Higher Education Enrollment Growth Briefing: Recent Episodes
Eric Olsen
Enrollment Growth Briefing is a quick daily update for higher education leaders looking to grow enrollment at their college or university. Each briefing highlights a potential enrollment growth strategy or initiative, including topics such as: enrollment marketing, adult student recruitment, enrollment management, online learning, student retention, data intelligence, online course development, financial aid, academic scheduling, and more. If you’re looking for tactics, strategies, and best practices in order to build a step-by-step roadmap toward enrollment growth at your institution, this briefing is for you.
This is your final Enrollment Growth Briefing from Helix Education. I’m Eric Olsen.
And I’m so excited to share that Helix Education is now a part of RNL, the leading provider of higher education enrollment management, student success, and fundraising solutions.
We’ve loved learning with you over these past 1,100 episodes. 1,100. Oh my goodness. What a crazy number. These daily enrollment growth devotionals have been such an amazing reminder to me of all of the innovation and passion happening all across the country. Thank you for listening, and thank you for your role in being those people, building such beautiful experiences for our students.
So find me on LinkedIn (@ericolsencreative) and drop me a line to say hello if you’ve enjoyed the show. And then head on over to RNL.com. They have an amazing resources section with great blogs, webinars, and interviews. So while this show may be ending, the learning won’t stop.
And may you forever continue to fight the good enrollment growth fight at your institution.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with COVID funds from the American Rescue Plan helping keep higher ed’s finances afloat during the down enrollment years of the pandemic, 65% of Chief Business Officers believe their institutions will be financially stable over the next decade.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, in 2021, only 51% of students attending law school online rated their programs as either “excellent” or “good”. Just one year later, this number has jumped to 72%, narrowing the gap between in-person satisfaction, currently at 78%, up from 76% over the same time period.
Reported by EdSurge, new virtual reality games suggest that we’re only scratching the surface as to what immersive education will allow us to teach. For instance, Shakespeare-VR out of Carnegie Mellon University is based out of the premise that Shakespeare is meant to be performed, and merely reading the lines in a classroom doesn’t fully help students understand the art form of Shakespeare’s work.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, as our institutions start paying more attention to our personal carbon footprint, there is an ethical case to be made for the benefits of online education. In fact, The University of Michigan Dearborn reported a $570,000 cost savings from utilities during the first year of the pandemic alone.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new study from the Student Experience Project showed that students’ self-assessment of their learning experience rose 10.5% when in classrooms where faculty had been trained to help promote social belonging in the classroom.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the next generation of this concept has begun, with the acquisition of University of Antelope Island in California, whose physical campus will be digitally replicated to become a metaversity for their online student population.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Utahns Against Hunger surveyed nearly 5,700 students for this report, which also shows that this food insecurity disproportionately affected students of color, with nearly half experiencing food insecurity.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with half of all confirmed monkeypox cases in the U.S. having been reported in the past two weeks, it is becoming increasingly likely that our institutions will have to deal with both Monkeypox and COVID protocols when students return this fall.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with tenure-track faculty options falling dramatically across the board, Brandeis is evolving their curriculum to make sure their graduates have solid postdoctoral opportunity pathways. This includes funding both on- and off-campus internships to help students diversify their experiences.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while Bowdoin College was one of the first to adopt test-optional admissions back in 1969, it is now one of the first to provide a need-blind admissions process to international students. A 57.4% return on their endowment investments in 2021, bringing their total endowment to $2.72 billion dollars, may have been a driving force behind this decision.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a Bay View Analytics survey shows that 22% of courses in Spring 2022 required the use of open educational resources while only 33% of faculty now believe that “students learn better from print materials”.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, as Congress is determining whether or not to allow Pell Grants to cover short-term academic programs, specifically those that lead to a postsecondary credential, online-only programs are currently absent from consideration.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a common explanation here is that the rise in Asian-American discrimination during COVID has made these students more hesitant to join our academic communities. Although, while a whopping 59% of this population chooses 2-year institutions in California, their enrollment numbers at four-year institutions remains largely unchanged.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while saying you’re open to remote work is one thing, actually being able to hire employees from all 50 states is a much heavier tax and accounting lift.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a number of colleges are experimenting with direct admit admissions policies, including a broad program in Minnesota where 50 high schools will be participating in a direct admit system in partnership with 40 colleges who can set up their own GPA qualifier at which any participating students will be directly admitted into the respective institutions.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, RealPage analytics data shows that new student housing planned builds look to be down about 50% this fall compared to the pace seen back in the 2010s. While slow enrollment growth has slowed the need for net-new housing, the problem is that alternative off-campus housing rents have skyrocketed over the past couple years with the change in the housing market.
Reported by Edsurge, Coursera’s large student base makes A/B testing extraordinarily interesting to learn quickly from at a high level of statistically significant confidence. New research shows that one of the more interesting A/B testing success stories is in regards to prompting.
Reported by EdSurge, Meta (Facebook), is currently running television ads promising the future of education in a virtual, immersive environment. The question is, why?
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while more than half of respondents to an NPR and Ipsos poll suggested support for President Biden’s partial debt forgiveness plan, a full 82% believe the focus should be on making college more affordable, not merely subsidizing its debt at the end of the line. But what would this look like?
