During his yearslong quest for a bachelor’s degree, José Del Real Viramontes encountered trials at four different California community colleges.

At his first college, right out of high school, the young man born in Zacatecas, Mexico, hoped to play for the football team. But Del Real Viramontes never made it to tryouts, he says, and when his best friend left the college, he decided to leave, too.

At his second college, close to his home in East Hollywood, he says that he had a bad experience with the instructor about an early assignment in a developmental English course. That, plus feeling like as the oldest child he should clock hours working to earn money to contribute to his family’s household, pushed Del Real Viramontes out of school again, this time for three years.

At his third college, his enrollment came as something of a surprise. A friend filled out an application and submitted it for him. This institution fit just right. Del Real Viramontes joined its Puente program, which embedded him in a cohort of students in a math and English course sequence. The group studied Chicano literature, offering him the opportunity to read about experiences that reflected his own.

“I think that program was the first program that really provided this idea of transferring to a university,” he says. “We were in a very supportive environment.”

A transfer counselor sat in on class sessions. He took students on tours of university campuses and helped them build connections there.

“It’s ironic,” Del Real Viramontes says, “because I remember going to UC Riverside, where I work now, visiting, and never in my wildest dreams did I think I was gonna be back as a professor.”

Looking back now, at age 40, as assistant professor of higher education administration and policy in the University of California system, Del Real Viramontes can see what his story shares in common with the experiences of so many students who start out at community colleges hoping to eventually earn a bachelor’s degree.

They may intend to earn two years’ worth of general education credits at more affordable rates before transferring to a four-year college or university. They may want to boost their grades before applying to a more selective institution. They may prefer to start out at an institution close to home, one with smaller class sizes and an environment that feels more approachable. Or, like Del Real Viramontes, they may be the first in their families to attempt college and lack information about where else to apply.

But data shows these strategies don’t actually work for most of the people who enroll at community college. Six years after they start out at what is called a two-year college, only about a third of students successfully transfer to a four-year college. And only about 16 percent end up earning a bachelor’s degree.

It’s a disappointing status quo. It’s really unacceptable.

— John Fink

“It’s a disappointing status quo. It’s really unacceptable,” says John Fink, a senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center. “As a system, that’s just not really living up to its potential.”

The transfer outcomes are even worse for Black students, Latino students, and low-income students, he adds.

This week, the U.S. Department of Education is hosting a national summit about improving transfer outcomes. It’s a goal community colleges have been striving for in recent years. But they can’t do all the heavy lifting alone, experts say. To successfully hand students off from one campus to another also takes effort and resources from the colleges that students hope to transfer to: institutions that grant bachelor’s degrees.

Four-year colleges and universities need to take “co-ownership” for transfer students’ success, says Tania LaViolet, a director at the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute.

As higher ed enrollment declines, will that finally start to happen?

Partnership Required

Many barriers block students from transferring to a four-year college, according to Fink, including bachelor’s-degree programs that don’t accept transfer credits and a lack of adequate advising.

“Too many students are just left on their own to navigate this process,” he says.

Some students get stuck in remedial or entry-level courses at community colleges. That’s what happened to Del Real Viramontes. Even though he fit in at the Puente program at his third college, he struggled to pass English 101 there, having trouble completing a research paper assignment. He attempted it three times, and then had to find a different institution where he could take the course again, he says, due to rules about limits on the number of times students are allowed to retake the same course.

To address this, community colleges have been doing away with developmental prerequisite courses and creating “guided pathways” that blend advising, career exploration and straightforward guidance about what courses to take that will apply toward a bachelor’s degree.

But without participation from four-year colleges, community college efforts are like a bridge that only spans half of a river.

“Right now, the status quo is that supports and advising for transfer students is too little, and too late, and really too absent the presence of the four-year partner,” Fink says.

A few pressures might incentivize four-year colleges to step up their efforts. For example, if it’s part of the mission of a bachelor’s degree-granting institution to educate diverse students and facilitate economic mobility, then supporting transfer students from community colleges fits the bill, LaViolet says.

After all, according to analysis from the Community College Research Center, in the 2020-21 academic year, half of all Hispanic undergraduates were enrolled at community colleges, as were 42 percent of Asian undergrads, 40 percent of Black undergrads and 39 percent of white undergrads. In 2015-16, community colleges enrolled more than a third of dependent undergraduate students whose families earned less than $20,000 a year.

Some public flagships are paying attention to the transfer pipeline’s potential for educating people of varied backgrounds.

“It helps us fulfill our mission as a public university,” University of Virginia president James E. Ryan told The Washington Post in 2022, “which is to be a place of opportunity, a place of social mobility.”

But LaViolet says it’s unlikely that the recent ban on affirmative action will motivate most four-year colleges and universities to recruit and retain transfer students as an alternative to race-conscious admissions. That’s because only a small sliver of such institutions are affected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this summer on the issue. The majority already admit most of the people who apply and so don’t need nuanced admissions criteria anyway. And the relatively few selective colleges and universities in the country could only enroll a tiny fraction of the students who start out at community colleges even if they tried to recruit more.

Instead, there’s a different force at play that might work in favor of transfer students.

Higher ed leaders are concerned about the fact that college enrollment is on the decline, not only coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic but also because of national demographic changes that will shrink the pool of 18-year-olds to a smaller size than admissions offices have gotten accustomed to fishing in. Recent years have seen some colleges close or consolidate because of enrollment problems.

Improved transfer pathways could yield better enrollment. The pressure four-year colleges are facing these days to boost student numbers — and shore up the bottom line — could spur some to take action on transfer students, LaViolet argues.

“When you support stronger partnerships and collaborations with a local community college, what that does is it increases your market share … in reaching students who would not have come to you otherwise,” she says. “In an enrollment-challenged context, that’s critical to your business operations.”

Collaborations might look like a university agreeing to admit all students from a certain community college who meet specific academic criteria, an arrangement known as guaranteed or dual admission. In such cases, the institutions work out which credits will transfer and apply to which majors, effectively telling students, LaViolet says, “here is a four-year map to complete your bachelor’s degree.”

“It’s the clarity of the pathway and certainty you’re providing students that is at the heart of the value proposition,” she adds.

Successful partnerships tend to be forged between one community college and one four-year institution, which are often physically close to each other, LaViolet says. Examples include the partnership between Northern Virginia Community College and George Mason University, called Advance, and a program that ties the University of Central Florida to half a dozen Florida community colleges, called DirectConnect. Most such partnerships are created between community colleges and public four-year colleges, LaViolet adds, but she sees an opportunity for more private institutions to do this, too.

LaViolet says top leaders help drive these collaborations, and Fink adds that academic departments and professors also have a role to play in doing outreach that helps transfer students. That might look like, for example, chemistry faculty at a university talking to chemistry faculty at a community college to align on course sequencing, instruction techniques and assessments of student learning.

“That really requires broad investment from faculty and other academic leaders at the university in particular, really reaching out to their colleagues to figure out what’s the right pathway to a specific major,” he says.

Policy might help, too. For example, new legislation in California will create a pilot program at the University of California, Los Angeles, to offer priority admission in certain major programs to students from some community colleges who earn an “associate degree for transfer.”

The Human Element

University outreach made the difference for Del Real Viramontes. One day, he visited the transfer center at his fourth community college, where he chatted with a peer mentor from UCLA. She eventually invited him to an opportunity at the four-year institution that she thought he might appreciate.

“That program,” Del Real Viramontes says, “changed my life.”

