Kevin R. McClure:
I’ll just note by the way that in, with my own students, most of whom are going into student affairs. I talk all the time about how understanding higher ed finance is a key competency, and it is going to be crucial in your career moving forward. It’s important from an advocacy perspective, it’s important in terms of the sustainability of the field. And you know, the reality is that financial knowledge is only gonna be to your benefit moving forward in your career.

Keith Edwards:
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs Now. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Today, we’re talking about the financing of higher education. We’ll cover some of the basics as well as take a look at some of the cutting edge issues for the future of higher education. We have three experts to help us really unpack all of this. And I can’t wait to explore this with each of you. Student Affairs Now is the premier podcast, an online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

Keith Edwards:
We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browe our archives at studentaffairsnow.com. Today’s episode is sponsored by EverFi, the trusted partner for 1,500 colleges and universities. EverFi the standard of care for student safety and wellbeing with the results to prove it. Today’s episode is also sponsored by Anthology. Learn more about their innovative data-driven platforms to build and foster your campus student engagement experience learn more by visiting anthology.com/engage. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he him, his. I’m a speaker consultant and coach and you can learn more about me at keithedwards.com. I’m broadcasting today from Minneapolis, Minnesota at the intersections of the ancestral homelands of the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to our conversation. Let’s meet each of you tell a little bit about you and your background, and then we’ll get into some of the basics and then some of the cutting edge issues. Nate, let’s begin with you.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
Thanks Keith. Nate Daun-Barnett. I’m an associate professor of higher education at the University of Buffalo I’m department chair for educational leadership and policy. My research focuses on college and access and student success and, and thinks about the role the finances play in that. I run a project locally called the facet completion project for the city of Buffalo. And I also note that my career started as a student affairs professional. In fact, it was my student affairs colleagues who pointed me in the right direction, got me on the path I’m on today. So I’m happy to be here.

Keith Edwards:
Wonderful. Glad to have you Amy, tell us a little bit about you.

Amy Li:
Hi and thanks for having me. My name is Amy Li. My pronouns are she hers. And I’m an assistant professor in higher education in the department of educational policy studies at Florida International University. I do research on higher education finance, and that includes studying free college programs, performance funding policies, student loan, debt and state funding for higher education. I spent a year working in private sector finance before I worked in student affairs. Primarily in study abroad, happy to be here.

Keith Edwards:
Well, we’re so glad to have you. Those are some topics that certainly are getting a lot of media attention. And speaking of getting a lot of media attention, Kevin, tell us a little bit about you and what you’re doing.

Kevin R. McClure:
Hey everybody. My name is Kevin R. McClure. I use he him his pronouns, and I’m an associate professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and director of communications for the Alliance for research on regional colleges. I study college management, leadership and finance with a focus on regional public universities. My co-edit edited book unlocking opportunity through broadly accessible institutions will be out at the end of the month. And I do a fair amount of public writing usually in the Chronicle of higher education or as part of a regular column at Eder. And like my colleagues started in student affairs. I was a residence hall director and then coordinated a living learning program for three years before switching over into academic affairs for a period of time prior to becoming a faculty member. So looking forward to the conversation.

Keith Edwards:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and thanks for some of that writing that you’ve been doing. It’s been mentioned on the podcast by others and floating around our social media and people are sharing and really appreciate the thinking you’re doing and the, the writing and sharing and giving voice to some things. Some people can’t really give voice to given their roles and, and things that are going on. Well, let’s focus on really broadly the finance of higher education, both how institutions operate, where funding comes from tuition, state, appropriations giving endowments but also how we operate. What are the revenues and expenses? How are things changing? I think many folks in student affairs have a, a understanding of their budget, but maybe not sort of the bigger picture and where they fit in with that. I think Amy’s gonna kick us off here with a little bit of finance of higher ed 101, some of the foundations and basics. Go ahead, Amy.

Amy Li:
For sure. So as Keith mentioned it’s important to know the key sources of where colleges are getting the, their money and how they choose to spend this money for public institutions. These revenue sources are primarily composed of tuition, state appropriations, and for community colleges. It also includes local appropriations. And then other sources of revenue include federally funded research and auxiliaries and auxiliaries are free for service type functions. These would include housing dining parking or conference services. And then once institutions have this funding, how are they spending their money? On the expenditure side, the areas that institutions typically allocate for are in instruction, which is, you know, the teaching mission of higher education, then there’s student support services. So some of the areas that us, we we’ve worked in including housing and study abroad and areas like support services, grants, and scholarships, and public service. So thinking about where institutions receive their funding and how they’re allocating this funding.