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, these institutions, including Columbia University, will be unlisted in the 2022 rankings for accusations of misreporting data. This comes recently after a business school dean at Temple University was sentenced to 14 months in prison for similarly falsifying data submitted to U.S. News.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the birth rate decline since the 2008 recession is going to start showing up in our 2025 entering classes. But will this 15% decline be an inevitability for all institutions, or hit some harder than others? Specifically in Connecticut, where population growth already ranked 48th out of 50 states, institutions like Western Connecticut State University are using big data modeling to find new pockets of students their prior enrollment marketing targeting would have ignored.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while Purdue cites technical constraints with its new financial processing vendor as the reason for the pause of their Back a Boiler ISA program, pausing may suggest internal dissatisfaction with the program to date.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the whole “you know potential employers can see that, right?” prompt that we give our students to help them understand the reputational downside of being too “authentic” on your social media platforms? It might not be a problem any more. Companies like Filtari promise to scan and suggest the removal of any problematic content that might red-flag employers during the hiring process.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, if you take the 40-year high inflation rate into account, our effective wages for full-time faculty dropped 5% this year. The problem? Most institutions don’t have the means or the stomach to dole out 5% raise increases across the board. Of course by not doing so, they run the risk of their most talented employees to try and find greener pastures. That’s why Carnegie Mellon University is offering a short-term measure to eligible employees in a one-time $1,500 stipend.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new Coursera report that tracks skills proficiency by country shows that U.S. tech skills dropped from 69% to 43% year-over-year.
Reported by The Hechinger Report, with so many employers beginning to quietly remove the bachelor’s degree requirement from their job listings, this begs the question if we’ll start to see a different kind of flipped learning in higher ed.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a recent study from The Brookings Institution suggests that increased high school graduation rates during the pandemic may have been a result of decreased academic standards during that same time frame. Schools were rightfully being more patient and more understanding of their students during a very difficult time.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, designed to double the number of engineering graduates coming out of the state and meet Maine’s growing STEM workforce requirements, the Maine College of Engineering, Computing, and Information Science will consolidate the system’s existing STEM programs under this one statewide institution.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, New York state is one for instance which requires master’s degrees for their teachers. But that means many if not most teachers are entering their careers with a higher level of debt than their entire annual salary.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the University of Arkansas System’s purchase of for-profit Grantham University for $1 has merged with their existing online university, eVersity, to become the University of Arkansas Grantham, currently serving only 5,500 students, but with the hopes of serving many many more, and solving the problem of so many Arkansas citizens who hold some credit but no credential.
Reported by EdSurge, Facebook continues to experiment and pilot the ability for instructors to teach and monetize courses directly on the Facebook platform. While Outschool appears to be the biggest player/target in this decentralized space on the K12 side, could this gateway into our instructors selling their courses directly on Facebook, albeit without the benefit of being able to provide credit or a credential for the work?
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, streaming media providers are becoming a growing portion of an academic libraries’ focus and budget, for documentary, film, music and podcast content for their students.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, approximately 20% of faculty and staff at Middlebury College in Vermont commute across state lines because they can’t afford to live any closer. Across the country, we’re seeing this become a bigger and bigger issue. Real estate prices go up, driving individuals further and further away from town center in order to afford the local housing rates.
Reported by ABC News, college discussion forums, including College Confidential and Reddit contain large volumes of discussions suggesting the Roe v. Wade decision may have an impact on a student’s college decision.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center highlights a few categories of student types over-indexing on their return vs. the stop-out group.
Reported by Detroit News, Michigan State University alone has fired more than 500 employees, and between MSU and the University of Michigan, more than 2,750 students have had holds placed on their accounts, preventing them from enrolling in future courses until they provide proof of an updated vaccination schedule.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, SUNY Oswego alumnus Al Roker wrote a letter for prospective students in the communications schools’ enrollment sequence. This is part of SUNY Oswego’s “everyone’s involved” approach to enrollment, which challenges faculty and alumni to be as involved in admissions as the enrollment team themselves.
Reported by Protocol, while Coursera and other microcredential providers have focused hard on hard skills these past few years, Coursera’s most recent Global Skills Report shows that U.S. learners have started leaning back to human skills during the pandemic, including resilience, project management, decision-making and storytelling - much more so than other countries. Which begs the question, who’s right?
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, 57% of Exclesior Scholarship student families participating in New York State’s free college program had an annual household income of $70,000 or greater. Critics of this program believe that this is well-intentioned design that ignored the fact that the very students this program was designed to serve most have nontuition, living, technology, transportation, and childcare costs that may prevent them from being able to participate.
Reported by Evolllution, Sheila Blanc from the University of Calgary believes it’s because we still don’t have a shared language to talk about our degree credentials, these microcredentials, and how they connect in a broader framework.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a recent EducationDynamics report shows online students are younger and more likely to be working full-time than they were five years ago. Now, there’s likely a pandemic asterisk on this data for sure, but it also makes sense to believe this trend is likely one that will stick. While online education used to be the format for the working adult going “back” to school, the younger student has realized that online is an amazing opportunity for them to be able to hit the workforce earlier, and learn more flexibly while they earn.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, higher ed’s largest missional failure got larger the last few years, with the number of students dropping out of college before securing their credential raised from 36 million in 2019 to 39 million today.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce reminds us that while elder millennials didn’t reach economic self-sufficiency on average until their early 30s, this is a full half decade later than it took elder boomers to reach that place. However, in their 30s, millennials pulled ahead of the boomers as well. And perhaps this is the most critical issue in our pursuit for clarifying higher education’s value. Perhaps it simply doesn’t happen fast enough post-graduation.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the U.S. Department of Education has been encouraging colleges to use their federal COVID relief funds, some of which are specifically earmarked to be spent on directly assisting students, on mental health resourcing. Pointing to initiatives such as the University of Riverside’s 24/7 crisis support, Sinclair Community College’s hiring of a social worker and the University of Texas at San Antonio’s telehealth expansion, including all-day online counseling for in-need students.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, many institutions are raising their tuition at the greatest rate since 2008 in response to a current inflation rate of 8.3%. This comes after two years of fairly minor tuition rate increases or even holds during pandemic years and lowered enrollment.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, for Gen Z students considering graduate school, only 22% of them have raising their earning potential as their top priority. These students are looking for better career alignment. Bigger mission. Better purpose. And a full 45% of these Gen Z prospects want a full-time in-person graduate degree, perhaps looking to experience what they weren’t able to, having graduated from their undergraduate degree in the last couple of years of the pandemic.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, for the students who started their college or career experience during the pandemic, they may not have the nostalgia for full-time in-person? And we see that preferential difference in the data. With 1 in 4 college leaders stating they don’t plan to offer remote class options by 2025, pandemic willing. But at the same time, a full 63% of students surveyed claimed they prefer either an online or hybrid education model.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Lowe’s employees can now pursue more than 50 degrees and certificate programs from 23 institutions, including University of Arizona, Morehouse College, Paul Quinn College, and North Carolina A&T State University. Lowes will also cover all textbook and course fees for employee participants.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, an amendment to the Higher Ed Act in 2008 required all institutions to implement Net Price Calculators on their websites, designed to provide a more accurate cost estimate for prospective students. The problem is, the tool is only as powerful as the inputs, which sometimes includes tax information which provides a big friction spot to completion.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, in response to the state of Maryland finding difficulty filling their talent pipelines, they have removed all degree requirements from thousands of available jobs they no longer feel necessarily should require them.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while a tentative White House plan is designed to forgive up to $10,000 in existing student debt per person, some critics question if this treats the symptom but not the problem that students may be incurring more student debt than their higher education helps them to pay off.
