More students are applying to more colleges using the Common App, according to the annual College App report. This past year saw a 5% increase in students using this popular way to streamline the application process, with about 1.5 million people doing so. Those 1.5 million applicants submitted more applications as well, as over 10 million applications were sent in this year, rising 8% from 2024.

I am often asked for a copy of these remarks I made as part of a presidential panel at the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE).  Here is an edited version of that talk.

As scholars, sometimes we forget that after all, the ultimate reason for this kind of work is to inform institutional change.

There is an assumption that the higher the response rate is to the survey, the more accurate the results will be. Oftentimes the first question I will get about a survey is about the response rate, because people have been conditioned to connect a low response rate with inaccurate results. This is most often used when someone does not like the results of the survey. A low response rate lets people dismiss findings that they don't want to hear without actually having to deal with those findings.

But (shhhh) nobody really knows what a good response rate is.

One in four college applicants are ruling out colleges because they are located in states they think are not in line with their own political and social views. In addition, this weeding out happens early on in the college choice process, with 64% saying that they eliminated these schools when first deciding what colleges they were interested in. This information is from a recently released report from Art & Science Group.

“The data behind understanding college success and happiness” and we talked about many things related to that and other ideas. I’ve know Harlan for about 20 years in the higher education sphere, and it was a pleasure to have this discussion. Hope you enjoy.

New findings from Arts & Science Group’s studentPoll looks at how high school students are using college rankings. And it shows, well, that they really are not using them that much. In fact, it’s more likely that a student will turn to rankings for information about a college rather than for the actual ranking that the publication magically gives that college.

Loneliness has been declared an epidemic here in the United States, according to the U.S. Surgeon General of the United States. This was laid out in a widely circulated report in 2023 entitled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” It’s not hard to debate this, if you pay attention to the news or get on social media. Children, teens, and adults are all feeling more lonely and socially isolated.

Two out of five high school students in the US in 2023 experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or helplessness,” according to the most recent report by the CDC. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) is a comprehensive survey of various risk in areas of mental health, sexual behavior, alcohol and other drug use, suicide ideation, and more that is conducted every other year.

These numbers are going in the right direction, but not fast enough. For one out of four college freshmen to leave after one year is really not ideal at all. Think about all the time and effort to get into college. And then after one year (or less), it’s over. You have no degree, and likely have some debt from that first year.

As high-school students they were unsure about how to approach choosing a college and were anxious about making mistakes in the process. They were unsure how to choose a major and how their choices might impact employment after college.

As college acceptances are in and people are considering where to go, they are thinking about where to spend the next four years of their lives. Few of them realize that more often than people know, it takes longer than four years to graduation from college.

The article makes a great point about majors. Majors should not be seen as defining what area your career will be in, but as a starting point to learn about learning most of all. Some majors do point towards careers in that field, like engineering and business. Other majors have broader applications, such as English. In the article Jamie writes about how an English major used the skills he learned in that major, such as effective communication, to get a job in a field not ordinarily seen as connected to English.

When I am asked what is important to do in college I fall back on the BIG SIX as well called them. These are the college experiences that are most likely to lead to what we called the Great Job and Great Life, based on Gallup’s outcomes measures in wellbeing and employee engagement.

I’ve always been about information-informed decision making. The current health crisis reminded me of a much smaller and less harmful situation I was involved with back in 2002 at Dartmouth College. An outbreak of conjunctivitis was spreading rapidly through the campus and we just did not have the information we needed to deal with the crisis. The Center for Disease Control came to campus to try to help when we quickly realized we needed more information.

My former colleagues at Gallup have released data that indicates that fewer Americans believe that a “college education” is “very important.” When asked about the importance of a college education in 2013, 70% of Americans thought it was “very important,” but that percentage dropped to only 51% in 2019.

“We will continue to see multiple choices for post-secondary education that have evolved from the traditional campus-based residential four-year experience. While this will still be an option, it will be less so that it is now. Online universities will continue to improve and grow as an option, especially for people who live in rural areas or who want to work.”

A new study, though, shows the negative side of not borrowing enough. In this examination of a program designed to inform students about their loans, those receiving these educational messages ended up taking less money in loans to support their college experience. You’d think that would be good, right? Given what we hear about student loan debt.

Thousands of people are looking at college acceptances this month and trying to decide where to go. Based upon my 25 years of experience studying higher education, here are my top 5 tips.

Choosing a college involves many factors, such as cost, location, and the academic reputation of the institution. Increasingly important to people going to college for the first time, however, is the college visit. According to the newly released 2017 CIRP Freshman Survey results, 47.3% of students who entered college in the fall of 2017 indicated that the campus visit was very important in their decision about where to go. Although not the reason given by the most students (that the college had a very good academic reputation, at 65.6%), the college visit shows an increasing importance, rising from 37.6% just 15 years ago.

About one in four college freshmen leave their school do not return for their sophomore year. So why, when faced with such a big problem, would I decide to talk instead about the importance of experiential learning in college at the Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience?