Reporters Roundtable: Enrollment, Loan Forgiveness, & FAFSA Simplified

The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus and Chris Quintana of USA Today join hosts Jeff and Michael for a roundtable discussion to talk about recent headlines in higher ed. Jon discusses the impact of lower birth rates in Japan on university enrollment, while Chris dives into the current state of the Biden Administration’s student loan debt repayment plans. Other topics include efforts by universities to articulate the value of higher ed, the rollout of the simplified FAFSA, and culture wars on campus. The episode is sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Ascendium Education Group.

Key Moments

(0:00) - Intro
(2:47) - Declining college enrollment in Japan and US
(8:04) - Student loan forgiveness and career centers in higher education
(12:35) - College career preparation and job placement
(14:37) - FAFSA simplification, college affordability, and higher ed news
(20:25) - Higher education trends and challenges in the US

Transcript

Michael Horn:

Today on Future You, we bring back one of our most popular features, the Reporters Roundtable.

Sponsor:

This episode of Future You is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a non-profit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit Ascendiumphilanthropy.org. This episode is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information, policy and institutional transformation.

Michael Horn:

I'm Michael Horn.

Jeff Selingo:

And I'm Jeff Selingo.

Michael Horn:

We're more than midway through the year, Jeff, and a few episodes ago we provided our own midterm report on what has turned out to be a very busy news year in higher ed. Again, higher ed just seems like it's constantly jumping into the top news in the mainstream media, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, Michael, that's why I thought we'd once again bring reporters who cover higher ed to our own virtual studio to talk about some of the stories that they've worked on and also the stories that they wish the higher ed media would be covering.

Michael Horn:

Today we have with us Jon Marcus from the Hechinger Report, whose byline is probably familiar to many of you because his pieces appear often in the Washington Post and the Associated Press, and he co-hosts his own podcast as well.

Jeff Selingo:

Also joining us is Chris Quintana from USA Today, and before that Chris was with the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Albuquerque Journal and the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Michael Horn:

Jon and Chris, welcome to Future You.

Jon Marcus:

Thank you.

Chris Quintana:

Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, you bet. Let's start with two big stories that define the fall for higher ed as an industry, concerns about enrollment and the restart of student loan payments after a very lengthy pandemic pause. Jon, you did a story I was fascinated by because it's an angle that many other reporters have not thought of in covering the enrollment cliff that's about to hit the US in the middle of this decade, and that's a look at another country where there was plummeting university enrollment, and that's Japan, and what it could portend for the United States. What did you find? And incidentally, I want to know how you got to go to Japan to cover this story because our listeners and I might be just a tad bit jealous.

Jon Marcus:

I went to Japan to figure out what happens when you don't have any 18 year olds. In Japan, the number of 18 year olds has dropped by half, nearly half, in just three decades. So a much more dramatic decline, but a good place to sort of look at what happens when you have no more college age students. The first thing that happens is you have an enormous effect on the economy. The International Monetary Fund predicts that under current demographic trends, the Japanese gross domestic product, which has been sort of stagnant or declining now for 30 years will continue to decline for the next 40 years largely as a result of this demographic challenge there.

What happened more immediately in Japan that served sort of as an example and a warning I think for the United States is fairly predictable.

Universities and colleges shut down, 11 of them in the last 20 years, which is significant in a country that's much smaller. There were 29 mergers in the last 20 years in Japan compared to only three in the 50 years before that. Additional colleges have announced that they were closing. Most vulnerable, as in the United States, have been small private universities in rural areas. There's also been a particular toll as in the United States on two-year, what they call in Japan junior colleges, what we call community colleges. 267 community colleges in Japan have closed or junior colleges out of a total of about 600.

All of those things are warnings for us. The more immediate things that we can look at over the longer term is that universities in Japan now much more desperate for enrollment, have become much less selective. In 1991, you had a six in 10 chance of being admitted to a college in Japan. Now they take more than nine out of 10 applicants. Almost everybody gets in. That is a huge concern to employers who question the qualifications of the graduates at the other end.

The Japanese have also encouraged higher graduation from high school, the equivalent of high school. That's helped a little bit, but not very much. What's concerning in the United States is our graduation rate from high school did go up and now it's going down significantly, something that I think people aren't paying attention to, down by about 10 percentage points in five years, the proportion of high school kids that go directly into college.