Reported by EdSurge, with higher education enrollment down more than 5% over the last two years, some institutions are embedding Coursera entry-level credentials from Meta and IBM into their degree programs to help their students stand out, and make sure their own degree program offerings look as immediately market relevant as possible.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a Federal Reserve Board survey shows a strong correlation between a student’s perception of higher ed’s value and whether or not they still carry student debt from their higher ed experience.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, this Chuck Palanniuk quote from the book and even more popular film Fight Club is a good description of the enrollment rebuild happening at Hamilton College.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, higher ed’s negative enrollment trends continue with an even steeper decline than what we saw the past fall. Community colleges bore more than half of this enrollment decline brunt, with no institutional type reporting a positive story from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center report.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, with just a few weeks left in the academic year, many institutions reinstated indoor mask mandates on their campuses due to the surge in positive coronavirus cases across the country. Which begs the question of what campus life will our students be returning to this fall?
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, this bill currently up for proposal would force institutions to take half their revenue earned from each sport and split it among the athletes, subtracting out the aid dollars those students receive.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, new commitments from 20 internet service providers mean that 40% of American households will be eligible for internet access subsidies under the federal government’s $14.2 billion dollar Affordable Connectivity Program.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, faculty will no longer chair presidential search committees nor be needed to comprise the majority of committee membership.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Coursera’s new Career Academy allows participating institutions and employers access to enroll in entry-level certificate programs from partners like Meta and IBM in high-demand careers.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, this multi-prong strategy included heavily promoting their proximity to New York City, precollege programs in technology and business (which are free for underrepresented minority students), a strong focus on communicating ROI to prospects, and nearly 4xing their international graduate student enrollment through a boots-on-the-ground strategy overseas.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, this is an 8% increase from 2019 according to the College Ave Student Loans survey conducted by Barnes & Noble College Insights.
Reported by EdSurge, new research from the Society for Human Resource Management suggests a disconnect, with 50% of executives claiming to place a high value on alternative credentials, while only 15% of HR professionals believe the same. But who’s right?
Reported by EdSurge, while tutoring has been available at many campuses, it hasn’t always been “accessible”. You could walk over, perhaps to the library, and connect with a tutor on-call. But the odds of them familiar with the content and that specific course? Then the odds decrease a little.
Reported by EdSurge, the late and brilliant Harvard professor famously predicted in 2011 that “50% of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. will be bankrupt in 10-15 years.” And while we’re not the whole way to the timing finish line yet, we sure can see it. And while some institutions have gone under in the past several years, we haven’t seen anything near a 50% sweep yet.
Reported by The Brookings Institution, while last year’s Build Back Better bill suggests broad bipartisan approval and alignment for critical infrastructure work, broadband access for students was historically stuck in the political crosshairs. Perhaps because for this type of infrastructure, private companies would be exclusively enlisted to do the work. There are no government providers of broadband.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, there is an interesting correlation in a declining interest in our humanities degree programs and an increase in political polarization over the past 8 years. And while correlation should not be confused with causation, a similar study from UNSW Sydney shows a similar decline in emotional intelligence over the same period of time.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, Duke University faculty director of their environmental leadership program, Rebecca Vidra, was surprised at how much more than the FAFSA there really was through seeing her daughter’s enrollment experience.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, it can be difficult for prospective students to understand how welcoming a particular institution might be to their particular faith. A new INSPIRES score, determining an institution’s Interfaith, Spiritual, Religious, and Secular Campus Climate Index, and developed by researchers at Ohio State University and North Carolina State University, may change this.
Reported by Fierce Education, while many universities are now online-only, could a Metaversity be in our future? Where virtual reality is the only access point? And if so, is this university more or less likely to be a spin off campus from a well known brand, or a tech startup?