For six weeks, he could take a UCLA summer class and benefit from wraparound services. Del Real Viramontes applied, with a letter of recommendation from his English teacher at his fourth community college. He enrolled in a course about public policy — not knowing what public policy was. He says he received an A in the class.

Community college and transfer students, we are very resilient. We are very good at figuring things out.

— José Del Real Viramontes

“I think that’s one of the biggest reasons I am where I am today,” Del Real Viramontes says.

“Being able to be part of that program and doing well in the class, it allowed me to see myself at UCLA.”

He credits that experience with giving him the academic confidence he needed to transfer to a university. It exposed him to campus resources, so he knew where to go to find support. It offered him validation about his culture and background, and revealed how he could view the challenges he overcame at community college as preparation for bigger adventures.

It’s an example of how, as much as sorting out institutional policies and partnerships matter for transfer students, boosting students’ confidence and making sure they can access supportive advising are important elements, too.

“You could have the best major-specific articulation agreements, but if students aren’t using them or working with advisers to explore their options early on and develop a plan and change it as needed and keep progress along the way, all that great articulation work isn’t going to yield any fruit,” Fink says. “It’s not going to change the student experience.”

UCLA offers this kind of program for students through its Center for Community College Partnerships. Run by more than a dozen staff members and six dozen peer advisers, the center also trains community college staff and builds support among administrators and faculty at the university.

About a quarter of community college students who try to transfer to UCLA on their own succeed, according to Santiago Bernal, assistant director of the Center for Community College Partnerships. In contrast, about half of students who participate in the center’s programs are admitted.

For decades, the Center for Community College Partnerships “has been a national example of creating a transfer-receptive culture at a university, one that is affirming to Black and Latino [students] and men of color and women in STEM,” Fink says. “Staff have a regular presence at their partnering community colleges, to sort of help students plan and think about transfer to UCLA before they transfer.”

Del Real Viramontes ended up transferring to UCLA. He majored in Chicano studies, participated in the McNair Scholars program that prepares students for doctoral studies, and graduated with his bachelor’s degree. He went on to earn his Ph.D., and he now studies the college transfer experience, especially for Latino students.

It’s important to him to highlight the agency students exercise, and the cultural resources and relationships they draw on, when they face challenges along the transfer pathway.

“Community college and transfer students, we are very resilient. We are very good at figuring things out,” he says, describing the group as “very aspirational.”

Del Real Viramontes went back a few years ago to teach the summer program class that altered his own trajectory. He still keeps in touch with those summer students he taught.

In fact, he says, giving transfer students the chance to build relationships with other people who already successfully navigated similar paths is key to helping them feel like they belong at a university and can thrive there, too.

“Students involved in this class in the summer program,” he says, “they already see themselves at UCLA.”

© Photo courtesy of UCLA's Center for Community College Partnerships

As a lecturer at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, where I teach econometrics and research methods, I spend a lot of time thinking about the intersection between data, education and social justice — and how generative AI will reshape the experience of gathering, analyzing and using data for change.

My students are working toward a master’s degree in public affairs and many of them are interested in pursuing careers in international and domestic public policy. The graduate-level econometrics course I teach is required and it’s designed to foster analytical and critical thinking skills in causal research methods. Throughout the course, students are tasked with crafting four memos on designated policy issues. Typically, we examine publicly available datasets related to societal concerns, such as determining optimal criteria for loan forgiveness or evaluating the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk police policies.

To better understand how my students can use generative AI effectively and prepare to apply these tools in the data-related work they’ll encounter in their careers after graduate school, I knew I needed to try it myself. So I set up an experiment to do one of the assignments I asked of my students — and to complete it using generative AI.

My goal was twofold. I wanted to experience what it feels like to use the tools my students have access to. And, since I assume many of my students are now using AI for these assignments, I wanted to develop a more evidence-based stance on whether I should or shouldn’t change my grading practices.

I pride myself on assigning practical, yet intellectually challenging assignments, and to be honest, I didn’t have much faith that any AI tool could coherently conduct statistical analysis and make the connections necessary to provide pertinent policy recommendations based on its results.

Experiments With Code Interpreter

For my experiment, I replicated an assignment from last semester that asked students to imagine how they would create a grant program for health providers to give perinatal (before and after childbirth) services to women to promote infant health and mitigate low birth weight. Students were given a publicly available dataset and were required to develop eligibility criteria by constructing a statistical model to predict low birth weight. They needed to substantiate their selections with references from existing literature, interpret the results, provide relevant policy recommendations and produce a positionality statement.

As for the tool, I decided to test out ChatGPT’s new Code Interpreter, a tool developed to allow users to upload data (in any format) and use conversational language to execute code. I provided the same guidelines I gave to my students to ChatGPT and uploaded the dataset into Code Interpreter.

First Code Interpreter broke down each task. Then it asked me whether I would like to proceed with the analysis after it chose variables (or criteria for the perinatal program) for the statistical model. (See the task analysis and variables below.)

Screen shot of Code Interpreter's task analysis. Courtesy of Wendy Castillo.Screen shot of Code Interpreter's variables. Courtesy of Wendy Castillo.

After running the statistics, analyzing and interpreting the data, Code Interpreter created a memo with four policy recommendations. While the recommendations were solid, the tool did not provide any references to prior literature or direct connection to the results. It was also unable to create a positionality statement. That part hinged on students reflecting on their own background and experiences to consider any biases they might bring, which the tool could not do.

Screen shot of Code Interpreter's recommendations. Courtesy of Wendy Castillo.

Another flaw was that each part of the assignment was presented in separate chunks, so I found myself repeatedly going back to the tool to ask for omitted elements or clarity on results. It quickly became obvious that it was easier to manually weave the disparate elements together myself.

Without any human touch, the memo would not have received a passing grade because it was too high-level and didn’t provide a literature review with proper citations. However, by stitching together all the pieces, the quality of work could have merited a solid B.

While Code Interpreter wasn’t capable of producing a passing grade independently, it's imperative to recognize the current capabilities of the tool. It adeptly performed statistical analysis using conversational language and it demonstrated the type of critical thinking skills I hope to see from my students by offering viable policy recommendations. As the field of generative AI continues to advance, it's merely a matter of time before these tools consistently deliver “A caliber” work.

How I’m Using Lessons Learned

Generative AI tools like the one I experimented with are available to my students, so I’m going to assume they’re using them for the assignments in my course. In light of this impending reality, it’s important for educators to adapt their teaching methods to incorporate the use of these tools into the learning process. Especially since it’s difficult if not impossible, given the current limitations of AI detectors, to distinguish AI- versus human-produced content. That’s why I’m committing to incorporating the exploration of generative AI tools into my courses, while maintaining my emphasis on critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which I believe will continue to be key to thriving in the workforce.

As an educator, I have a duty to remain informed about the latest developments in generative AI, not only to ensure learning is happening, but to stay on top of what tools exist, what benefits and limitations they have, and most importantly, how students might be using them.

As I consider how to weave these tools into my curriculum, two pathways have emerged. I can support students in using AI to generate initial content, teaching them to review and enhance it with human input. This can be especially beneficial when students encounter writer's block, but may inadvertently stifle creativity. Conversely, I can support students in creating their original work and leveraging AI to enhance it after.

While I’m more drawn to the second approach, I recognize that both necessitate students to develop essential skills in writing, critical thinking and computational thinking to effectively collaborate with computers, which are core to the future of education and the workforce.