Keith Edwards:
Great. And I think Nate, you’re gonna talk us a little bit about public versus private and some cost drivers.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
Yeah, no, I appreciate that was a great setup for this. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve come at this from a couple of different vantage points most recently. Well, as a department chair thinking about enrollment, so we’re really focused on the tuition that students are paying today and, and how how, how great a proportion of the cost of college they’re paying today in comparison to prior years. But I also have seen it from the perspective of a board of trustee member at a local private college. And one of the things that I constantly try to remind students and families about is how complicated this investment is and, and how much more transparent we need to be in higher education about what college actually costs, you know, today at, at this college, we have a tuition bill of about $28,000 a year.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
And students look at sticker price and they think, wow, there’s no way I could possibly afford that. But we were discounting at about 62%. So on average, a student was paying just shy of $11,000 a year to attend the institution and very few students or families, particularly those who are first generation understand that or know about. And so there are, there are a couple of cost drivers, I think that are really important that we do pay attention to, we’ve talked a lot about the disinvestment of the public sector in higher education, you know, appropriation, not keeping pace with enrollments and things like that. But there are some other things as well. And, and I think that’s important and particularly in the more recent context with post great recession, but there are some other drivers as well. I think we make some decisions as institutions to invest in amenities that cost us more, you know, there, the quest for prestige is real on our campuses and us news and world report drives a lot of the decisions that we make. But the other thing that we don’t talk a lot about is that for decades, the cost of college was rising faster than inflation, but the key difference was that family incomes were rising as well. And that hasn’t been true for probably 20 years or so. And that’s put a great deal of pressure on students and families to think as consumers about the investment they’re going to make. And I think that’s something that we’re starting to see come out in the way people talk about education.

Keith Edwards:
And do you think that the, just the costs of doing this with more student needs more legislation, more federal requirement, just the operating cost has gone up as well?

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
Yes. I do. You know the cost of complexities is something that we might think about here. The financing has become so complicated. Policy makers are worried about the efficient use of taxpayer dollars. And so they create, for example, financial aid strategies that have lots of mechanisms in it to ensure that students don’t take too long to figure out what path they’re gonna be on, that they graduate in a timely fashion. And those policies have a disproportionate impact on low income first gen generation students of color. And that that’s a real concern, but as our work gets more complicated, we hire more administrators to compliment the work of faculty and that’s driving up our costs as well. So those are things that we have to think about as institutions.

Keith Edwards:
I love this idea of cost complexity, both financial aid and sticker price, but reality price and all the, a, and loans and grants and all of this kind of coming in. But then also just the greater expenses of, you know, Title IX is costing institutions a lot more money to prevent and respond and litigate mental health. All of these things COVID testing is just one example. What does that, you know where did that come from? And so all of these costs of requirements student needs, and I love this point too, about the more complicated it is, the harder it is to understand the harder it is for students and families first gen and, and BIPOC folks, but also others. It’s harder also for legislators to understand. , it’s harder for administrators to understand, and it’s harder for all of us to understand. I love that you’re pointing out the sticker price versus the reality price and the folks who are paying that full sticker price are helping ’em make possible for people who aren’t paying that sticker price. Right. And so there’s a real interesting dynamic here. Kevin, you asked to back clean up on this question. What would you clean up? What would you add? How can you take the foundation that Amy and Nate have offered us and make it a little bit more complicated? What, what more should we understand here?

Kevin R. McClure:
Well, I like, first of all, I like the idea of maybe building upon the very strong foundation that my, my esteemed colleagues have built rather than playing cleanup . What I might do is just zoom out a little bit and share a couple of just sweet broad principles for understanding high ed finance and I’ll just note by the way that in, with my own students, most of whom are going into student affairs. I talk all the time about how understanding higher ed finance is a key competency, and it is going to be crucial in your career moving forward. It’s important from an advocacy perspective, it’s important in terms of the sustainability of the field. And you know, the reality is that financial knowledge is only gonna be to your benefit moving forward in your career, but just a couple of things for, for the entire history of American higher education.