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Chick-fil-A is committing $24 million for up-front tuition scholarships, at levels of $1,000, $2,500, and $25,000, eligible to employees with no length of service requirement.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, while online learning can transform opportunity for those juggling many responsibilities and who are far from a physical campus location, our online students do have lower engagement and retention rates.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Ohio’s Second Chance Grant program moved from pilot to permanent, allowing student stop-outs from public colleges and universities eligible for a $2,000 grant if they return to class within five years of stopping out.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, salaries for higher ed professionals increased less than half of the inflation rate increase in the past year. This trend mirrors similar realities and their respective hiring and retention challenges employers are experiencing nationwide.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, this expansion will include free tuition, books, and fees for 175 programs from more than 35 universities. These programs are largely focused on foundational priorities for the organization, including agriculture, supply chain and operations, and manufacturing - ensuring their employees’ upskilling provides a direct and immediate benefit to the org as well.
Reported by EdSurge, a new study published by Educational Psychology Review showed that students who participated in an online field trip exploring climate science using virtual reality scored significantly better on both a test immediately after and later in the term compared to the student group who had simply watched an online video on the subject.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new report from Ithaka S+R shows a higher completion rate from Georgia State University students who received up to $2,500 to clear unpaid balances and stay enrolled for the term. These students also ended with an average of $3,278 less debt than non-recipients, greater than their emergency aid received.
Reported by EdSurge, while we utilize grade level and prerequisites to try and create a fairly even academic level within each of our classrooms so we can best teach to the mean, have we ignored thinking about learning speeds?
Reported by EdSurge, as many less selective liberal arts colleges across the country face difficult financial challenges about which 20 programs they need to cut to design a financially responsible way forward, is intelligent collaboration between other like institutions our best option here?
Reported by EdSurge, Hope College is moving forward with piloting a pay-it-forward model where they “hope” (pun intended) their graduates who attend college tuition-free will become philanthropic partners and help pay for the next generation of students.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while public institutions in California are comparatively affordable to public institutions in less expensive states, for graduate student Anna Holman, housing accounts for 70% of her income earned as a teaching assistant at UC Santa Barbara.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, much has been said in attempt to dethrone the U.S. News & World Report college rankings from coveted status.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, if a school were to ban the teaching of the concepts of evolution from their AP biology course for instance, AP may remove their authorization and the AP designation would even be removed from student transcripts who had taken the course.
Reported by WGME, eligible students must have a recent high school diploma, enroll full-time in an associate degree or one-year credential program, and be an active Maine resident.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, now that student-athletes can receive financial compensation off endorsement deals and other means, Adidas has built a widely open affiliate network for 50,000+ Division I athletes to get a revenue share from referring their social media followers toward Adidas purchases.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, many of these violations include proxy testing, where an individual takes the test for another student. Online testing options, made available during the pandemic, has likely made proxy cheating an easier option for potential violators as well.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a new study from The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity shows that 60% of MBA students would have been better off financially having not entered the program. Whereas STEM degrees like master’s in computer science, engineering and nursing have the strongest ROI.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, this new proposal would cause institutions to lose access to federal financial aid if their graduating students enter the workforce with a lower starting salary than high school graduates in the state or too high a debt-to-earnings ratio.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, both MOOC platforms have suspended all content coming from Russian universities or partners on their sites, citing humanitarian reasons following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Students already enrolled in courses with this content will have 90 days to complete them.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, this includes HBCU Tennessee State University’s dual enrollment pathway for high school seniors, a new teaching apprenticeship program approved by the U.S. Department of Labor, and 65 total no-cost pathways designed to teach new teachers, including financial assistance for tuition, books and fees.
Reported by Forbes, the proposed University Rewarding Workforce Readiness Act would provide Missouri’s public universities and community colleges with performance scores based on several indicators, the largest of which would be the average of annual earnings of students from six to ten years after first enrollment.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new sense of empathy was his primary takeaway. While teaching a 101 class was not a new exercise for Krislov, the behaviors of his students was markedly different this year. Often through non-academic challenges, Krislov saw his students battling with very real distractions, including at-home responsibilities, family members with medical issues, and overwhelming mental health issues.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the U.S. Department of Education announced a new policy that would hold the entities behind private institutions financially accountable for their students who experience poor outcomes.
Because many of our most talented faculty love working with our upper-level students on more advanced work. But perhaps we’re thinking about the sequence of operations wrong? Perhaps we need to go all-in on making sure that first class, that first semester, that first year is absolutely magical for our students. Where they feel deeply in love with the pursuit of learning and engagement. Where their intrinsic motivation to finish what they started takes root.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a 50% mark would suggest there is no difference in economic outcomes between going to college and not. So at 60%, this ROI report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce is convicting and appalling. And when you drill into the numbers, you find that for 30% of all colleges, more than half their students earn less, and so many of them are also saddled with student debt and no credential to show for it.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, while Coursera may be best known for their MOOCs and recent certificate partnerships with Google, they also launched 13 degree programs this past year, bringing their total, in partnership with other colleges, to 38.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new study from the Bipartisan Policy Center shows that 96.3% of public institutions provide students with a positive median return on investment vs. only 89.5% of private nonprofits.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, in response to a 2010 study showing Idaho had the lowest rate of college attendance out of any state, with only 45% of high school graduates enrolling directly into college, the state began offering a direct admissions system into state universities.
Reported by Inc.com, Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently announced a $100 million Google Career Certificates fund, which will fund additional services like career coaching, living stipends and job placement support through income share-like agreement (ISA) programs run by non-profit Social Finance.
Reported by Knowledge@Wharton, students at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania utilize game-based virtual scenarios to engage in real-life business scenarios, stress included.
Reported by Campus Technology, the wild growth in higher ed cyberattacks and ransomware payouts last year have started to hit our insurance premiums. And therefore, these insurers are the ones insisting we update our network security so they’re not backing a sitting cyber duck.
Reported by eCampus News, the higher ed workforce became permanently altered during the pandemic, with many institutions at least much more location-flexible with their workforce than they had been prior.