As an educator, I have a duty to remain informed about the latest developments in generative AI, not only to ensure learning is happening, but to stay on top of what tools exist, what benefits and limitations they have, and most importantly, how students might be using them.

However, it's also important to acknowledge that the quality of work produced by students now requires higher expectations and potential adjustments to grading practices. The baseline is no longer zero, it is AI. And the upper limit of what humans can achieve with these new capabilities remains an unknown frontier.

© Song_about_summer / Shutterstock

Back in March of this year, EdSurge published my article outlining the nearly 400-year history of higher education in America, how that past shapes the way the country views colleges today, and why microcredentials, while critical to the future of the U.S. economy, are causing a dilemma for the academy. Since then, I have enjoyed serving on various panels like those with the Colorado Business Roundtable discussing the future of higher education and its intersection with economic and workforce needs.

Several critical themes have emerged from these conversations that create burdens for workforce partners and higher education institutions. For one, agreement around the purpose of higher education is fragmented. In 2019, Brandon Busteed penned an article for Forbes that beautifully describes what I have witnessed in these discussions. Busteed described a "decidedly false dichotomy" where some argue that higher education is about preparing a person for work versus, more broadly, preparing a person for success. While I have enjoyed the dialogue, the fact remains that this intellectual discourse is being held amongst some of the most privileged and well-credentialed persons in society.

In these conversations, another critical theme emerges: the need for more decision-makers to understand that U.S. population growth has nearly flatlined. It is vital to note that this trend is NOT a blip but the result of a steady decline, and that higher education as a whole must address it. One implication is a recent prediction by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the labor force participation rate may fall from 62.2 percent in 2022 to 60.4 percent in 2032. A second implication is the absence of sufficient numbers of workers in professions such as health services, trade, and hospitality. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as of June 2023, the national labor force participation rate was 0.7 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels. That equates to 1.9 million workers who have left the workforce since the pandemic’s start in early spring 2020.

The lack of an available and prepared workforce in America adds unnecessary fuel to the fire of poverty that burns uncontrollably throughout our communities, and that leaders don’t seem to feel an urgency to extinguish. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Poverty in the United States: 2022 report, the supplemental poverty measure (SPM) rate in 2022 was 12.4 percent. This increase of 4.6 percentage points from 2021 represents the first increase in the overall SPM poverty rate since 2010. Furthermore, the SPM child poverty rate more than doubled, from 5.2 percent in 2021 to 12.4 percent in 2022.

To address our children’s hunger and our communities’ poverty, our educational system must be redesigned to remove the boundaries between high school, college and careers so that more Americans can train for and secure employment that will sustain them.

In 2021, Jobs for the Future outlined a pathway toward realizing such a revolution in The Big Blur report, which argues for a radical restructuring of education for grades 11 through 14 by erasing the arbitrary dividing line between high school and college. Ideas for accomplishing this include courses and work experiences for students designed for career preparation. Joel Vargas, contributing author to this report and JFF executive, spoke at length about his personal life story and reason for serving as an ambassador for educational redesign on my Discovering Your Mission podcast earlier this year. He said that, “We have to change the [educational] systems that students experience, because it is pretty obvious, our systems are designed to work against students as a whole.”

As a Policy Leadership Trust member of JFF, the Community College of Aurora (where I serve as president) has served as a national leader in the work to apply higher education to drive social and economic mobility in today’s society by aligning student learning outcomes directly with workforce needs. Such goals are achieved when the institution understands its responsibility in the fight to eliminate poverty and support equitable educational attainment by providing our students with key skills that are relevant and transferable throughout industries.

This commitment to student success is what students look for most, according to the Strada Education Foundation. In its most recent nationally representative study of more than 3,200 people who completed bachelor’s degrees since 2002, Strada found that graduates who reported they developed key skills during college earned $8,700 more in their first year after graduation than their peers who reported lower levels of skill development through college. As Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen, and its students have amassed more than $1.7 trillion in student debt, institutions must focus on providing the tools critical to thrive in a skills-based economy.

This year, the Community College of Aurora hosted U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, the Departments of Transportation, Energy, Commerce, and Labor, along with several national, state, and local officials for the Biden-Harris Administration’s nationwide Unlocking Pathways Summit series, which focused on helping young Americans access good-paying jobs. One component, Unlocking Career Success, is an interagency initiative that reimagines how our nation’s high schools prepare all students to thrive in their future careers. Guided by the four keys of dual enrollment, work-based learning, workforce credentials, and career advising and navigation, this initiative, in collaboration with JFF, aims to evangelize the need to revolutionize the American education and higher education systems.

The future of America depends on our ability as a community of educators, workforce partners, governmental agencies, and legislators to work together to develop seamless academic and career pathways for more students. Together, we can unlock upward social and economic mobility for our youth and for working adults. Failure is not an option; America is depending on us.

© Berit Kessler / Shutterstock

Stuart Blythe teaches writing courses at Michigan State University that are officially listed as in-person only. But he makes it clear to students that they are welcome to join any class session remotely via Zoom if they can’t make it in on any given day.

It’s a practice he started at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many students were in quarantine and needed ways to continue learning remotely. Now, having gone to the trouble to design course resources that can be accessed remotely and feeling accustomed to turning on a webcam in the classroom, he has continued to embrace a teaching practice that is known as “HyFlex,” a portmanteau of hybrid and flexible.

“For example, this morning I taught a web design course, and one of my students has epilepsy, and he said, ‘I can feel something coming on so I better not come out today,’” Blythe says. “Things come up in students’ lives, and the HyFlex gives them the ability to still be part of a class even when things get in the way.”

But not every educator who tried hybrid teaching of some kind during the pandemic has continued it. Even vocal proponents of HyFlex admit it’s not widely popular among college instructors.

“It’s a pendulum swing, that we need to get people back in the classrooms,” says David Rhoads, director of hybrid and emerging pedagogy at Vanguard University in California, who considers himself a proponent of HyFlex teaching. He says instructors who felt forced to quickly allow for remote options or teach remotely are now eager to get back to what they consider normal.

“Faculty are saying, ‘I’m back in the classroom where I want to be,’” he says, admitting that there is less HyFlex teaching now than during the pandemic.

Rhoads argues that students often feel differently than the people at the podium about returning to the default of all-in-person teaching. “Students discovered the flexibility,” he says, “and now they're demanding it.”

Some data seems to back that up: A survey earlier this year from Tyton Partners found that nearly seven out of 10 students said they preferred courses with at least some virtual component, while more than half of faculty members said they preferred face-to-face teaching.

Even so, proponents of hybrid teaching are making a push to build on the experience so many educators gained teaching online during the pandemic. Just last week, for instance, fans of the approach held a workshop and sessions teaching HyFlex practices at the Educause conference in Chicago, and a group called the HyFlex Collaborative held a national conference on HyFlex teaching over the summer. And they point to a recent Educause Horizon Report that listed HyFlex as an emerging practice in part because of an increasing demand from students for greater flexibility in accessing higher education.

Will their efforts succeed? And how much flexibility is best to balance convenience and high-quality teaching?

Built for Flexibility

The first known course that called itself HyFlex emerged in 2006, at San Francisco State University, taught by Brian Beatty, a professor of instructional design and technology. And one main driver was surprisingly mundane: traffic snarls that routinely kept students from getting to class on time.

The goal was to employ a high level of course design from the outset, so that the instructor built all the course material for students to use either live during a class session (online or in person) or as on-demand modules for those who can’t be there at the appointed time.