Jeff Selingo:

Just an interesting place to look at this, Jon. So you got to go there?

Jon Marcus:

I went there also because I ran the Tokyo Marathon. Yeah, so while I was there, I visited a university where there are some faculty that have done some research on this problem. It's the subject of significant research actually in Japan, which is something else that we don't see necessarily in the United States. In the United States, the enrollment decline is the subject of significant journalism, especially lately, but we don't see necessarily a lot of academic research into why it's happening and what we might do about it.

Interestingly, I did a story recently about an ad man in Texas, a guy named Maurice Spence who came up with the "Don't Mess With Texas" slogan and "You are now free to move about the country for Southwest Airlines." He started a nonprofit to encourage high school kids to go to college, largely funded by employers who are desperate now for students after high school with some post-secondary education. Not all college, but at least something, trade school even.

He has created this sort of advertising campaign that tells you not only how to go to college but how much money you'll make and all of those very simple ways of looking at a post-secondary education that colleges make insanely and ridiculously complicated. What I found interesting working on that story is when you see other industries, like it or not tobacco, fossil fuels come to mind that have been threatened, they have collectively responded in some way to try to revive public confidence in their product.

I haven't seen that yet from higher education. Americans are questioning the value of going to college and colleges are doing almost nothing to address that.

Jeff Selingo:

It's kind of like the Got Milk campaign I think from the milk producers as well. It's interesting. This is not by design. I think we have two of some of the fastest journalistic runners on this show today. Chris, next time I think we'll do this podcast as we're running, and Michael and I will run way behind you and Jon. But Chris, the worry about enrollments in the US of course is really worsened by the increasing debt of students. And so fewer young adults, for example, might think college is worth it because they don't want to take on the debt.

This fall we saw student loan payments return. I have two questions here. How was the startup after such a long break? But more long-term, we know the Biden Administration has been trying to forgive a whole swath of student loan debt, much of it without success thanks In part to the Supreme Court last year. Is that effort now basically dead?

Chris Quintana:

I want to say it's a yes and no kind of answer there. The administration is canceling student debt still. We're still seeing it in a variety of ways, whether that's through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, whether that is through income-driven repayments being adjusted and kind of catching folks up when they have been making payments for years.

In that way, student loan forgiveness is still very much happening. I think what folks had anticipated this sort of mass $20,000 for borrowers almost across the board, that seems to have been shelved for now.

I think we will have to wait until 2025 to see kind of what the administration's plan B is for mass student loan forgiveness. What I would say is for folks who are looking at what's happening immediately, where I've been paying attention to is changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, adjustments to this IDR plan. Just recently, the administration announced plans to move up it's plans to forgive about $12,000 worth of federal student loans for folks who had been paying for a while.

So it's like all of this is sort of influx and often, and so when you're a borrower, it can be really frustrating and challenging to know what relief is actually coming to you, especially when things are changing so rapidly. Just a year and a half ago, I was writing consistently about "Here is this..." We were waiting for a form to drop for mass student loan forgiveness, and I remember people rushing out to fill this thing out when it came out in October and it was a page long. It was everything that the federal government promised. It was not a lot of effort, and then that just sort of evaporated.

Jeff Selingo:

It makes me wonder how much, if anything, this will become an issue in the presidential campaign in 2024, especially with Gen Z and people in their 20s who felt maybe that was promised and now not going to happen. That'll be kind of interesting to see what happens there.

Chris Quintana:

I would say too, yeah, the route that the Biden Administration is taking right now, it is incumbent upon a friendly administration. If this isn't wrapped or a Republican kind of comes in next cycle, we don't know what that looks like. I wouldn't say that Republicans are opposed uniformly to student loan forgiveness. There are people who are still in favor. If you've been taken advantage of by a predatory school, if you were totally disabled, it just would not be as much I would imagine.

Jeff Selingo:

Chris, we're going to ask you in a little bit about the FAFSA rollout, but anytime the government starts to do something at a big scale, there always seems to be a problem with it. Just quickly, how has the kind of start of payback for loans, how has it gone overall?

Chris Quintana:

Yeah, there's been a lot of confusion. One, again, we can go back to just this whole student loan freeze and kind of the whole layout for borrowers. I remember back in March 2020 that we weren't given a clear date of when this was going to end. And so you'd always reach this point where it was just like a week or two before payments were supposed to restart, I would be calling the Education Department being like, "Hey, what's going on? Should I tell borrowers they should start paying?"

It would inevitably come down to a week or so it's being extended again where it just became kind of like a Groundhog Day thing where it's like... I think for a lot of folks there was still that sense of like, "Well, they say the payments are going to restart," but then there's also this on ramp. I don't think it's been as consistent as the federal government hoped for. They are still saying about 60% of borrowers made payments, which is down from normal times, but also not as bad as cataclysmic as one might expect.

Jeff Selingo:

Jon, the value of college is increasingly connected to its ROI. Years ago, I remember writing this white paper on reimagining the career center, but at the time the focus on improving career centers seemed to be really limited to less selective colleges. You recently wrote a piece that kind of caught my eye because you were talking about career centers, and I must admit, some of the schools you mentioned in that piece were kind of surprising to me. Brown, William, &, Mary, Wash U and St. Louis, because those places really could coast on the value of their degrees.

So Jon, what's happening that we suddenly now see these more selective places focusing more on the career outcomes of their graduates?

Jon Marcus:

William & Mary, you mentioned William & Mary. Colleges and universities periodically produce a five-year plan or a mission statement that they hang from the light posts in the parking lots. They spend years of faculty committees coming up with vague reasons you should go there.

William & Mary launched their new five-year plan. It came up with four core strategic priorities and one of the four core strategic priorities of William & Mary was career preparation. What's sort of mind-boggling about that is why wasn't that one of their four core strategic priorities before or their first strategic priority from the point of view of students? That is the principle priority for students. There was a Lightcast survey, the workforce analytics firm Lightcast did a survey. They found that career success is now the top reason people give for getting a degree.

There's a separate very well-respected freshman survey produced by an institute at UCLA that we've all used that found that career success was kind of second after the idealistic reason for going to college learning something. But this Lightcast survey, which is more recent, found that career success is now the top reason people give for getting a degree. And yet, universities and colleges haven't in many cases haven't paid attention to it. You mentioned Brown. Everybody that goes to Brown gets a job. We probably work for them. They spent two years and a lot of money revamping their entire career process.

Other colleges that are more challenged for enrollment than an Ivy would be also have been doing this in immediate response to that question that they get asked by parents when they're recruiting students, what job will my student get? It's no longer possible to just dismiss that question now for colleges. They have not done a great job. Fewer than one in five of the graduates in that Lightcast survey agreed that their universities and colleges had done a good job with career services.

Michael Horn:

It's going to be really interesting to see how that trend continues to play out. Let's take a quick break right there, and when we return, we will be right back with Jon and Chris to talk about two other big recent stories, the FAFSA and Culture Wars on this edition of the Future You Reporters Roundtable.

Jeff Selingo:

This episode of Future You is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student-centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post-secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first-generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners, and rural community members. For more information, visit Ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Michael Horn:

This episode is being brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Today's college students are more than just students. They are workers, parents and caregivers, and neighbors. Colleges and universities need to change to meet their changing needs. Learn more about the Foundation's efforts to transform institutions to be more student-centered at usprogram.gatesfoundation.org.

Michael Horn:

Welcome back to Future You, and higher ed News has entered the mainstream late last fall with two big stories. Chris, let me start with you here. After years of talking about the Simplified FAFSA, that is the free application for Federal Student Aid, literally years talking about it, it finally happened. But the rollout sort of was not a finally happened. It was first delayed and then when the application opened at the end of the year, it was a very slow rollout.

So why didn't the Feds just delay it for another year? What's going on there?

Chris Quintana:

I think that's a question that is going to be on a lot of people's minds, especially since we were delayed for quite a bit. The FAFSA usually comes out in October. We're already three months behind at this point. There'd been just a drum beat from financial aid advocates saying "This isn't out. We're worried about what this is going to mean for students down the line." It just still didn't happen.

Even when the rollout did start to happen, the FAFSA was available for just short periods of time. It kind of felt like trying to get Taylor Swift tickets almost where it would be half an hour where you can rapidly try to fill out the FAFSA before it closes down again, which I think it really speaks to the panic and concerns that students and families have about financing their college education.

It seems like it has smoothed out a little bit, but there are still issues that are coming up. The Washington Post just noted that this was an index for inflation in the same way that folks thought there would be. Now there is some question about whether or not do we take the time to adjust this for inflation that then could even delay this process further, or do we just try to make it up next year?