Reported by The Brookings Institution, chat may have been the best thing to happen to the classroom. Rather than sitting passively and listening to an instructor speak, what we saw during the pandemic was the chat functionality becoming the live public square during instruction.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, MIT has ended their relationship with Skoltech, the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology.
Reported by Inc.com, labor market changes during the pandemic forced employers to be more flexible in their hiring practices. And one of those flex points? The bachelor’s degree requirement.
Reported by The Hechinger Report, 61% of student fathers are dropping out of college with some credit and no credential, a full 13 points fewer than the 48% completion rate of student mothers. For single Black and Latino fathers, this drop-out rate is even higher, at 70%.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, Middlebury College made the decision to recall a dozen students studying in Russia earlier this month, allowing them to finish the semester remote. While other institutions are moving students to other locations throughout Eastern Europe.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, The University of Missouri made a change to their rules and regulations allowing for individual tenured faculty salaries to be cut by up to 25% for reasons including enrollment or individual productivity.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the key difference between McDaniel College’s legacy admissions program is that, unlike other legacy admission policies that have been criticized for their ability to help non-academically qualified progeny skip the line, McDaniel isn’t difficult to get into. With a 76% acceptance rate, the $30,000 legacy grant is equal to the same grant it offers the children of all veterans and educators who work at a K12 school or community college.
Reported by Digital Journal, while NFTs obviously have interesting design applications that are already being explored and incorporated within art departments nationwide, Duke University has also started awarding certain educational credentials as NFTs.
Reported by The Hechinger Report, the University of Texas System is looking to pilot a program designed to provide microcredentials to students from degree programs that don’t often have an immediate salary payoff after graduation.
Reported by The Hechinger Report, inflation is very likely coming for our tuition prices at the same time enrollments are deeply down.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the Articulation of Credit Transfer project, coordinated by Ithaka S+R, is attempting to salvage the 43% of credits lost when students transfer to a new program and/or institution.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, California’s service program, Californians for All College Corps, will provide eligible students $10,000 in exchange for 450 hours of volunteer service work a year, roughly $22/hour.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a survey from Anthology showed 44% of students picked an institution closer to home than they may have before the pandemic.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows that 6-year college completion rates reached 62.2%, up 1.2 and 1.5% respectively from the previous two cohorts.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, state senator Dave Cortese is proposing $500/month payments to low-income students at three California State University campuses as a pilot experiment, spurred by findings from the San José State University’s Silicon Valley Pain Index report, which showed the food and housing insecurity of local populations, including up to 14,000 CSU students with family household income of up to $20,000.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, Central Michigan University recently notified 58 students that they were recipients of the prestigious Centralis Scholar Award that, among its benefits, includes a full-tuition scholarship.
Reported by EdSurge, and suggested by San José State University professor Roxana Marachi, if credentialed records on the blockchain are attached to a student, does a student have any semblance of data privacy or the right to be forgotten?
Reported by Nerd Wallet, an estimated 813,000 Pell-eligible high school graduates didn’t submit their FAFSA last year.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while online learning offers peak convenience for the working adult, it can also be isolating learning alone.
Reported by EdSurge, For 15 years, we’ve heard how online education will quickly consolidate higher ed, with the best 5 online colleges and the cheapest 5 online colleges taking 90% of our students.
Reported by EY, the ‘ZOOM College’ many students experienced last year wasn’t revolutionary. It didn’t feel like the future. For many students, it felt slightly worse.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, charitable donations to colleges and universities increased 7% last year to $52.9 billion dollars, led by no-strings attached donations from MacKenzie Scott totaling nearly $7 billion dollars.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, even the KU University Senate agrees with the elimination of 28 of the 42 programs on the cutting line, since they are largely inactive, but is pushing back on the other 14 that would impact currently enrolled students and faculty.
Reported by EdSurge, while higher ed enrollment has suffered in America during the pandemic, it virtually shut down 82% of enrolled students in sub-saharan Africa without internet access, where remote learning was not a mere annoyant learning curve, but a massive luxury unable to be realized.
Reported by Business Standard, while our business schools became more online-friendly since the pandemic out of necessity, the question becomes, why should we go back once we can?
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Don Kilburn, the CEO of UMass Online, claims we are beyond the experiment phase. That online is clearly the way forward for adult learners. And that our focus must become on excellence of delivery.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while higher ed’s enrollment woes continued last year, the average college endowment increased 35% from the fiscal market’s bull run, to an average of $1.1 billion dollars.
Reported by CNN, Yale University's “happiness” course, officially titled “The Science of Well-Being” is the highest enrolled course in the history of the institution. And during a global pandemic that has been extraordinarily rough on our mental health, this free course is filling a big need.
Reported by The Hechinger Report, higher ed’s value is indeed in question, so much so that higher ed enrollment is down 1 million students since the start of the pandemic. And while the labor shortages of the last year have meant these students have been able to find open opportunities in the workforce today, a majority of high-paying jobs are still largely locked for them.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, while only 1 in 3 college presidents are women, recent research from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources finds that female senior leaders are paid more at these institutions with female presidents.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, an Ipsos poll found that nearly 60% of college undergraduates believe students should be exposed to all forms of speech on campus, even if biased or offensive, while less than 50% believe freedom of speech rights are secure in this country today.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new report from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce shows that the top two dozen institutions providing low-income students the greatest ROI are highly selective private colleges. Whereas, overall, public colleges in general provide low income students with the best ROI.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, features of the new digital version include brevity - a 2-hour test time down from the original 3 - shorter reading passages, and calculators allowed through the math section. The testing centers will remain for authentication purposes.