“Faculty say it’s more work for them to do that,” says Rhoads. “And 100 percent it’s more work.”

It’s work that pays off, though, Rhoads argues, since it opens the course material to students even when they are sick or unable to attend, and the material can easily be reused over time.

“I’ve had days where I have two people in the room and everyone else is online and vice versa."

Stuart Blythe, an associate professor of writing, rhetoric and American cultures at Michigan State University

“The question that usually comes up is, ‘I don’t have enough time and I don’t have enough money.’ Which is completely 100 percent valid,” he says. That’s why Rhoads argues that institutions should invest in making courses more flexible rather than just leave the work to those teaching the courses.

One of the biggest complaints about the HyFlex model is the logistical challenge for the teacher of attending to those in the physical classroom as well as those logging in remotely on Zoom.

For Blythe, of Michigan State, he says he has gotten better at doing that juggling over time, and that it’s now pretty routine for him in his classes of about 20 students. He says he arranges his computer so his notes are open on one half of the screen and the Zoom display is on the other, “so I can look at the students in front of me or look down at the computer screen and see those students.”

But he admits that when he enters the classroom each day, he has no idea how many will be joining him in person and how many he’ll see only as a small box on a screen.

“I’ve had days where I have two people in the room and everyone else is online and vice versa,” he says. “It probably feels a little weird if it’s just me and another student, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it.”

While Blythe feels the extra effort is worth it to help students, many faculty argue that by trying to serve everyone, even those who can’t attend, the experience is worse for everyone. As one instructor wrote in an essay last year, “everyone lost something in HyFlex courses. The students in class, the remote students and the instructor each felt they’d been given short shrift.”

What’s the ‘Gold Standard’?

The proponents of HyFlex classes are often making a larger argument against the standard lecture model of teaching that is the norm at colleges.

Rhoads, for example, says that complaints about hybrid formats often stem “from believing that traditional way of doing education is the gold standard. I do not believe that.”

He argues that the process of redesigning a course to be taught in various formats — online or in person — pushes instructors to rethink how to best help students achieve the learning outcomes.

“I would love to ask faculty, ‘Do you know of any research on traditional education showing the efficacy?’” he says. (Lectures, for example, are not holding up well in some studies.)

And for those instructors worried that no one will come to an in-person class if an online option is given, he argues that “if you design an experience that students can't get any other way than in person, then I think they’ll come.”

HyFlex is not the only way to make courses flexible, however.

At the University of Central Florida, officials say that while some instructors do HyFlex teaching, they’ve had more takeup for so-called “blended” courses, where some sessions are online and some are in person. Unlike in the HyFlex model, where students can pick whether to come or not on any given class, the blended model means that, say, for a class that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Tuesday sessions will be held in person and the Thursday sessions will be online.

“We train faculty to take advantage of the in-person moments to do the things that can only be done in person,” says Thomas Cavanagh, vice provost for digital learning at the University of Central Florida. As a result, he says, “those classes have the highest review from students, they get the highest grades and they have the lowest withdrawal rates.”

Rhoads, the HyFlex advocate at Vanguard University, hopes that the pendulum will start to swing back to online again as educators have time to properly design flexible classes.

“Professors are kind of beat coming out of the pandemic,” he says. “We have to get them refreshed and say, ‘Shake it off for a minute.’ I think many more faculty actually know what they need to do — they need to do more to be flexible.”

© Central Michigan University

After Carl Wieman won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2001 for, as he puts it, “shining lasers on atoms” in a new way that gave experimental proof to a theory by Albert Einstein, Wieman decided to shift his research focus. He devoted the bulk of his time and energy to studying how to improve teaching.

“I just could make a bigger difference in education,” he says.

Education research wasn’t new to Wieman, who these days is an emeritus professor of physics and of education at Stanford University. In fact he had been pursuing research to improve physics teaching for years, as a parallel area of work that people hadn’t paid much attention to. But with the fame brought by the Nobel, he hoped to raise the profile of educational research.

He argues that the traditional lecture method for teaching physics and other STEM fields has been proven ineffective, and that shifts to more active methods can greatly improve learning outcomes to make sure the next generation of researchers can make the next Nobel-worthy breakthroughs.

Wieman has led efforts to improve science teaching. He wrote the book “Improving How Universities Teach Science.” And he won the world’s top teaching award in 2020, the $4 million Yidan Prize.

So what has he learned in more than 20 years from applying his persistence (and much of the money he won from the Nobel) to studying teaching?

EdSurge connected with Wieman to find out, and to hear about his more recent efforts to improve how teaching evaluations are done at colleges to make them more useful — and more equitable.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.

EdSurge: What was it that got you started in doing research on effective teaching?

Carl Wieman: It was really started by sort of a puzzle that I saw, which was that I had these graduate students come in to work in my research lab doing physics, and they'd had many years of great success in physics courses, but they really didn't seem to know how to do physics when they came in to work for me.

There wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with them, because after they worked for me for a couple years, they turned into expert physicists. And so after I saw this happening over and over again, and I saw actually sort of a correlation, that the really top students in coursework never turned out to be the better physicists, I decided there was some fundamental question here about learning and thinking.

And so I just tackled this as a science question, and I started reading the research on how people learn — how people learn physics. … And it showed me there were much better ways to teach than what was being used in most of our courses.

Did you feel there has been something lacking in the teaching you had in physics when you were a student?

Well, I always hesitate to use myself as data. But in fact there were some pretty unique aspects in my education that is in the back of my mind when I'm looking at what's happening with other students. And in my case, I in fact got involved in doing physics research at a very early stage in my first year in college, and got heavily involved in it and decided this was a whole lot more interesting and worthwhile than taking courses.

And so I really spent my whole college career devoted to research and doing the minimal coursework I could get away with, essentially. And I managed to get lots of loopholes, to get away with a lot. And so for me, my education was overwhelmingly just actually doing research, interacting with other research students and graduate students in the lab. And the coursework, I never felt I learned terribly much from any of my classes, but it was very much secondary.

You talk about needing to change the paradigm of teaching physics and other STEM fields. Broadly, what do you think should change?

So the norm is really this paradigm of, you've got a brain, and it's a sort of fixed thing, and you fill it up with knowledge. And how well it can absorb that knowledge is just determined by the characteristics of that brain. And so colleges spend lots of time focusing on, ‘OK, how do we select the brains that'll absorb the most with admissions and tests and such?’ And then, ‘What material are we going to try and pour into them? What things do we cover?’ That's the old and still largely pervasive paradigm.

But I'd say what research shows us is a very different picture, which is that the brain is very, what we call plastic, it changes. So really you need to think about that these student brains come into the classroom ready to be transformed by their educational experience. And the better their educational experience, the more their brains are changed. And what's really happening is you're rewiring how the neurons are hooked up, and that's developing new capabilities in those brains. And so it's very much not an idea of a fixed brain with its capacity, it's how much new capability you can develop in a brain through proper education.

And the best form of that education that essentially does the best transformation of the brain is really having the brain practice the thinking you want it to learn. And so rather than sitting, listening to somebody, drone away, giving information where the brain is doing very little — essentially just taking in sounds — it needs to be actively thinking about ideas, solving problems, figuring things out with feedback and guidance as it's practicing. That it's strengthening, essentially, through the right kind of mental exercise. And so that's really the different paradigm, is how do you exercise the brain in the right way to best develop new capabilities in it.

You’ve famously compared lecturing to bloodletting. It sounds like you stand by that pretty harsh critique.

