Lifting the Veil on Enrollment Management: How a Powerful Industry is Limiting Social Mobility in American Higher Education

by Stephen J. Burd (editor)

288 pages, Paperback

Published May 14, 2024

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

The issue of the games selective colleges play with their aid and pricing has been a problem that has hid far too long from the public consciousness as everyone tends to focus just on the list price. This thorough and highly readable book shines that critical light o. the practice of enrollment management through a range of lenses and perspectives. In doing so it highlights both how much the chase for prestige has led colleges astray from key goals around access and perhaps most scarily as public colleges have started emulating the worst practices of private colleges.

This issue of the pernicious chase of prestige merits particular discussion. The book starts with two strong chapters going over the history of US News and the enrollment management market. What it lays bear is just how absurd this behavior is if you take a step back. Boston College was one of the first practitioners of enrollment management as it faced financial troubles. There’s also highlights of Clemson University trying to bolster its prestige. But why? Why should BC be trying to create a national profile? Shouldn’t Clemson just serve students in South Carolina well? Instead all these games so that you can say you reject more people or increase student test scores say nothing about what’s in the classroom or if people learn or succeed after college. It’s all performative based on sort of nothing that’s actually about the work colleges do.

Highlight this is critical work Steve Burd has been doing for years and the book does a great job highlighting the nuance and issues. I’ll particularly highlight the chapter from Beth Zasloff that is a heartbreaking portrayal of how these games lead to forcing a low income student with a disability paying $14k in parent loans a year for Ithaca College.

The types of schools here aren’t an accident. They’re higher Ed’s upper middle class. They aren’t the super rich. But they’re trying to get there. And their pursuit of doing so can be felt in the pocketbooks of low and middle income families across the country.

[Carolyn Kost · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recommended read. If you hadn't known what a mess higher ed was before reading this book, you will afterward. The most insightful essays for my purposes as one who advises high school students' parents were "Going to a Witch Doctor" (the witch doctor being enrollment management services companies), "The Dangerous Game of Financial Aid Leveraging" (although it completely failed to indicate how Black families tend to use financial aid), and "Gapping Through College."

First, the witch doctor. Enrollment management companies have transformed the "cone-shaped progression" into a vendor-driven strategy of selling names to the universities. If they digitally market to thousands of students who then decide not to apply, so much the better: more names to sell! Front loading aid (offering more financial aid in years 1 and 2, and reducing it over time) results in higher dropout rates, but retention is another service to sell.

Next, the dangerous game. Quoting from my review of Lower Ed>: "Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, 'I could say the words 'student loan refund check' to African Americans with any postsecondary experience and likely be understood.'

An illustration: my colleague, a young Jamaican immigrant and graduate student, has done and continues to do exactly what McMillan Cottom describes and what the advocates of student loan forgiveness conveniently ignore. He has received tremendous amounts of grant and scholarships that have covered his cost of attendance for his bachelor's, master's and now doctoral degree, but has annually taken out loans for the official total cost of attendance, a widespread practice among African Americans. He invested the money in a CD and used it to purchase a house, which he calls "building wealth." He says the terms are lower than any other loan and he plans to never repay it by continuing to enroll in classes in perpetuity, which is unlikely to work as planned.
Other less prudent students use the money for expensive cars and vacations or business start-ups.
So, Blacks have more student loan debt? Yes, and there's a reason behind that which doesn't equate with systemic racism.

Finally, gapping. Colleges use money to attract students of high merit more than to support students who need money. Sounds like a reasonable business strategy to me in these times when a college closes on average every week, but these writers denounce it as inequitable, which is willfully disingenuous. The notion of entitlement to an expensive school can extend to the entire society. If I can't afford a Tesla, I do not buy it and buy a cheaper car instead. If I can't afford a Birkin, should I just take one from the Hermès store? The idea of working for it is unfair? Let's consider this quote from Saint Augustine: Better to have fewer wants than greater riches to supply increasing wants.

Beyond all this, however, the smug certainty in higher ed about a degree as the only path to upward mobility no longer rings true. When over 20% of college graduates earn as much as or less than high school only graduates—before considering student loan debt—the College for All! motto is just wrong. Look at the data. Are we certain that the university degree is the cause of higher lifetime earnings? Money in, money out: wealthier people graduate from college. And cognitive ability is as heritable as eye color and height, but we don't want to admit that: smarter people graduate from college. Correlation is not causation.

Enrollment management undercuts the intention of federal aid programs and wealthy families get more aid in many cases. And the costs have risen dramatically. NYU is $100K/year (x 4 or more), while an NYU social science graduate earns on average $27K/yr. The return on investment is lacking. Irreplaceable by AI, skilled trades offer significant opportunities for upward mobility; a college degree is not needed.

And then there is the arbitrary category of ethnicity. The Hispanic population in the USA quadrupled from 1980 to 2021, so "historically underserved" doesn't quite fit; 65% of the Hispanics in the USA have only European ancestry, which calls into question the entire category, an issue I have addressed elsewhere; and as for social mobility, 45% of Hispanics who grew up in the lowest income quintile made it to the middle class or higher, compared to 46% of whites and 25% of blacks. Know what does work for social mobility? The : finish high school, get and keep a full-time job and/or join the military, marry before having children, and be a member of a religious congregation.
Wang and Wilcox foundthat "97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence”—that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34)."

The major negatives of this book are rooted in the fact this was published in 5/2024. The role of AI in enrollment management is not addressed here, nor is the SCOTUS decision (6/2023) ending race-conscious admissions programs. Some of the authors seem obsessed with legacy admissions, as of 2024 already illegal in three states with five more considering bans. Legacy preferences don't admit kids who are not otherwise qualified; they give a boost, not a ladder. See Fredrik deBoer on this topic.

It's still worth reading.

[Laura Schiavo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and important read for anyone in higher education. This is an industry that is not understood bit it crucial to collegeband university operations

[Caroline Thiemann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was forced against my will to read this for work. I wish I could have simply not read it. But we don’t get the things that we want now do we.