Kevin R. McClure:
It has been the case that it is more expensive to provide a high quality higher education than institutions have revenues to support. And so we have, always, always, always depended on subsidies of some in, in some way, shape or form, whether that’s from donors or philanthropists that are supporting institutions or in the form of state appropriations. And so when you hear folks making comparisons between higher education and business, believe me, I can certainly understand comparisons there, but one way in which there’s a clear difference is that we have never, ever provided a service that has generated enough revenue to cover all of our costs. And so what that means is that we’re dependent on other entities in order to pay our bills and at public institutions that has been the state in most cases and at private institutions that has come in the form of private gifts.

Kevin R. McClure:
And the big shakeup that we’ve seen really since 1980, is that at least in public higher education, the reliability of that public subsidy has decreased and we’ve become more reliant on other so of revenue to replace that. Not coincidentally, in my opinion, that’s precisely around the same time that we really started to see broadening access manifesting in higher education. And so precisely at the moment that higher education was becoming less of the domain exclusively of the white middle class and white upper class, we see this flip happening where states are not willing to invest in higher education in the same sort of way. So that’s one important principle. I think that’s worth keeping in mind is that, well.

Keith Edwards:
Let me just interject here. We just did an episode with the authors of Broke who talked about at the UC system. As soon as these institutions got more and more diverse, more black and brown folks going there, we started funding them less and less shifting the burden from our collective to then those folks, which leads to as they point out and illustrate the racial segregation. So such a great, great perspective. What else would you add here, Kevin?

Kevin R. McClure:
Yeah, well, I mean, and, and there are some that would say that this, the timing there just kind of happened to work out the way that it did. But I think an important, a second principle that I might offer is that in many ways we ought to consider the golden age of higher education finance to be the anomaly, as opposed to the norm. So there was a period postwar where we saw really generous support for higher education. It’s propelled this massive expansion of the system, increased accessibility and kind of unfortunately, you know, set, not, not, unfortunately I should say, but established an expectation around affordability that was not the norm prior to that period and has not been the norm moving forward. . And, you know, I think another important principle of our system is that it, it has always been set up in such a way that there is extreme competition between institutions, for resources that competition drives spending institutions are competing for students.

Kevin R. McClure:
They are competing for faculty, they are competing for scarce resources. And the reason why that matters in particular today is that I think a number of policy decisions have really dialed up that competition. Amy can really speak to this well when it comes to performance funding as just one example of that. But when we dial up that competition, the result of it is greater spending on the part of institutions that competition, unlike in other kind of economic areas has not led to a, a decrease in costs. And part of the reason that we see higher education struggle on the cost side to, to kind of I’m back around to something that Nate mentioned is we have not yet figured out a way to bring down costs that doesn’t simultaneously dilute the quality of the education that’s being provided.

Kevin R. McClure:
And so that’s, you know, if we can crack that nut, then we might be able to, as they say, bend the cost curve that makes it possible for us to deliver higher education, more cheaply. But as it stands now, many of those efforts to cut costs have come at the expense of the services and the education that are provided. And in higher education, of course so much from a competitive standpoint, depends on the extent to which we are providing a high quality service or education to students. So anyway, I wanted to zoom out a little bit. I have, I could respond to like a couple of FAQs that I get from folks all of the time very quickly that I’m sure some of my colleagues also here all the time. And then we can, we can move forward with it, but one is, you know, why, how is it possible that our institutions are financially struggling while endowments are growing? And another kind of way of thinking about this is why is the endowment a better instrument for helping institutions? And you know, it’s a great question.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
We’re gonna see a couple of examples of that, Keith, right? Yeah. What Ohio State’s done. I’ll talk a little bit later about Purdue.

Keith Edwards:
Well, and what I, one of the reasons why I wanted to do this episode is because I was seeing student affairs folks say, why is Michigan state asking for volunteers in the dining hall when they have this massive endowment? So yes, help clear that up for us, help clear

Kevin R. McClure:
That up for us. Yeah, well, and so the, where I kind of land on this is, you know, the endowment is designed to be the kind of financial bedrock of the institution in the perpetuity and forever, forever more. And so there are rules around spend down, meaning there are kind of restrictions in terms of how much an institution can spend down. Much of that money is restricted based on a contract between the donor and the institution around how the money gets used. And so what it means is that it’s just not a particularly flexible resource. It can’t move quickly in a time of crisis. That’s not to say that nothing can be done with the endowment to support the institution in times of need. And there are many people who argue if this is not a rainy day, what’s the purpose of a rainy day fund, right?