Yes. This was my soundbite, but it was effective, that lectures are the pedagogical equivalent to bloodletting. And this isn't just flippant. I mean if you look at it, for 2000 years people felt bloodletting was the treatment of choice and you could justify it because well, you let blood from people and look, they got better. And so obviously it was working.

And so much of the same thing is happening with lectures. You give lectures to a bunch of students, and some of those students actually turn out to be pretty good. And so obviously that means the lecture was effective and the students who weren't successful, their brains weren't very good. And so that's how you could continue to justify lectures as effective in very similar ways to how you justified that bloodletting was good. Yeah, it didn't work for all the people, but that was just the fault of those people who had poor systems.

I hear you even tested the value of your own lectures on students to show this?

One little study I did was, I sort of picked some important but non-obvious fact and lectured about it and then tested students on it half an hour later. And 10 percent of them actually remembered it. So 90 percent didn't get this.

And then actually later on I repeated this, but I presented this material in what we call an active learning environment, where rather than just telling students that they had to answer a question, they had to figure out a question about how something behaved and then get feedback on that. And then I tested them on that and overwhelmingly they all remembered it. So that was just a very simple but clear demonstration of what I thought was pretty good lecturing was not very effective.

You’ve led many efforts to reform college teaching and written a book on it. Are you frustrated that that hasn’t led to more change than it has?

I'm always frustrated because I'm an impatient sort of person. But at the same time, I have to admit that you're dealing with something that's very entrenched culturally and historically, and that's just hard to make big changes in things like that.

And there really has been quite a bit of change. I mean, you see aspects like the [Association of American Universities] launched a big program and its STEM education initiative six or seven years ago that is devoted to changing the teaching of introductory science courses. It represents the 60 or so leading research universities in North America, and it's calling on its members to change how they teach. That sort of thing would've been unheard of not very long ago.

One thing you’ve focused on more recently is teaching evaluation at colleges. Why that topic?

We’re trying to solve what I see as a really fundamental issue in improving education. And that's the methods for evaluating teaching, particularly at the university level, where I think everybody realizes that we don't have good ways of doing that.

The things that almost every university uses is student evaluations. And those have tremendous flaws to them. They're very biased, and they don't capture effective teaching practices at all. And everybody knows that they're highly flawed and they're probably going to be illegal because there's such good evidence that they are very biased against, for example, if you're a underrepresented minority or a female instructor in a white-dominated field, you just get lower evaluations even if you do this exactly the same as a white male does. So anyway, so it's a real problem.

People always say you can't tell [faculty] what to do. I'm convinced they really are doing what they get rewarded for. And right now the teaching evaluations are so meaningless. They really are counted appropriately, counted very little in the incentive and reward promotion system. So what you need is something that's a good meaningful evaluation that then could be taken seriously in how you hire and promote people, and then it'll make a big difference.

AAU has run a competition that then provided grants to I think five or six departments to come up with demonstration projects of better evaluation systems. So we'll see how that works out.

Listen to the full discussion, including examples of active learning methods shown to work and how Wieman thinks the pandemic has impacted teaching on the EdSurge Podcast.

© Stanford University

Most of us know what to expect in a face-to-face classroom: Students sitting in rows, facing instructors and listening to lectures, watching videos displayed on screens up front, or, in smaller classes, participating in lively discussion. Altogether, a modest set of conventional choices we’re all familiar with as students and faculty on campus.

But in the last couple of decades, since the introduction of online instruction in higher ed, students now expect a much wider range of options — a collection of novel approaches, inconceivable before the digital revolution, including participating online in breakout rooms, joining online study groups, watching recordings of class sessions posted later for study and reflection, and more.

But are colleges paying attention to what online students want most? Are virtual classes delivering what they expect?

These days senior college leaders should be eager to find out, as enrollment overall is falling even while interest in online courses is on the rise. A recent analysis of federal government data by Jeff Seaman of Bay View Analytics shows that enrollment in on-campus courses fell nearly 11 percent in the past decade and almost 30 percent from 2020 to 2021. In contrast, enrollment in online courses shot up from nearly 34 percent over the 10-year period and leaped 110 percent in the first years of the pandemic.

Source: Bay View Analytics

So do we know about what these students value most?

Surveys of remote college students show that their top priorities are convenience and flexibility. After all, about 70 percent of online students work, while in the wider college population, only about 40 percent are employed.

Many depend on accessing course resources and lessons seamlessly from online textbooks or other digital resources. Others find it enriching to participate in online chat and polling. Those who live in remote areas of the U.S. or in disadvantaged countries abroad that lack robust broadband options depend on mobile devices to participate online.

Remote students also want the kind of services their on-campus peers get — robust academic and technical support, job-ready curricula and links to employers. And just like those on campus, they’re eager to win scholarships and receive financial support.

Many students expect their online courses to be completely on-demand (what’s known as asynchronous), so that they can tune in as they carve out time between jobs and other life responsibilities. A survey of online students conducted by Wiley found that 69 percent preferred asynchronous classes in fully online programs, with no requirement to visit a campus.

But a different survey of students published in Frontiers of Education concluded that college students prefer real-time interaction online (known as synchronous instruction) such as showing up on Zoom to a class held at a specific day and time together with other classmates. The sharp difference in results comes from whose opinion counted. This survey asked a broader group of students, while the Wiley study quizzed those in online programs only.

It turns out, luckily for online students, that the most common type of remote instruction for undergraduates is asynchronous, according to the CHLOE report from Quality Matters of chief online learning officers — a result that came as a surprise to me, since most faculty members prefer in-person teaching. For years, it’s been a struggle for many college faculty to adapt to online instruction. Even though Zoom and other video conferencing systems have opened classrooms to remote students, the habit of delivering lectures in real time is hard to break, and that doesn't translate as well online.

If you're looking to uncover whether colleges and universities are delivering what remote students want, the recent Quality Matters report offers insights with mixed signals. With only about 40 percent of online officers saying their institutions are fully ready to give it all they’ve got, it suggests that higher ed is only moderately prepared to deliver the digital bells and whistles remote students are looking for. An almost equal fraction of online officers hesitate, saying that their colleges need time to do the right thing.

For centuries, higher ed was the province of scholars, with faculty determining the scope and nature of what constitutes knowledge, what students learn and how they learn it. In the digital age, faculty no longer occupy the seat of authority alone, but must share it with their students.

If colleges are serious about attracting new streams of online learners to solve their enrollment challenges, leaders must move full speed ahead with online options and support.

© Ground Picture / Shutterstock

My daughter recently called me in a panic. She said, “I’m not getting into Brown!” I wondered what she was talking about. She had just finished her junior year of high school and hadn’t applied to college yet. Then I realized why she was calling. Two days earlier the United States Supreme Court ruled to end affirmative action. On the heels of the ruling, multiple voices, from legal experts to the Biden administration, explained how colleges and universities can still consider how race affects an applicant’s life, but all my Black daughter heard was: “You don’t belong here.”

Millions of Black, Indigenous and Hispanic students are processing the news. The myth of American meritocracy was shattered for them. Because of our historical systems of structural racism, losing affirmative action laws will make it harder for college applicants from marginalized communities to get an equitable shot at attending their dream colleges — even for the most gifted students.

In these times of lost hope, what our young people need to hear are the same words I told my daughter when she called me: “You are an intelligent, caring, hard-working person with a remarkable story of perseverance. If a college doesn’t accept you, then it’s not where you are supposed to be and it’s their loss.”