Reported by EdSurge, Dr. David Clark from Grand Valley State University conducted a student self-grading experiment in his upper-level Euclidean geometry course this past semester. The results? Qualitatively, Clark claims his most energetic, enthusiastic, and best course in 12 years of teaching.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the goal is for these learners to all participate in an online global management and entrepreneurship certificate program, translated into 40 different languages, and provided free of charge through a $25 million philanthropic gift. Completion of the five graduate-level classes will provide students with 15 credit hours able to be transferred into full graduate degrees.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, California governor Gavin Newsom’s 2022-23 higher education budget plan is part of a broader goal of having 70% of working-aged Californians holding a post-secondary credential by 2030. This is by far the most ambitious state higher ed funding plan in the country.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, Worcester Polytechnic University is grieving after a third student took their own life this past year - this for a campus who had seen only two in the 15 years prior.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, student enrollment has declined by 5.1% across the board since the pandemic’s beginnings in spring 2020, with campus leadership more focused on retaining the students and staff they have vs. coming up with massive growth plans.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a new survey from TimelyMD reports that nine in 10 students claim there is a mental health crisis on campus. The biggest revelation in this report is that student stress is even worse this year than last year. One theory? Last year, students had hope we were coming out of this. This year, it kind of feels forever?
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, The University of Southern California announced a new requirement of “medical grade” masks, including N95 and KN95 masks, due to updated guidance from the California Department of Public Health.
Reported by University Affairs, online microcredentials grew in popularity during the pandemic when organizations couldn’t conduct their in-person training programs.
Reported by EdTech Magazine, a research study from the Future of Privacy Forum shows that 71% of students believe they should possess the right to control how their institution uses their student data. At the same time, 70% of students trust their institutions to protect their personal information.
Reported by University World News, the recent trial of Elizabeth Holmes and her defrauding of investors has raised questions about the education, motivations, and pressures of Holmes and how higher ed can better support and prepare future founders to make the right ethical calls.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, Amazon is spending $3 million to help launch a new computer science bachelor’s program at technical and community colleges throughout Washington state.
Reported by EdSurge, as higher ed grew over the last 50 years, so did our scope. We grew. We did more. We had new ideas. We did more. And then the pandemic hit, and we were forced to do even more.
Reported by EdSurge, the relative anonymity of online gaming has helped breed some gender toxicity, name-calling and harassment within the sport. And now with esports coming to college campuses, that cultural challenge becomes our challenge as well.
Reported by EdSurge, the “credentials craze” unleashed with MOOCs and competency-based learning has spurred songs of inevitable disruption over the last decade that have still yet to fully disrupt.
Reported by EdSurge, while computer science is at the top of the in-demand jobs list in the U.S., computer science courses are still not widely accessible to the broad majority of K12 students.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, eight public colleges in Ohio have agreed to forgive the institutional debts of students with college credit but no credential, and allow them to re-enroll in any of the 8 participating colleges to complete their degree program.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, Oklahoma quarterback Caleb Williams has been offered $1 million to come and play QB at Eastern Michigan University for his sophomore year, a financial offer promised by local employer, GameAbove Capital.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, D’Youville College is moving to a 4 day, 32-hour work week for their staff and administrators, without a downward decrease in salaried pay or benefits.
Reported by eCampus News, a new report from Mursion shows that 44 percent of HR professionals would prefer to hire applicants with strong durable skills over hard skills.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the field of artificial intelligence continues to take off on our college campuses, with more and more degree programs dedicated to its study and development.
Reported by The Brookings Institution, from July 2020 to 2021, the U.S. population grew at an unprecedented 0.12%, the lowest known growth rate since these statistics started being collected in 1900.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, MSU will provide all their full- and part-time professors with these bonuses along with three additional personal days in recognition of their incredibly difficult work during the pandemic.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a recent report from 1EdTech Foundation shows the results from a survey of 750 HR leaders across the country.
Reported by EdSurge, more and more faculty and admins are calling it quits two pandemic years into their very same toughest years in higher ed yet.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, med school applications increased 17.8 percent this year, including a 21 percent uptick from black students.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the massive variability in the curriculum and academic experience of homeschoolers has historically made standardized test scores the easiest way for colleges to compare these students to their public school peers.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the American Bar Association will now permit law schools to require the Graduate Record Examination in lieu of the Law School Admission Test for admittance decisions.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a Kaplan survey found that while 67% of MBA programs have waived their admissions exam requirement, often the GMAT, during COVID, 88% of those institutions still claim that submitting a competitive score will indeed help the student’s chances for admission.
Reported by EdSurge, while we’ve seen the promise of disruption for years, with competency-based education, MOOCs, open badging and more, the bachelor’s degree still sets atop the leaderboard as the broad credentialing standard.
Reported by EdSurge, The Catherine Project gives us a small preview. Largely organized by college professors for free, and meeting with adults to discuss works of literature and philosophy, this is an attempt to reclaim a liberal arts learning the modern academy doesn’t seem to as deeply believe in anymore.
Reported by Campus Technology, the latest college phishing scam is using a promise of COVID updates and communications to gain access to college network login credentials. And in some of these instances, the scammers have also created mock multi-factor authentication sites to also gain secondary identification information from university users.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans delivers $20 million in college scholarships every year. The change they made this year? Awarding them a year earlier, to high school juniors.
Reported by EdSurge, the edtech company Byju’s has raised $4.5 billion in investment capital over the last decade, and is using part of that funding to invest in moonshots through its Byju’s Lab.