Kevin R. McClure:
. But the reality is, is that being able to use the endowment in that way requires in some cases making changes renegotiating contracts and it, and like I said, there are in some cases, laws that prevent spending down the endowment faster than what has been kind of determined to be you know, a responsible level for an Institute. And so you know, we all would like to, I think, see endowments be used differently and I’m, I am a proponent of that conversation, but in many instances they are not in a able to kind of rescue institutions in the way we might want them to. Right.

Keith Edwards:
Well, I hope this is a great start. Good, good start. I hope what we just did is clarify for so many folks who maybe have a basic understanding a little bit more of the bigger picture now that we’ve provided such clarity. Let’s make it messy again. Amy, what are some of the things that you’re seeing that complicate this, that you’re seeing as some of these cutting edge issues or on the near horizon?

Amy Li:
Yeah. So one of the topics that I think is a really important discussion that’s happening now is free college programs. And these are also called promise programs. And I think we’re in a really interesting time policy wise with the Biden administration, because there’s been buzz and interest around college affordability, although there’s been limited legislation at the national level, there’s been ongoing discussions about making the first two years of community college free for everyone, regardless of merit, you know, regardless of high school achievement, regardless of their financial need. And although they idea has faced hurdles at the federal level, you know, there’s other priorities that the administration is working on. Now, COVID being one of them, of course numerous states and localities and counties, or even just single institutions have started their own free college programs. And these programs aren’t necessarily free in that all costs are covered.

Amy Li:
They typically only cover tuition and sometimes mandatory fees but that’s still a, a quite large portion of the cost that students are gonna to pay. And what these programs do is that they incentivize students to enroll full-time directly after high school, because we know from the research that full-time enrollment helps with completing a credential in like a specific amount of time. And these programs will typically cover up to the completion of an associate’s degree. So the majority of these programs are at the two year college level, but one of the critiques is that these free college programs, even though they’re deemed as free, they don’t cover other costs such as housing and transportation and books. So that’s one of the critiques there however, on the positive side research that myself and others have conducted on these free college programs show that they do increase college entry.

Amy Li:
Programs seem to incentivize students who otherwise would not attend college. And it has actually increased, like, I wouldn’t necessarily call this access, but it, it does increase that initial enrollment in college because these programs are relatively new, there’s emerging research that’s being done on whether they improve retention and degree completion. And one of the areas that I’m looking at as a next step in my research is on whether specific student support programs, you know, such as mentorship, coaching, advising, first year experience programs, whether these actually help keep students there and help them graduate. So I would say, you know, free college programs is a hot time in higher education and a second topic, which I’ve done a lot of research on is on performance funding, which Kevin mentioned earlier. And these are policies that are at the state level, which allocate appropriations based on student outcomes.

Amy Li:
And these outcomes would be retention rates, degree completion, graduation rates, and retention and completion for underserved students. So students of color, however that’s defined typically black and Latin X and native American students, sometimes specific Islander students or students who are from lower income backgrounds or first generation students. And these policies have been in place for a number of years. But I think a topic right now of interest is the sustainability of these performance funding policies during the COVID pandemic, because we’ve experienced market declines in enrollments in higher education. And states are finding that this performance based funding or outcomes based funding, you know, looking at metrics such as degrees, it’s still very much enrollment driven and enrollment declines directly affect these commonly used performance metrics. So, you know, one of the questions is how are states adapting to these changing external environments, which are caused by the pandemic existing research that colleagues and myself have done find that performance funding does privilege better resource, more selective institutions, for example, flagships over lesser research institutions that enroll more underprivileged students because the policy sort of reward, you know, graduation and completion and the institutions that are enrolling students that are from more academically privileged backgrounds are, you know, seeing benefits from performance funding.

Amy Li:
So in some ways this policy does increase that stratification of higher education, where more resources just keep going towards the better resource schools, you know, the ones that are more selective, the ones that do have the ability to kind of chase rankings. So perhaps the pandemic has exasperated some of these existing inequities when it comes to finances and resources around, well.

Keith Edwards:
Reminds me what we’ve done with K12, right? We say the schools with the best performance indicator should get the funding in schools that don’t should will starve them until they get their act together when they’re enrolling the most needy students who have the greatest need rather. And, it just increases the stratification rather than fixing it, which was the stated intention. It increases that the, the haves and have nots, is that what we’re seeing

Amy Li:
Exactly. That’s exactly right. You know, it’s kind of a mirror of K12 where the the school, the universities that are serving the most needy students and ones that we really need to be paying, paying attention to are the ones getting penalized with these types of policies, although I will say, you know, to be fair I think performance funding does draw attention to student success, you know, and making sure that we not only get students in the door and, you know, focus on these enrollment numbers, but also that we’re doing a good service to these students that they are end up, they are ending up graduating with credentials that will ultimately help them in the labor market and moving forwards.

