College admissions news roundup: Week of September 7th

A weekly digest of college admissions news impacting your family

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Forget the late nights spent crafting your college essay or filling in an activities list. This enrollment cycle, more than 200 colleges on Common App don’t even need your high school transcript.

Colleges are adopting a new strategy to fill dwindling enrollment numbers — direct admissions.

Advocates say it's the best of both worlds: students no longer sweat college admissions season, and schools yield a class size that keeps them solvent.

But look at who is sending the offers: Grand Canyon University in Arizona, Hendrix College in Arkansas. These colleges aren’t running a charity.

As critics of direct admissions rightly point out, many schools are targeting first-generation and low- to middle-income students. College doesn’t provide an ROI just because it’s college. As the white-collar recession has shown, we’re not short on bachelor’s degrees. We're short on jobs that need them.

Families thinking about direct admissions need to do their homework. If a college offers you a “free” spot, look into its six-year graduation rate, the median earnings of your intended major, and the cost of attendance.

It takes about fifteen minutes on College Scorecard, which is less time than you’d spend on that supplemental essay question you were spared.

Half-a-million-dollar degrees?

Many families with college-aged teens are experiencing sticker shock. Sixteen colleges now cost more than $100,000 per year, including Duke, Georgetown, NYU, and the University of Chicago.

Of course, most students don’t pay that. According to a recent NACUBO (The National Association of College and University Business Officers) study, private colleges offered a 57.1% tuition discount to first-time undergrads. Nine in ten first-year students also got some kind of institutional aid grant.

Net revenue from tuition is actually falling. So that six-figure number is more of a headline-grabber than reality for most families. 

What matters is the net price on the award letter students receive. Measure that against how many years it takes to finish, and what graduates of a particular school, or better yet a particular program, can expect to earn.

At Empowerly, we help our families find the best deal possible. College is an investment, but it’s also a product. And as the savviest shoppers know, you don’t pay full price unless you’re getting something great in return.

Harvard dean goes AI happy

Harvard Dean David Deming emailed students his thoughts regarding AI in the classroom. Spoiler alert: he thinks “writing-intensive” courses need a little more ChatGPT in their lives.

Humanities faculty immediately issued an outcry. English professor Deirdre Lynch described the writing process, in a way only an English professor would, as “personality and individual thoughts clashing with something shared called language.”

Harvard’s professoriat is torn on AI use along a disciplinary divide: more than half of science and engineering classes permit “some” AI use, compared with only 27% in the Arts & Humanities.

Deming is a labor economist, and he’s spent time thinking about why employers stopped hiring recent college grads. In a recent podcast, he said higher education had to change, focusing less on the “synthesis of information,” and more on working with people and building trust. From this perspective, embracing AI means less time thinking and more time learning how to be a proper human.

At universities like Harvard — in fact, especially at universities like Harvard — education is often treated as a four-year apprenticeship in thinking. But now that we can outsource some of that thinking to machines, Deming and others are challenging what college is for. For now, the answer depends on which building the classes meet in.