That's a question I am glad that I don't have to answer. It's a challenging question for Ed. I recognize that they're feeling the pressure, but these are families who are trying to make crucial decisions and these packages are often limited. I'm not sure what's going to happen.

Jeff Selingo:

Chris, first of all, you probably got us a million more downloads because you mentioned Taylor Swift, so thank you for that. But in all seriousness, just quickly, what is the bottom line of the new FAFSA going to mean beyond the simplification? Are we going to see any big shifts because of the new FAFSA in terms of college enrollment?

Chris Quintana:

That remains to be seen, but what we've been told by the federal government is that this is supposed to enable more students to get Pell grants, and if we make college more affordable, that could result in more folks going to college. There are also a lot of accessibility changes they've made to the FAFSA to make it easier on folks. It primarily had been available in English and Spanish. We've got multiple languages now online.

The other part that I think is kind of underrated is this IRS data retrieval tool to directly pull the information from the IRS and just streamline the process further. The idea is also that they've reduced the number of questions that you have to answer. One of my favorite gifts ever is still Lamar Alexander unrolling the FAFSA in the Capitol, and then kind of taking out his new version and being like, "Look, this is what it could be."

It could have that downstream effect. I mean, if it continues to be a thing where students don't know when the FAFSA is going to be available every year, I question if October 1st is going to be a date we ever return to, or if it is just now December 31st, it's like, I don't know what the incentive is for the government to move it back to October 1st, other than to have folks stop yelling at them. But yeah.

Jeff Selingo:

The other big story, Jon, that Michael and I have covered are the protests on campuses post-October 7th, and then of course the fallout with the resignations of the presidents of Penn and Harvard after their congressional testimony. You wrote a piece that, to be honest with you, when I first heard people talking about this, I was really skeptical. It was headlined Culture Wars on Campus Start to Affect Students' Choices for College. I must really ask you, really? Because given the record low acceptance rates for places like Harvard and Penn, my thought is aren't people still clamoring to get into them?

Jon Marcus:

I was surprised too when I started reporting this story, how at least survey data so far shows that students are making decisions like that. I'm not suggesting that they're not going to go to Harvard. We're talking more about where geographically students choose to enroll, students that have the mobility to go wherever they want in the country.

In fact, there's significant and legitimate survey data showing that they're already making decisions based on things like the political climate in the state where a college is located. The most interesting survey along these lines was by Art and Science Group, which is a higher education consulting firm, well-respected, that found that one in four students has ruled out already a college or a university for consideration.

Now, that's kind of hard to track. Like the impact of the FAFSA, it's too early to really tell how those changes might shift where people go, if we ever will know.

What's more concerning I think, than whether this affects where people go to college is what these students are thinking about. This is bipartisan. This is true of liberal students and conservative students. They're concerned about different things, but they're all very concerned about these trends on campuses, and they equally describe themselves as feeling unwelcome on campuses increasingly. Liberal students most commonly cite things like whether a state is too Republican or has what they consider lax gun regulations, or anti-LGBTQ regulations, or restrictive abortion laws, which is a big one.

This brings up something that I think is widely overlooked, perhaps intentionally, about this issue of whether campuses are woke or overly liberal. That freshman survey that I mentioned from UCLA makes it really clear that 18-year-olds hold views that would be considered very left before they step foot in a college classroom.

I would venture to suggest that any listener who was once 18 will remember having those kinds of views. They don't need to be indoctrinated by a faculty member to feel the way they do about these issues. They may eventually change their minds, I don't know. But when they're 18, this is how they feel. Nonetheless, there are also conservative students who feel that some states are too democratic according to these surveys and have gay rights and abortion laws that are too liberal.

What is the most I think threatening and dangerous aspect of this trend is that a huge proportion of students of all political persuasions say they don't feel comfortable sharing their views in class. To me, the scariest one is that students and most liberal students, 81% of liberal students, even more than conservative students, say it's okay to report faculty who say things in class that they might object to. 81% of liberal students say that.

Now, what does that do to an educational environment? We've already seen this happening in terms of people shutting down guest speakers and cancel culture. It's happening in the classroom now and on top of the sort of curricular legislation in some states and other measures and just the sort of climate of fear, I think that's been pushed by the culture wars. I wonder what's being taught anymore. I wonder what faculty feel comfortable saying if their students aren't comfortable hearing these things.

