students were indeed hungry to read the serious literary and philosophical texts that can help them explore questions of meaning and value, the administrator immediately apologized for being presumptuous. Nevertheless, the elitism was broadcast.

If RPUs are serious about the civic ideals they have once again begun to champion in response to potential government overreach, then they need to re-evaluate the overall educational product they are offering and redirect autonomy and respect back toward the faculty—particularly the humanistic faculty—who are best poised to educate students in the kinds of “soul-crafting” that are essential to a well-lived life in a thriving democratic society.

But the gatekeepers for higher education seem bent on continuing the U.S. News problem.  "College Board shortens SAT as student performance declines."  Performance, no longer "an essential prerequisite for college."  No, seriously.

American education has one job: to educate. And it’s flunking. Probably no one would dispute that.

From collapsing K–12 literacy rates to bloated, ideologically driven university curricula, the U.S. is producing a generation of poorly educated—often outright uneducated—citizens. Plenty of blame has rightly landed on K–12 schools and universities. But there’s another player quietly contributing to the problem: college admissions testing companies. These middlemen—most notably the College Board and ACT, Inc.—write and administer the SAT and ACT, the gateway exams for higher education.

Last year, in response to declining student performance, the College Board made various modifications to the SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test), the most widely used college entrance exam in the United States. These changes not only simplified the exam—they made it easier.

Why?  Why else, because "first-generation-nontraditional-marginalized" comes bundled with some sort of deficit.

[T]he College Board’s 2024 changes, which describe college readiness as an “essential but elusive goal, particularly for members of historically underserved population groups,” also citing “societal and educational inequities.”

It continues by listing statistics from the high school graduating class of 2022, when only 26 percent of Hispanic/Latino students and 19 percent of Black/African American students met College and Career Readiness Benchmarks as opposed to their Caucasian (53 percent) and Asian American (75 percent) counterparts.

The College Board then expressed support for  “accessible testing situations” where  students are not “unduly advantaged or disadvantaged by individual characteristics” such as “age, disability, race/ethnicity, gender, or language.”

To that end, the SAT exam was modified to be “adaptive,” meaning that the computer collects data on students’ aptitude and “adjusts the difficulty of the questions […] based on the student’s test-taking performance.” In essence, students will be evaluated against the limits of their own abilities rather than a set standard, rendering the exam useless for comparing academic performance across the board.

Business as usual.  Senior administrators and their enrollment managers can congratulate themselves on their inclusiveness (read admitting unprepared students and calling it access) and U.S. News continue to sell their guides.