Reported by Government Technology, Google has designed an AI Tutor Platform designed specifically to uplevel the feedback in online courses, through personalized feedback, assessments, and guidance.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while the speed of Google’s education growth is remarkable, what may be even more so is Google’s commitment to treating these certificate completers as equivalent to four-year degree completers.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the length of presidential tenure is shortening, with some very notable presidential hires in the last several years that didn’t even make it to the 2 year mark.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a devastating survey from ECMC Group suggests that fewer than half of all teens currently plan on pursuing a four-year college pathway, from 71 percent in May 2020 all the way down to 48 percent today.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with nurses having some of the most stressful work in the world these past two years, many have left the industry or retired early, causing a labor shortage in this high-demand pandemic-related field.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while virtual job recruiting increased in popularity this past year, it wasn’t enough to make up for the decrease in traditional recruiting, and graduating seniors in 2021 received approximately 12% fewer job offers than the prior year. And who is getting hit the hardest?
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the Equitable Value Explorer is specifically designed to discover inequities in the higher education experience.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Henry McMaster, the Governor of South Carolina, designated $17 million in federal coronavirus relief money to fund 15,000 students in technical programs within high-demand fields in the state, and is encouraging the state’s legislature to keep this scholarship going through June 2024 with another $124 million in funding.
Reported by IBL News, IBM has announced a global plan to train 30 million people to help close the world’s technical skill gap. This upskilling plan will leverage their existing internal education programs along with partnerships from 170 different academic, industry and NGO players.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new study by Educational Researcher used simulation data to show that in enrollment lottery systems where GPA or test score requirements still existed, the share of black, latino and low-income students would likely plummet.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, in another example of “making it available isn’t the same as making sure it’s utilized”, a new report by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice shows that two-thirds of students experiencing basic needs insecurity during the pandemic didn’t apply for the emergency grant aid specifically designed for them.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, after inflation is taken into account, average college tuition and fees actually decreased this year.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the College Completion Fund would help make sure federal aid isn’t exclusively focused on getting-in-the-door access, but instead provide funding for student support programs that help get enrolled students over the completion finish line.
Reported by the Hechinger Report, while the Great Resignation suggests many Americans don’t find their current job path worth it, finding one that is isn’t all too easy, either.
Reported by the Hechinger Report, with two consecutive years of 3%+ enrollment drops, we’re looking at the largest two year higher ed enrollment decline in the past 50 years.
Reported by EdSurge, more than half of high schools now offer at least one computer science class, with many states now making computer science courses a requirement for high school graduation. But with computer science courses comes technology requirements that can affect representation. Economically disadvantaged students are still underrepresented in CS courses. As are our Latino students. And girls make up only 31% of these classes, too.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the Build Back Better Act, which originally included Biden’s education plan centerpiece in free community college, went from $290 billion in planned funding down to $40 billion. The Pell Grant increases and support for minority-serving institutions such as HBCUs stayed, however.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while income-based loans are designed to keep one’s loan repayment affordable through alignment with their current income, some low-income participants report that this simply ends up ballooning their total debt, since their income can’t cover the loan principal, and they feel trapped.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a new research article from the Journal of Advertising suggests that religious language can adversely impact a student’s confidence in the quality of the same university's STEM programs.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Yale’s incoming enrollment has stayed relatively flat for the last 40 years, despite their application rate having 3x’d over the same time period.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, many university endowments went wild last year with the positive movements in the stock market, including Washington University in St. Louis, who earned a whopping 65% return during the 20-21 fiscal year.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, while 98% of students had been vaccinated prior to the Sept. 27th deadline, that still left 5,903 students at risk of deregistration at The State University of New York.
Reported by EdSurge, start-up Argos Education is building an open-source system called Sojourner that allows institutions and instructors to both aggregate a la carte teaching materials for their courses more easily, and also sell the same ones they themselves create.
Reported by EdSurge, the wicked cross-disciplinary problems of our time require wicked cross-disciplinary students. And the College Impact Survey out of The Ohio State University shows that 86% of PhD candidates expect to work on wicked, cross-disciplinary problems within their grad programs. But do they?
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while there have been long-standing policies against providing U.S. student recruiters with commissions based on the number of students they are able to enroll - in attempt to prevent wrongful incentivization toward enrolling students unable to succeed at an institution both academically or economically - incentive-based commissions for international students have still been on the table.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, having approved a new test-optional policy just prior to the pandemic, IU Bloomington’s modeling had forecasted 15-20% of their applicants would choose to submit applications without test scores. With the ensuing pandemic, that number ended up being 47%.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, enrollment algorithms are only as powerful as what they’re optimized for. Tuition-driven institutions have an incentive to optimize for finding students who can pay. But in that situation, they might drive enrollment, while also driving students unable to academically persist.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, the College Scorecard’s program-level metrics may help program reputation become an even stronger signal than brand reputation. Because now, you can search for a specific degree program and compare graduate success rates, including income, debt, and more among institutions across the nation when making your college selection.
Reported by EdSurge, there are only roughly two dozen online degree programs offered throughout all the Ivy League schools together, with some institutions such as Princeton offering none at all.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, after receiving $1.2 million in funding from the American Rescue Plan legislation, roughly the same amount the institution typically charges in tuition and fees each year, Clinton President Lester McCorn decided to announce the free tuition year.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, while the pandemic led to many institutions forgoing ACT and SAT admission requirements this past year, as long as they still make up 5% of U.S. News & World Report’s rankings formula, can colleges forgo them altogether?
Reported by Fierce Education, Arizona State University has been a leader in the AI-empowered classroom through its learning design principles, including each student having unique learning needs, that students learn best by solving problems not watching others solve problems, and that lesson mastery must be demonstrated in order to advance.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, more than 90% of incoming first-year students are optimistic about their personal future. This study seems to be somewhat in contrast to other reports about 62% of first-year students experiencing anxiety in the past year, and less than 50% reporting to be optimistic about the United States as a whole.