In short, our young people need to know they belong.

I have dedicated my career to advancing equitable access to education, helping bring high potential students from historically marginalized communities to top colleges and universities. As a former teacher and in my roles as the executive director of two pre-college programs — the MITES program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke TIP at Duke University — I have seen firsthand how developing a strong sense of belonging is critical for student success.

Researchers have found that young people who experience disrespect, rejection or exclusion are absent from school more often, less engaged in class and earn lower grades — and Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students are at heightened risk of hearing these kinds of messages. The inverse is also true. Studies show that feelings of belonging increase engagement and performance, and reduce dropout rates.

Because young people from racially marginalized communities are more vulnerable to feeling like they don’t belong, it’s critical for these youth to hear that they deserve a high-quality education and are qualified to attend their choice of college.

The reality is that our country has work to do. We have a long way to go to make students of color feel like they belong and to get to a place where the student population at colleges and universities reflects our nation’s changing demographics. When you compare the U.S. population with the racial demographics of students at the top 20 American colleges, according to U.S. News & World Report Best National Rankings for the 2022-23 school year, the data reveals that students from racially marginalized communities, especially Black and Indigenous students, are grossly underrepresented at America’s top universities.

These results illustrate that current college admissions practices at top colleges are not yielding equitable admission opportunities. Further, the practices are not addressing inequities in American history that impact higher education institutions, including the colonization of Indigenous land and culture, the more than 250-year enslavement of Black people, and Jim Crow laws and redlining practices that still place many Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students in under-resourced neighborhoods and K-12 schools.

The Supreme Court decision will keep us on this unjust, inequitable path. We know this because it’s happened before.

In 1996, California banned race-based admissions policies at public universities with the passage of Proposition 209. Prior to that year, the student populations of California’s flagship universities, University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) were mostly representative of the state’s college-eligible population. After Proposition 209 was enacted, underrepresented minority students were 40 percent less likely to be admitted to UC Berkeley and UCLA, according to a study led by researcher Zachary Bleemer. The study also showed that the ban resulted in many Black and Hispanic students enrolled at less competitive campuses.

In an interview with NPR, Bleemer said “Black and Hispanic students saw substantially poorer long-run labor market prospects as a result of losing access to these very selective universities. But there was no commensurate gain in long-run outcomes for the white and Asian students who took their place.”

The long-term economic outcomes of Bleemer’s study are also concerning. The study found that Black and Hispanic students were less likely to earn graduate degrees or enter lucrative science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields and these outcomes contributed to a 5 percent average annual decline in applicants’ wages in their 20s and early 30s.

Unless colleges proactively engage students from racially underrepresented communities through pre-college programming and other recruitment strategies that create a sense of belonging for our students and families as early as elementary and middle school, their fate could be the same.

Right now many universities are quietly determining how this Supreme Court ruling will impact their admissions practices. At the same time, our Black, Hispanic and Indigenous high school students are watching and deciding where they should apply to college. Like my daughter, these students are looking for messages and actions that restore their confidence and belief in an equitable review of their academic performance and lived experiences.

It’s time for families, teachers, guidance counselors, and colleges and universities that still believe in creating an equitable education system to send loud, clear, and repetitive messages to our beloved Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students: Yes! You belong.

© Volha Hlinskaya / Shutterstock

Twice a week, Rofiat Olasunkanmi, 22, heads back to Brooklyn to her alma mater, Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School. Now a senior at New York University, Olasunkanmi helps high school seniors navigate applying to college, a process she personally recalls being dominated by concern about finances and a general sense of anxiety because no one in her family did it in the United States before her.

Her older siblings received degrees in Nigeria, where her parents still live, so she’d had to figure out a lot on her own, a burden she now tries to alleviate for the students she works with. She aims to support them from start to finish, beginning with applications for the City University of New York at minimum and then moving on to the Common Application.

“But I’m not there every day, and Common App is very lengthy,” she said, “so they need to ensure that they’re doing the parts that they need to get done while I'm not there.”

Rofiat Olasunkanmi helps high school seniors apply to college. Photo courtesy of Olasunkanmi.

The Common Application was first created with the goal to simplify the college admissions process by allowing students to submit one application to multiple institutions. However, as Olasunkanmi mentioned, it takes significant time to complete, an estimated six to eight weeks, according to admissions counselors.

The COVID-19 pandemic complicated the application process further with disruptions to in-person advising, testing and extracurricular activities. But barriers to completion predate the pandemic.

During the last pre-pandemic college application cycle, 2018-19, nearly 1.2 million students accessed the Common App, created a profile and began working on at least one application. But a quarter of those students, almost 300,000, did not end up submitting any application through Common App, according to a working paper published this August.

Researchers characterized this subset of students as “non-submitters.”

“Non-submitters” were more likely than students who submitted applications to have lower educational-occupational aspirations, be racial minorities, have parents who completed lower levels of education and live in communities with lower socioeconomic status — but they were not less academically qualified.

Colleges across the country have doubled down on trying to attract students as enrollment numbers decline. Direct admission has proven to be an effective method of appealing to students who hadn’t already been planning to attend college. But the students who start applications without hitting the “send” button, the “non-submitters,” largely fall into a different category. They are presumably already interested in college.

So, why aren’t they completing applications?

Identifying ‘Non-Submitters’

During World War II, the U.S. military noticed that certain parts of the airplanes that returned from battle had more bullet holes than others. As a result, leaders decided to reinforce those areas, expecting that would help the planes better withstand enemy fire.

But this strategy had a fundamental error. It’s one relevant to past research about barriers preventing students from enrolling in college, said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the “non-submitters” study.

The error, known as survival bias, directs focus on those entities that passed a selection process but overlooks others that didn’t make it through. The military focused on holes in the planes that survived enemy fire. But really, leaders should have considered the holes in the planes that did not make it home.

Likewise, higher education institutions have tried various strategies to boost student enrollment but haven’t stepped back to ask, “Who is not completing applications?” Odle said.

He and Preston Magouirk, chief data officer at the nonprofit DC College Access Program, took that step back. They outlined key factors that can predict non-submission, using data students put into their Common App profiles coupled with community indicators from the American Community Survey administered by the U.S. Census Bureau and school features from the Common Core of Data maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. (Magouirk was a senior manager of research and analytics at Common App while conducting the study.)

Overall, they found that 24 percent of students who started the Common App in 2018-19 did not complete it. The highest rates of non-submission were among American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students (as well as students who did not report their race or ethnicity on Common App), and the lowest rates were among white and Asian students. While students who identified as Black or African American and Latino represented a small fraction of all Common App users during the study year, both groups were overrepresented in the non-submitter population, with non-submission rates of 27 and 26 percent, respectively.

Submission rates also varied by community. The higher the unemployment rate in a ZIP code, the higher the likelihood of non-submission among students who lived there, the researchers found. Further, rates varied by school type. Students attending public high schools were more likely to not submit applications they’d started than students attending independent or private high schools. Students at Title I schools, which serve high numbers of low-income students, were more likely to not submit applications they’d started (28 percent) compared to students at non-Title I schools (22 percent). Compared to applicants, non-submitters were also less likely to report having a parent with a college degree.

Students who ultimately submitted the Common App visited the platform more frequently. The essay, in particular, appeared to be key in distinguishing between students who finished and didn’t finish their applications. Out of the students who eventually applied, 94 percent wrote at least 100 characters for their essay; whereas just 43 percent of students who did not write at least that much ended up applying.

