What is your point of view on the topic?

Lipman Hearne has worked with the Brookings Institute and RAND Corporation (both mentioned as resources in this article) on brand, reputation and awareness-building initiatives.

It wasn’t just that Princeton had found a new way to appeal to students; this particular offer helped reverse a strange decline in matriculation at elite colleges among a particular subset of the college-bound population: high-achieving students from low-income families. A growing body of research tells us that these students—even when they know on an intellectual level what they might go on to earn in their chosen fields—are averse to debt.

As a demographic group, these students are more diverse than the college-bound population as a whole, and are also more likely to be first-generation students. They are also rare among subsets of the college-bound population in that they are growing in number, while the overall college-bound population shrinks.

In the years that followed Princeton’s announcement, the rest of the Ivy League colleges and several other highly selective institutions followed suit. Since 2001, the number of colleges replacing loans with grants for low-income families or all families who qualify for aid has more than doubled every two years, reaching a total of 39  in 2009*. Even as the policy adds pressure to already stressed endowments, many schools report that delivering on the no-loan promise remains a high priority. We haven’t begun to see, much less measure, the total seismic shift in applicant and admitted student demographics this change has brought, but some early signals are interesting.

At Princeton, 60 percent of students in the incoming class of 2013 will receive financial aid. A total of 487 students from minority backgrounds represent 37.4 percent of the entering class. That’s a minority student headcount increase of 60 percent over nine years ago, when just 305 students were from minority backgrounds. At the same time, selectivity has increased since 2001.

Lipman Hearne’s 2009 report High Achieving Teens and the College Decision offers insight into the values and motivations that drive students to make the choices they do. Particularly in this climate of increasing economic pressure on both family savings and college endowments, how critical is financial aid to high-achieving students? What do students need to know from the colleges that want them, and how, finally, do they choose from among their options? We’re far from knowing all the answers, but we look forward to beginning a lively discussion—with you.

- Tom Abrahamson, Managing Director & Principal

*Excludes another 23 colleges that make this offer, but limit eligibility by residency or GPA.

The University of Minnesota, Morris is cited for having “academic chops and green-energy cred,” while Kettering University is noted for offering cutting-edge engineering majors and a four-year professional co-op structure.

Lipman Hearne has provided both universities with strategic admissions, research and creative consulting services.

Having worked for many years in higher ed – both in faculty positions and as a consultant – I don’t argue with their basic premise:  The model has real problems. Duplication of effort, fierce fiefdoms, historic insulation from the marketplace, lack of a structure that could link real planning (which requires tough choices) with the authority to execute the plan, political intervention: All are endemic.  But in a larger sense, the model has these problems because the enterprise is – and by its very nature must be – messy.  On the undergraduate side, incoming freshmen don’t know what they want so they need the latitude to fumble their way forward to some more lasting definition of self ( aka…“Seven years of college down the drain” – Bluto). In graduate and professional education – particularly at the doctoral level – the “tradesman” model that attracts a grad student is often in conflict with faculty assumptions that what they are actually doing is replicating themselves (even when there aren’t any faculty jobs on the horizon).  In research, we learn as much from what doesn’t work as we do from what does (“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison).

The biggest problem I have with the piece is that the authors leave perhaps the most important point to the conclusion – the myth that “American colleges and universities are grossly overfunded, and that better management of resources by itself will generate enough ‘new money’ to pay for the nearly doubling of capacity needed to return our country to internationally competitive attainment levels.”  All their other points – which mitigate against this conclusion – are thoroughly developed, and this key factor is tossed in nearly as an afterthought.  What do you want to bet that in Congress and statehouses across the country, the first eight myths – which seem to argue that efficiencies alone can save the institution – are widely touted, and the final, meek conclusion gets short shrift?

Our higher ed institutions were dealing with a plethora of problems before the current economic malaise – problems that have only been exacerbated by shrinking state budgets, endowments, and family resources.  The biggest loss, though, would be one of faith: If the public no longer believes that education is the path to personal fulfillment and prosperity, or that they can’t afford to take that path, then we’ve quite simply lost the game.

- Rob Moore, Managing Partner

Yes, tuition, room and board, and fees at the very top, undiscounted, elite colleges and universities are nearing $50,000 annually. But how many students and their families actually pay that price?  The average discount rate reported by NACUBO (in The Chronicle, I might add) is nearly 35% – making the overall cost as actually paid much lower than that scary full-price tag.  And yes, again, endowment earnings are down for now, but most colleges and universities that I know about have dedicated even greater resources to student financial aid in recognition of these challenging economic times.

What’s more likely than a bursting bubble is a shift in the market in which mid-tier private institutions are going to have to compete ever more strongly with regional public universities and regional publics are going to have to compete ever more strongly with community colleges.  In fact, according to McKinsey reports, the industry that gains most in a recession is education.  Take a look at the stock prices of the major for-profit providers – Apollo Group, DeVry, and Career Education. While they are not busting the market moving forward, their trajectory is far better than that of the financial and industrial giants that got us into this mess.  And a college education is still the best bet in any market.

-Rob Moore, Ph.D., Managing Partner

But if Secretary Duncan, his lieutenants, and education leaders across the country want to make a case that these spending levels are the new norm and should continue, they’ve got two huge challenges – first, they’ve got to deliver quality results. And second, they’ve got to convince the American people that they’ve delivered. Higher achievement, more and better early education options, and higher graduation rates from both high school and college are the new expectations. And, assuming that educators and their policy colleagues are successful on the ground, they’ve got to make these improvements tangible to the American people.

This is going to require a sea change in attitudes among the education world. American education institutions are notorious for resisting transparency. Lots of people in education are used to using the language of victimization to argue for more money – the “children are our future” argument, “if you don’t give us more money then you must not like children,” etc. etc. Secretary Duncan could help both educators and the American people if he required that public school districts, early education programs, and colleges and universities drop their traditional resistance to transparency and embrace open communication using real data. For K-12 systems, that means making academic progress by group, graduation rates, and income level readily available. For colleges and universities, that includes focusing on measuring the value that tuition money buys as well as being honest about how many students they are graduating.

There’s growing evidence that the successful reform efforts that have been in cultivation since the first Bush Administration are beginning to take hold, and, so far, the Obama Administration seems to be directing these new resources to support many of those efforts. But the second challenge – convincing the American public that it should continue to spend more on education – is going to require a much more targeted, disciplined strategy for communicating success than the education community usually musters. In every state, in every school district, in every school, there’s going to need to be a sea change in the way educators talk to their constituents. Educators are going to have to communicate a simple message – we’re using your money wisely, and here’s the proof of that. Test scores are improving. The achievement gap between minority and white kids is closing. Participation in AP and IB classes is climbing. More kids are graduating from high school, and more of them are going on to (and graduating from) college.

Huge exo-systems such as our own education system are geared to do exactly the opposite. There’s never been an imperative for spreading successful education practices and communicating that success to teh public – until now. The huge increases in federal spending on education put to bed the old standby that the federal government’s spending on education is too miniscule to really drive wholesale change. Even though, on a federal level, we still spend less per capital than most countries do, Secretary Duncan and his colleagues can no longer hide behind the “local control” argument.  The Feds now have lots of skin in the game.   They need to make sure that the folks who are on the receiving end of this enormous federal largesse are forced to talk to their constituents about what is working, what’s not, and the shared responsibilities to ensure success. If they do, democracy, school systems, colleges – and, most important, our kids – will benefit for years to come.

- Rodney Ferguson, Managing Director & Principal