Keith Edwards:
Great. Nate, what’s what’s on the cutting edge for you.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
Yeah. So there are a couple things that I wanted to mention, but I wanna pick up on a couple of things that Amy said and kinda underscore them a little bit. I will tell you as a former policy analyst performance funding drove me nuts. So I was in Michigan and Michigan the universities are constitutionally autonomous, and so they are bickering over resources all the time. And, and we were registered lobbyists in the state on behalf of higher education. And the biggest challenge we ran into with performance funding measures was that they, they changed so frequently. I think, you know, in the, the span of the legislators we worked with, they had three different variations of those metrics and it made it difficult for institutions to try to plan and, and adapt. And so I think they’re, it’s an interesting policy area, complicated for the kinda work that we do on campuses on the, on the promise programs.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
You know, I, it’s one of the areas that I spent a lot of time in as well. And when I was in Michigan Kalamazoo had announced its tuition guarantee and it became a model for the state. And one of the really important lessons that we learned there was it’s one thing to do this with private dollars and in Kalamazoo it was private anonymous dollars. It’s another thing to try to legislate that and turn it into a state investment in communities. And we had the opportunity to consult with the governor, governor’s advisors on education to create the promise zones. And there are 10 or 15 of those now. And one of the real drawbacks to that was they set up a funding mechanism that was tied to increased tax pro tax dollars coming into the state aid fund. And if you increased your property values, basically you were as a community going to be able to capture some of that pour into your scholarship program.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
And basically what we were doing with state dollars was incentive, advising some communities over others. And so for every community that needed it like Lansing or Detroit, there was a Flint or you know, somewhere in Grand Rapids that wasn’t covered. Right. And so it becomes really it’s one thing to do it with, with the private support. It’s another thing to try to figure out how to do this with public dollars. But the two strategies that I wanted to talk about that are, have been on my radar in terms of helping families, finance education, one is maybe not new, but it’s new in terms of scale. And that’s what Ohio State has recently announced in terms of eliminating debt from students, financial aid package. There’s lots of institutions have done this, but none at the scale and size of, of an institution like Ohio State.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
And one, a couple of things that I find useful and important about their strategy is one. They are thinking about endowment, going back to what key to talk about, but that’s not the only piece they’re talking about work. So having students work sort of an institutional work study approach combined with some financial literacy, as financial aid becomes increasingly complicated students and families need to understand the investment that they’re making. They have to understand the implications and the choices they make while they’re in school to take advantage of that financial aid and it’s. And I think the combination of those features makes what Ohio State is doing different from some of its predecessors, Michigan. I was at the University of Michigan. They had announced something like this 15 years ago, but having an income ceiling prevented them from really doing it for every student.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
The second one that I’m I’m interested in, and again goes back to the, the endowment pieces is what Purdue chose to do a while back with the income share agreements. The idea this is really comes from conservative policy makers. The idea that we would invest in human capital contracts, and that would be a private market, but this is an institution saying we’re going to commit endowment dollars to basically cover the cost of students in our institution. And in exchange, they will pay back some portion of that or some portion of their income for a certain period of time up to, and including some amount of money . And what that does is it fundamentally shifts the risk of that investment from the student and the family, to the institution where we typically would shift more of it to the state. And, and I think there’s some promise for institutions that have the resource to do that. I think it’s a great strategy. Then we have to think differently about the institutions that don’t. So those are the two that I’m really watching.

Keith Edwards:
Great. Thank you, Kevin. What’s on the cutting edge for you

Kevin R. McClure:
Too many things, probably trying to pay attention to too many things, although I will say that, that the things that both Nate and Amy mentioned are things that I’m paying us attention to. So we’ve got a good, good complimentary panel here. you know, one of the things that really bothers me is, is just the absolutely disgusting inequality within American higher education. You know, the richer getting richer and that’s bad for a number of reasons including the fact that it’s not ensuring that we are resourcing institutions that are serving students that are coming with the greatest need. In many instances, we’ve of course got all sorts of attainment goals that have been put out there. And if we’re gonna move the dial on those attainment goals, we need to be putting more resources into our broad access institutions.

Kevin R. McClure:
And instead, unfortunately, you know, the gaps and resources are just widening. And many of the policy solutions that that are being talked about are not doing anything about that. You know, a lot of the big storylines in higher ed finance recently have been, you know, huge one time donations from incredibly wealthy people, not helping a whole lot from a, a systemic perspective. There is looking to be a fairly historic investment from the Biden administration into American higher ed, including some great investments in minority serving institutions. Again, these are probably not going to be sufficient to really address longstanding discriminatory, racist you know, funding policies that have created a very, very unequal system. So that’s one of the things that, that I’m paying attention to is.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
Hey, Kevin, I have a question for you while you’re talking about that. In tying it back to endowments, what are your thoughts about us investing more or in enhancing endowments of historically black colleges and universities and other minor serving institutions as a way to, to help bolster their financial viability moving forward?

Kevin R. McClure:
I think it could certainly help particularly at the institution, you know, the reality when we’re talking about endowments is that the vast majority of institutions in American higher education have very small endowments. We sometimes are led to believe based on the numbers that we see at large institutions, that all of these universities have billion dollar, and it’s just not true. So, you know, there are institutions that are struggling financially or, or are making it by financially, but they don’t have any kind of a strong enough safety net in the event of, of crisis. And I think bolstering endowments can help with that. Similarly, it can help when it comes to offsetting costs for students attracting and retaining faculty you know, in ways that other sources of funding may not be able to do. So yeah, so that’s a big one.

Kevin R. McClure:
Is, is this idea of widening resource inequality and the fact that I don’t think that we’re doing enough to address that. A second big thing that I pay attention to is one that honestly, and I, this is not gonna make me popular, but I think student affairs is very involved in which is privatization. You know, student affairs has always had an interesting relationship to revenue generation. It is obviously often it’s the case organizationally that there are units within student affairs that are expected to generate their own revenue in order to say operational. But there’s been some more.

Keith Edwards:
Fund the general fund.

Kevin R. McClure:
Or fund the general fund. Right. And so that’s one of the shifts that we’ve seen recently is that we’ve seen student affairs kind of co-opted in, into a revenue general strategy in ways that I think are inappropriate and many folks in student affairs don’t love probably, but is, has become part of their responsibility.

Kevin R. McClure:
But yeah, we’re seeing the expansion of kind of outsourcing using third party vendors public private partnerships. I’m not saying these things are like the source of all evil in higher. I understand where they’re coming from and why we are pursuing them. But the reality is that it can, in some cases create kind of an uneasy relationship when it comes to the mission of our institutions. What are we, what are we really about? And to what extent are we just attempting to extract every possible dollar that we can from students in an effort to stay afloat, many of the solutions that I come up with tend to be more at the structural level for that. So I’m not necessarily suggesting that our listeners you know, themselves go out and, and fix this. I think a lot of it kind of comes back around to escalating costs and decreasing subsidies, but nevertheless, it’s gotta be a conversation and it’s gotta be a conversation within student affairs.

Keith Edwards:
But I see one of the things I see Kevin, I’m wondering, you’re seeing as well is institutions who can afford to build their own residence halls, build their own dining hall, do it institutions who can’t then engage in a, in a public private partnership, which then is not really what they would prefer to do, but it’s the only way we can add a building. It’s the only way we can do that. Is that what you see too?

Kevin R. McClure:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think it’s more of the have

Keith Edwards:
Haves get more and the nots get less

Kevin R. McClure:
Precisely and this idea yeah. Kind of feeling boxed in, in terms of choices. But you know, I will be honest and say that I think that there are some decisions that get made that aren’t nearly as forced. And you know, student affairs can be just as guilty as other units of, of wanting to chase something that’s new and flashy. And sometimes it’s with the best of intentions, right? We want to serve students well, we want to engage them. We want them to stay. These are all wonderful things. But it doesn’t change the fact that you know, it, that has to get paid for. And in many instances we know who’s paying for it. And that’s not ideal. Not, not all students have the ability to pay for the party as it were. And so that’s, that’s something that I keep a close eye on from just a pure or institutional management perspective, because I have seen ways in which some of those relationships with partners have gone south. I’ve seen ways in which it creates real access and success issues for students. And it makes me uneasy sometimes the ways in which some of our, our colleagues kind of turn a blind eye in terms of really thinking are like, who’s paying for some of these things. Right. and so those are, those are a couple of items that I think, unfortunately in the near term, I don’t see getting better. I see kind of intensifying and accelerating.

