At Eduventures Summit 2022: Higher Education Remastered, held last week in Boston, we gave Innovation Awards to four institutions who found novel ways to increase yield, reduce summer melt, and made real progress on student retention and success.
The Eduventures Summit evergreen theme, Higher Ed Remastered, captures what Summit aspires to be year after year: relevant, compelling, and insightful. Remastered occupies the creative space between continuity and change, staring down both reactionaries and revolutionaries. “After” a crisis like COVID-19, both reaction and revolution can look especially appealing.
Ever since John Harvard in 1638 bequeathed his library and half his estate to the fledgling college that would bear his name, American higher education has been a story of slow but inexorable expansion.
We’re beginning to see the light. After more than a year of turmoil and uncertainty, the outlook for traditional undergraduate admissions is beginning to brighten. But it’s still unclear exactly what the new practice of enrollment will look like post-pandemic.
With a few exceptions, there are two key questions keeping community college leaders up at night this summer: “Where did they go? And, what can we do to bring them back?”
Making the class is nail-biting at the best of times, but following record-breaking undergraduate declines, 2021 is particularly precarious. Applications among better-known brands have skyrocketed, but languished at others. Graduate enrollment is up, but master’s programs face a stiff challenge from today’s plethora of low price, top-branded, online non-degree programs.
