Written by / Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
MAE 2010 Volume: 5 Issue: 2 (March)
Private Institutions Boost Efforts to Attract Students from Two-year Colleges
Private institutions have stepped up their recruiting efforts of students from two-year colleges. “I see more and more privates getting out there and recruiting transfers, whereas there really weren’t that many out there even just a few years ago,” remarked Brenda Doran, the director of transfer admissions at Bryant University. “As with any competition, you just have to be more aggressive than you were in the past.”
Spurred by the desire to bolster and diversify their enrollments and capitalize on the belt-tightening of regional public universities, many private institutions are adding staff positions focused on recruiting community college students.
According to Tatiana Melguizo, a professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education, these students are appealing because private institutions do not have to offer as many resources to support them as they typically do for incoming freshmen. Tuition-driven private institutions ideally want to “bring in fresh students who’ll be able to pay for four years,” she observed. “But if they can get transfers, who get financial aid from the government and other sources, they can at least get two years. And still, community college transfers don’t always take two years. Some stay longer. These institutions are discovering that this is a good way, in terms of cost effectiveness, to bolster their enrollments.”
Freshmen to Assume Bigger Share of College Bills
Less than 70 of the more than 2,600 four-year colleges in the country have committed this year to meet the full financial need of their students using only grants and reasonable amounts of student work and federal debt. Many schools have indicated that they cannot afford to increase their aid budget to keep up with rising prices and the growing number of students who don’t have enough money to pay for college tuition and expenses.
Yet according to research by the Iowa-based think tank, Postsecondary Education Opportunity (PEO), many students, especially those with excellent grades, often get more aid than the government calculates they need. It’s also noteworthy that this fall the Obama administration intends to increase federal Pell grants by about $200 per student.
But the fact remains that more than 97 percent of the nation’s fouryear colleges will not be able to ensure that parents of students will have to pay only the expected family contribution, which is calculated by the federal government based on the family’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
The average student from a family earning less than $73,000 received about $3,000 less aid than the government calculated the family needed in 2008, according to PEO.
Survey Charts Increase in Online Enrollment
According to the 2009 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, online enrollments increased 17 percent from 2007 to 2008, with about 4.6 million students taking at least one class online. Higher education enrollments rose by 1.2 percent and the portion of students taking at least one course online reached 25.3 percent.
A survey of chief academic officers, however, revealed that the growth in online enrollments has not been matched by consistent training programs. A large number of faculty members have not received online instruction and are doubtful about the medium and the support they would have if they taught virtually.
The data from the survey reflect nearly 4,500 colleges and universities. Information was gathered by the Babson Survey Research Group and by the College Board. The survey was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Educational Technology Used Frequently in Classrooms
The Primary Research Group recently published The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Educational Technology, which offers data on how higher education faculty in the U.S. and Canada view the usefulness of college library technology centers and other forms of educational technology, such as course management systems, clickers, document cameras, electronic and interactive whiteboards, in-class use of video and internet access, PowerPoint and other technologies.
The survey, which represents more than 550 higher education faculty, found that 26.5 percent of U.S. faculty and 14.2 percent of Canadian faculty use library computer labs frequently. More than a third of faculty said that in using their college’s course management system they were either “pretty much lost” or that they “know a little, a few basics.” Also, 34.8 percent of faculty have used electronic whiteboards, while 53.4 percent would like to teach a distance learning course if the pay were equivalent to that of a traditional class. So far about 40 percent of full-time U.S faculty in higher education have taught at least one distance learning course. More than 72 percent of faculty consider the use of PowerPoint in the classroom highly beneficial. In addition, a large number of computer science, math and engineering faculty support the use of document cameras in the classroom. ♦