Reported by EdSurge, Zoom’s open source development kit means that the education innovations may not come from ZOOM themselves. But rather from third-party building blocks to bring technological, interactive, and adaptive benefits into a synchronous remote classroom.
Reported by EdSurge, there has always been a concern about the quality difference between in-person and online learning. So much so that Harvard created HarvardX to demarcate the difference. To clarify that these aren’t the same experiences.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, Facebook’s recent name change to Meta has created a lot of fervor and questioning as to what the metaverse actually is, with the early 2000s game Second Life being many of our’s closest participation to this future state Mark Zuckerberg now speaks so passionately about.
Reported by The Brookings Institution, much has been said about the increasing enrollment disparity between men and women. But if you look at the completion data, the gap gets even wider. In the 2018-2019 academic year, only 74 men received a bachelor’s degree for every 100 women.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, many across higher ed were hopeful that our fall enrollment numbers would bounce back from the prior year’s 3.4% drop in a post-vaccination world. Instead, they fell another 3.2%.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, about 6.6 million students have stranded credits through estimates of up to $15 billion in unpaid fees and tuition.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, admissions student workers at Hamilton College have filed a petition to seek a union election, calling for “higher wages, a uniform disciplinary process and greater respect”.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with a total cost of attendance upwards of $63,000 a year, it can be hard for students of neighboring states to choose Cornell over their state’s public institution because of the tuition disparity.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while Democrats have focused on Pell expansion and free college programs, many Republicans suggest expanded Pell should only go to institutions with high graduation rates from their Pell students - that there should be greater accountability behind federal funding.
Reported by EdSurge, while much research points to the effectiveness of open educational resources (OER) being on-par with traditional resources, researchers from Framingham State University wonder if culturally relevant resources could improve learning outcomes for underserved students even further.
Reported by EdSurge, separating room and board, textbooks, and other fees from their tuition price is designed to make the sticker price appear as affordable as possible. And yet, it is all too often these extra out-of-pocket fees that end up being the exit points for all too many students.
Reported by EdSurge, as online education continues to grow in popularity, some institutions are doubling down on their on-campus infrastructure.
Reported by Campus Technology, Walden’s AI-powered tutor, Julian, can help identify learning gaps and generate new activities designed to reinforce critical concepts, customized to the individual learner.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, six colleges, including California State University, San Bernardino will now recognize participants in IBM’s software engineering apprenticeship program with 45 credit hours.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, this “under no circumstance” policy has been defended by the administration as a safety effort, especially during a time of COVID, in which many children, and all those under 12, aren’t able to be vaccinated yet.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, this acquisition includes the 4,000 currently enrolled Grantham students and doubles the number of available online degree offerings available to University of Arkansas students.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, some K12 schools looking to ensure the college readiness and acceptance rates of their students are looking toward new extracurricular initiatives. From adding college course options in high school to creating more in-person field trip experiences, to focusing on application and portfolio preparation skills.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, after an incredibly difficult enrollment and therefore revenue year for many colleges, we’re starting to see this reflection in new tuition increases, including at the state systems in California, Iowa, and Minnesota.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, University of Alabama system employees were recently asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, prohibiting them from speaking to non-system employees about their non-public work. This is potentially in response to a local publication that has been reporting on financial irregularities out of the institution.
Reported by Slate, a ransomware attack rendered Howard University's wi-fi network unusable, forcing the cancellation of all online and hybrid classes for two days.
Reported by The Brookings Institution, many institutions often try and spin up new degree programs to try and leverage growing trends. But is the upcoming artificial intelligence revolution an even bigger opportunity?
Reported by University Business, despite an 85% on-campus vaccination rate, a nearly 50 student COVID case count triggered the decision to shift university-wide to virtual learning.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while The University System of Georgia has opposed both mask and vaccine mandates across their 26 institutions, many USG faculty are concerned about the personal health risk this opens themselves up to in the classroom.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, private nonprofit Brandman University will now become UMass Global in exchange for $130 million over the next 10 years.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, one of the most invisible inequities during last year’s emergency remote learning experiment was the fact that many students had very varied access to high-speed internet, including 57 percent of students claiming that accessing high-speed internet was difficult for them as reported in a Third Way and New America research study.
Reported by EdSurge, while the buzzword of “AI” gets thrown around a lot in education, this often means fairly basic adaptivity - merely rearranging learning sequence - at its most generous.
Reported by EdSurge, a recent College Innovation Network survey reported that a full 20% of our students struggled with the EdTech tools required in their online courses during the pandemic.
Reported by EdSurge, this pandemic has hit our student mothers the hardest, with the Institute for Women’s Policy Research labeling this crisis a “shecession” due to limited in-person schooling options for their children.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Intel’s program is attempting to develop their own future workforce in partnership with local community colleges. The curriculum includes more than 200 hours of technical content as well as ethical training regarding AI use cases.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, a Pearson+ subscription will cost a student $14.99/month for access to the platform’s full library of books and other academic content.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, this pilot only includes four transfer colleges who will also be providing the courses, including Baker College, Franklin University, Western Texas College, and Strayer University. Eligibility requirements include junior year standing and a 3.0 GPA.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, this increase comes 10 months ahead of schedule in response to a state-wide worker shortage, hoping both to attract new local employees and retain their existing workforce that has stayed through the pandemic.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, The U.S. Department of Education is tripling the number of participating colleges and universities, from 67 up to 200 based on the positive results of the first six years of this pilot.
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, Harvard University’s Kennedy School has announced their new integrated enrollment staffing model, in which their enrollment counselors will also serve as financial aid counselors.
Reported by Higher Ed Dive, 10,000 high school students from low-income districts will take asynchronous cloud computing classes this fall, earning an AWS certification along with college credit from ASU.