What is most distinct about these findings, the researchers said, are the academic similarities between submitters and non-submitters.

“It would be so easy for people to just say, ‘well, they're probably not college material,’” Odle said, referring to non-submitters. This study shows otherwise. Students who submitted and students who did not submit applications had very similar GPAs and SAT/ACT scores.

Of course, there are other ways to apply to college beyond the Common App. While the platform connects students with more than 1,000 four-year colleges and universities, its data alone does not provide a comprehensive look at all pathways to higher ed.

Separate from the research by Odle and Magouirk, Common App conducted an internal analysis using National Student Clearinghouse records to track what happened to non-submitters beyond its own platform, said Mark Freeman, vice president of data analytics and research at Common App. The analysis found that the average Common App non-submitter is still likely to enroll in college after high school — but using another platform, such as applying directly to an institution.

This underscores the fact that people who access the Common App at all have a high baseline enrollment rate. For the 2017-18 academic season, for example, 71 percent of Common App users who did not submit an application through the platform still attended college within the next academic year, according to the analysis. More than half (56 percent) attended an institution that does not accept the Common App, but some students attended institutions that do (14.5 percent).

While this analysis looked at the year prior to Odle and Magouirk’s study, the results should look very similar, Freeman said.

However, Common App non-submission still seems to be related to college-going outcomes, Odle said. After all, the enrollment rate of students who completed the Common App — 88.4 percent — was higher than the enrollment rate of students who started but never finished it — 71 percent.

Counseling Students to Submit Applications

Dorma Lozada, a senior at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, recalls going through the college application process herself a few years ago. “I understood the language of the applications,” she said, which she attributed to her mother’s experience attending college in Puerto Rico. When filling out financial aid forms, her mother had the needed documents prepared, for example.

Lozada, 21, now assists students preparing for college at her high school alma mater, the Facing History School several blocks away from John Jay. Her work is supported through the same program that Olasunkanmi participates in, which trains college students to provide individualized support to high school seniors.

The high school students Lozada works with often do not receive the same insight from their parents that she did from her mother, she said. And many of her students’ parents do not speak English. She translates what she can, but it’s a challenge to alleviate families’ uncertainty about college, and specifically fears about affordability.

While Odle and Magouirk’s study focused on predictors of non-submission rather than strategies to support application completion, its findings point to possible solutions. Because submitters typically came to the Common App platform more times and completed the essay portion, for example, maybe more involved and sustained college counseling could help more students finish their applications.

The work that Olasunkanmi and Lozada do is an example of that counseling, which varies in quality and quantity across the country and in individual school districts. While the ratio of students to school counselors in the U.S. has narrowed over time, it remains well above what the American School Counselor Association recommends. These counselors assist with postsecondary planning but also boosting academic achievement and interpersonal skills. ASCA recommends a ratio of 250 students for every one school counselor. During the 2021-2022 school year, the latest year for which data is available, the nationwide average was 408-to-1.

High school seniors in 21 states shared how a lack of counseling affected their college application process in surveys conducted by the national nonprofit YouthTruth.

“I am almost done with my senior year and not once been talked to or notified about end of year requirements for graduation let alone college,” a male student reported. “Because of this I have decided that college is out of the picture and that I guess I'm just not good enough.”

Sometimes we have students that are very enthusiastic at the beginning of the application, but by the end, they're not.

— Rofiat Olasunkanmi

Others reported not knowing about application deadlines, and when they learned of them late in the application season, they assumed college was just off the table, said Jen de Forest, director of organizational learning and communications at YouthTruth.

“There were a lot of kids, particularly Latinx kids, who described not having social capital in the process, unless they had a sibling to guide them through,” de Forest said. “If they had a sibling, the sibling was a really crucial bridge.”

Olasunkanmi has found this to be the case with her students in New York, too.

While her older siblings did not go through the college application process in the U.S., they attended and completed college, so she had that example set for her. For her students at Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School, many lack personal connections who chose the college pathway themselves. While these students may want to attend college and eagerly begin applications, they do not always follow through as they commonly see siblings and peers going straight to the workforce.

“Sometimes we have students that are very enthusiastic at the beginning of the application,” Olasunkanmi said, “but by the end, they're not.”

Like Lozada has seen, Olasunkanmi said this decreased buy-in from students is often contingent on the support they receive — or don’t receive — outside of the Bridge Coach program. Olasunkanmi knows from her own experience that a lack of parental input is not always an intentional choice. Some students’ parents are not familiar with the U.S. college admissions process, while others are busy juggling work or other responsibilities.

Setting Different Expectations

Yet Olasunkanmi’s parents did expect her to attend college. “African parents, they don't play with education,” she said. That meant her own college aspirations aligned with her family’s expectations.

Across the country, however, large aspiration-expectation mismatches have been found. YouthTruth's most recent survey of over 25,000 high school seniors in the class of 2023 found that 74 percent aspired to go to college but only 66 percent expected to go to college.

Olasunkanmi thinks this mismatch is at least in part due to a lack of diverse representation on college campuses. Overall, white students are the largest racial demographic in the U.S. college population, regardless of whether the institution is public or private, or a two- or four- year school (although public two-year institutions comparably have more minority students). Meanwhile, Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School is composed of mostly Black students (81 percent), with 14 percent Latino and 3 percent white students.

Career expectations likely also contribute to the mismatch. In the Common App study, submission rates varied widely by students’ reported educational plans, with higher rates of non-submission found for those who aspired to attain an associate degree compared to higher degree levels. The non-submission rate essentially doubled for students who never selected any degree goals.

Rates also varied based on students’ intended career field, with students who reported aspiring to work in occupations that generally require advanced levels of education (engineers, policymakers, physicians, etc.) having high application submission rates, while students who reported aspiring to occupations that don’t typically require a postsecondary credential (homemaker, farmer, etc.) had low application submission rates.

While college may not be a match for everyone’s career goals, ruling out college as an option because of expected job plans at such a young age is limiting, given that research shows those aspirations often change over time, Odle cautioned.

This was true for both Olasunkanmi and Lozada. After graduating high school, Olasunkanmi started at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, before transferring to NYU. She thought she wanted to be a nurse before she had the chance to work closely with a counselor, who spoke with her about the multitude of career options there are in health care. Now, she plans to work as a health care manager in a hospital or medical center. Lozada, who is majoring in political science and minoring in economics, initially thought she’d be a lawyer, but she is now set on becoming an elected official.

Cost is easily the biggest barrier to enrollment for both the never-enrolled and the previously enrolled, according to the latest Gallup and Lumina Foundation State of Higher Education report for 2023. YouthTruth reports seeing students become more concerned about the return on investment for a college education.

Transparency in what students can expect from the college experience, particularly overall cost, is key to helping them feel more confident to enroll, according to Bryce McKibben, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University. “It is so opaque,” McKibben said of the college price tag. “You don't necessarily know how much it's going to [cost] even in the next year, let alone over the length of your degree. As a result, it's very easy to make the conclusion that it may not be possible or that you're going to end up in loads of debt.”

The Hope Center regularly conducts surveys assessing students’ basic needs. The latest 2020 results from more than 195,000 students showed rates of basic needs insecurity increased among the general population, and intention to enroll in college dropped.

“We don't necessarily have data on the level of which those folks who never entered may have struggled with those challenges,” McKibben said, “but the fact that there are three-in-five students experiencing basic needs insecurity obviously presents huge warning signs of folks who are sort of at the margin.”