So that, I think is really scary in the long term.

Michael Horn:

You both have such interesting insights from all the great stuff that you're working on, but one question we always like to end these roundtables with reporters on is really a lightning round question, so a quick hot take. That question is, what education stories ought to be getting more coverage or attention, but for various reasons aren't? Chris, why don't you take first stab at, and then Jon, you can jump right in.

Chris Quintana:

This is perhaps a little bit of a cop-out, but I would like to see more stories just generally about regional public universities and the ones that are non-flagship and non-Ivys, just because there's a lot going on there and there's a lot that can fly underneath the radar. I've written a lot about these schools. For example, I had written something about a professor who was passed from one public regional campus to another after harassing students.

I think the issue there is that there just wasn't a dedicated higher ed reporter or a dedicated education reporter in many of these markets that the story kind of overlapped on. I do wonder as the, and this is sort of navel-gazing journalism defense I guess, but as the number of the reporters covering higher ed full-time kind of decreases, I am worried about what happens at some of these enclaves that are kind of away from critical attention.

Jon Marcus:

I second that motion and I've been to some of these regional public universities. They're cutting majors, not just one or two, but 20 or 30 majors. Their enrollment is tanking. To Chris's, really good point, no one covers it. I went out to Emporia, Kansas where the local university cut 27 majors, Henderson, Alabama. I preceded my visit by doing research into what have people reported about this? Nothing. Almost nothing because if there's one industry in even worse shape than higher education, it's journalism, and there's nobody out there.

They're higher education deserts or they're threatened with becoming them and they're already journalism deserts. I would add to Chris's suggestion, a few ideas of stories that aren't getting enough attention. Well, first of all, obviously Taylor Swift and her relationship to the FAFSA form I think needs a great deal more coverage now.

Jeff Selingo:

Now he just got us another million downloads.

Jon Marcus:

Yes, yes.

Jeff Selingo:

Thank you, Jon. Go ahead.

Jon Marcus:

Don't mention it. Graduate school enrollment, a huge cash cow for universities and colleges is going down. One of the reasons it's going down is because it's been a huge cash cow for colleges and universities, and it often isn't very good. Graduate students are very unhappy with the educations that they get. Universities, there's no limit on the federal student loans that you can borrow for graduate school.

That's where a lot of the debt is. There are very unhappy people there now telling friends and siblings "Don't go to graduate school." That's going to be a huge problem for universities and colleges. So is competition for international students. It has rebounded, but of course it has rebounded because it was down to almost zero during COVID. Universities like to do that thing where it's like, look over here, don't look over there and saying, "International students are fine. They're all coming back. They love us here."

That's not true. We're losing students from China, which is our most important sending nation. Other major sending nations are building their own campuses. They don't need to come here to the United States and they don't want to because our immigration system is a disaster. They can't stay. The ones that do come here, we educate them and then send them home to compete against us. It's a mess.

Michael Horn:

Terrific. As we wrap up here, just how can people track and follow the other stories that you are writing on social media and online?

Jon Marcus:

I post my stories on Twitter, sorry, on X @JonMarcusBoston. All the stories that we produce, TheHeckingerReport.org website. Also, I hope you wouldn't mind my plugging that I also have a podcast, although it's more consumer-facing, produced in collaboration with NPR called College Uncovered.

Michael Horn:

And Chris, how about you?

Chris Quintana:

Yeah, you can find me on Twitter and Threads and I believe Blue Sky and various other Microblogging platforms at @CQuintanaDC. That's usually the best way to find me. I'm terminally online. You can also reach me by my email CQuintana@USAToday.com. Thanks so much for having me.

Jeff Selingo:

Wow, you're brave, Chris, for giving out emails.

Chris Quintana:

Oh yeah, no, send me everything.

Jon Marcus:

I will say, Jeff, that you can also find Chris @RunningAllTheTime, and he is so much faster-

Chris Quintana:

I lost it in Rock Creek [inaudible 00:37:01].

Jon Marcus:

He's so much faster than me. We ran the same race in Washington a couple of years ago, and I looked at his results and I was just embarrassed how much faster he is than I am.

Jeff Selingo:

Chris, Jon, thank you for joining us on Future You, and we'll all see you next time.