Odle and Magouirk hope that their research leads to changes that help more students successfully complete college applications. As for how the Common App plans to build on this work, Freeman said the organization will conduct a survey of non-submitters.

As Olasunkanmi and Lozada both begin their senior year of college, they’re thinking about how they can leverage their knowledge to beat back inequity in who makes it to college, and who succeeds beyond higher education, too.

Their advocacy work has already begun, one high school senior at a time.

“At the end of the year, they turn around and they're like, ‘thank you so much for helping me,’” Lozada said. “‘If it weren't for you, I would have not been able to complete these applications.’”

© Studio623 / Shutterstock

As college classes start up this fall, instructors are handing out syllabi and pointing students to official platforms for turning in assignments and participating in class discussions. Meanwhile students are setting up unofficial online channels of their own, where they can ask questions of classmates, gripe about the professor and sometimes share homework and test answers.

Students increasingly turn to private systems to create online groups around individual college classes. It’s a practice that has gone on for years, but teaching experts say it intensified during pandemic campus shut-downs, when students were looking for ways to connect. Platforms used for these groups include Discord, a discussion service popular with video gamers; GroupMe, a text-message platform; and Slack, the messaging system popular in many professional workplaces.

“We tell faculty to assume that there is a Discord for all of their courses,” says Aaron Zachmeier, associate director for instructional design and development at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Some professors welcome these channels as a way for students to blow off steam. But others worry that they can lead to violations of academic integrity. And some have taken the attitude of, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” actively setting up Discord servers or joining those created by their students.

"We tell faculty to assume that there is a Discord for all of their courses.”

— Aaron Zachmeier, associate director for instructional design and development at the University of California at Santa Cruz

In some ways it’s just an online version of informal networking that students have always done as they chat with classmates in physical classrooms before or after class. But because these online platforms are easy to hide from instructors and are available 24/7, they can be trickier for students and professors to navigate.

Building Community

Most college courses these days offer official online forums where students in a class can chat, often through learning management systems. But students can be reluctant to use these sanctioned channels, or to show up in person for office hours, says Megan McNamara, a continuing lecturer in sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

She says she used a Discord server as a student recently, in an online course she took at the campus. “I loved it,” she says, noting that the students got to know each other by asking questions like what they planned to do next year. “What gave me my feeling of being in relationship with anyone else in the class was the conversations I had there.”

Often students use pseudonyms in the platforms, so that even if they do run into each other on campus, they might not realize it. But McNamara says she ended up getting together with another classmate she met on the Discord group face to face.

Zachmeier, the instructional design director, says that students often use student-organized discussion groups on Discord or other channels to ask each other logistical questions about the class and assignments that they are too embarrassed to ask the professor, or to get an answer more quickly than a professor might respond.

That’s what Joseph Ching, an affiliate scholar at James Madison University, has experienced. He says he has noticed that students typically organize channels in Discord and GroupMe only when they are frustrated by the level of assistance or timely feedback from instructors. When he was an undergraduate at Purdue University a couple of years ago during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he says that students flocked to GroupMe to talk about topics like “I need help on my homework,” or “how do I drop this class?”

McNamara adds that students report feeling more social anxiety these days than before the pandemic, and many seem more comfortable asking questions of classmates online than in person. “They could talk to each other, but that doesn’t mean they do,” she says. And these days, in the time before class sessions start, she sees students “pull out their phones to avoid talking to people.”

But even though these forums can build community, they might also be playing a role in reducing attendance in classes and contributing to a sense of student disengagement in physical lectures. When EdSurge visited Texas State University to explore that issue late last year, Zoe Channon, then a senior majoring in biology, said, “I almost wonder if technology is sort of encouraging people to not go to class, where then people are sort of checking in with other students and on GroupMe to find out, ‘What did they ask about this?’”

And these platforms have also been the sites of student bullying. McNamara and Zachmeier noted in an advice column on the use of Discord that students are expected to follow the college or university’s code of conduct “regardless of where those interactions take place.”

Concerns About Cheating

The biggest concern many professors have about these unofficial online platforms is whether students use them to cheat, both Zachmeier and McNamara acknowledge, by sharing answers on homework or exams.

While the loudest discussions about student cheating these days revolve around the use of new AI tools like ChatGPT, student Discord servers and other unofficial online forums can allow students to trade specific answers or work together in ways that might be even harder to catch.

A few incidents of student cheating on these online platforms have made headlines in recent years. In 2019, for instance, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at Austin sent an email to 70 students saying he would give them an F on an assignment and refer them to the dean’s office after he discovered they were on a GroupMe chat group where answers to an exam were shared.

That has prompted advice to pop up in at least one Reddit channel advising students to avoid joining GroupMe sections for their classes. As the anonymous user wrote: “If you are looking to cheat, then this is honestly the worst way to do it. With everything online there's much better ways to get answers without leaving a huge trail and risking other people's academic records, and to be honest [it’s] probably more work to cheat than it is to just do the classwork (and you might learn something).”

That rings true for Perry Evans, a senior at James Madison University. He said that there was a “big scare” among many of his classmates last year about using GroupMe, out of concern that the companies would share information from the chats with professors.

Though Evans uses Discord for video gaming, including discussing Pokemon Go, he says he does not use it or other unofficial platforms in his classes, where he feels he gets enough feedback and help from professors and teaching assistants if needed.

Meanwhile, concerns about student cheating have led some professors to try to get involved with student Discord servers for their classes, or set them up, so they can monitor them.

But that has led to pushback from students who say that defeats the purpose.

“Discord is for students, not professors,” wrote Tony Phan Vo, a student at California State University at Fullerton, in an article last fall in the student newspaper there. “Students should be in charge of their class Discord servers, not the professors,” he continued. “Collaboration becomes futile when there is pressure to follow cautious procedures, especially if the Discord doesn’t have a clear instruction by the professor.”

If a professor does become part of a student Discord server, McNamara, of UC Santa Cruz, advises setting clear expectations and sticking with them — especially around whether or how quickly you will respond to student questions.

“If you set yourself up to be responsive and you aren’t responsive, it’s worse than if you didn’t say you’d use it,” she says.

And she advises professors to resist the temptation to get involved with these informal channels at all. “The undergroundness of Discord is part of its appeal,” she notes. For students, she adds, “this is how you develop independence.”

© Julia Tim / Shutterstock

If you’ve ever been a student, then you’ve probably done a group project at some point. And you most likely also have a horror story about a group project that went terribly wrong.

That trend was clear when EdSurge recently took a microphone to one campus and asked several students to share their group project horror stories. Every student we talked to had one.

But teaching experts say it doesn’t have to be that way. Yet fixing group projects isn’t easy, since many instructors tend to repeat the same flawed methods that their own teachers used when they were students.

For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we connected with John Warner, a longtime writing instructor at colleges and a teaching consultant for Eyler Warner & Associates. He’s written books on improving writing, including “Why They Can’t Write,” as well as an essay on how to fix group projects. But he says he has trouble getting educators interested in his advice, in part because many see traditional group projects as a way to save time.

What he suggests may indeed take more time than other types of teaching, Warner says, involving more effort from teachers in setting up groups, teaching students about successful group processes and checking in on their progress.

“It's not sort of ‘set it and forget it,’” he stresses. “Because that’s asking for trouble on the backend for the instructor, to clean up the mess when a student shows up with nothing on a group project day and you have to figure out how you're going to grade them.”

We ran the student group project tales we heard by Warner to get his reaction and advice. And we addressed some big questions about what it means to teach — and to learn.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page.