Keith Edwards:
Let me see if I can real quick throw two brand new grenades that will open up a whole can worms and see if you very smart experts can clean ’em up succinctly so we can move to I closing thoughts. So the first one is well, I’ll give ’em both to you. And then you can decide who wants to be this I’m, as I’m listening to this, I’m thinking about the enrollment decline coming, which is gonna lower revenues at the same time we have I would think we’re seeing real reductions on auxiliary. I, people just can’t live on campus in some cases because of COVID people can’t eat in the dining hall because of spacing, that would seem to have a real impact. So I, I wonder if you’re seeing long term trends that are gonna make the competition of the haves and have nots expand, then the other one, which you can pick up as well is what about massive expenditures and revenue generators? I’m thinking big time, college athletics with 10 million a year coaches, which costs a lot of money, but also brings in a lot of money. I’m also thinking about medical centers which are really expensive to run and operate, but also bring in, can bring in a consistent source of revenue. And maybe there’s other things that I’m thinking about. Would any of you like to concisely explain some of these things to our audience and then we’ll move on?

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
Yeah. Well, let me, I’ll pick up on the enrollment piece and I’ll I’ll, to me, this is really fascinating, important. What we’re gonna see is a real shift. There, there are gonna be two things. One, there’s gonna be a real impetus for us to start looking at non-traditional students again and reengage with them. And I watched this as a community college level for a long time. Community colleges have been responding in the opposite direction because they’ve been criticized for failing to be successful in graduating students and moving them into the labor market. And so they, instead of trying to better educate the students, they have, they try to attract more of the students that they don’t, which are the traditional high school graduates who can transfer on to four years. And that, that is I think we’re gonna see a shift back towards non-traditional students because they’re struggling right now.

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
There just aren’t enough of those students to fill the needs in both the four year and the two year sector. But I think one of the things that really needs, we need to think about from a student affairs perspective is we need to focus our energy and attention on what institutions talk about as retention. I think a lot about student success , but we have to be the arbiter of retention initiatives on campuses. if, if we aren’t then we, we run the risk of potentially becoming irrelevant because the institution will address it in other ways and maybe in repurposing or rethinking the roles that some of our professionals play. And reenvisioning how we go about the work that we do. And I think we’re gonna have to do more of that in the coming years.

Amy Li:
Yeah. So I wanted to mention something, which is that when we think of higher education, we think of these big time athletic schools, we think of these well known universities that do have these hospital systems, but the vast majority of students are attending, you know, open access non-selective regional masters, comprehensive colleges, you know, the community.

Keith Edwards:
They don’t even have a football team.

Amy Li:
Yeah, they don’t even have housing. They may not even have athletics. So I think it’s sort of a that like, just we, as a field need to consider is that the students that you know, are covered and the institutions that are covered in the news, you know, that are in the headlines, like these are often not representative of the typical university or the typical student. And like Nate mentioned, you know, we think about non-traditional students, even our terminology around that with framing traditional versus non-traditional, you know, the majority of students are technically non-traditional, they’re returning students, they’re adult students, you know, they’re, they’re at a college to earn a certificate or for continuing education.

Amy Li:
They’re not the students who are going full time at a four year institution, you know, going to football games and living on campus. And so broadening sort of the conversation around, you know, the sort of haves and have nots, like what kind of student demographics and populations are we paying attention to? And, you know, thinking about this sort of more equitable resource allocation, you know, it doesn’t help society as a whole, if just these rich universities are getting richer and we are, you know, diverting resources away from the colleges that really need it and the students that really need it.

Kevin R. McClure:
Yeah. I mean, I agree 100% with what’s already been said, what I would add to this is I think the whole demographic cliff conversation gets framed in ways that are not particularly helpful for really understanding the issue. It has a tendency to place on a lot of blame on institutions for not sufficiently attracting or not being competitive enough. And doesn’t attend nearly enough to the fact that as a country we have in multiple different ways eroded the fabric of society and made it such that it’s incredibly difficult to make a living in certain places of the country and to be on strong enough footing to pursue higher education. You know, there is no coincidence that some of our institutions that are struggling most on the enrollment front are precisely in the places that have been hardest hit by policies that have neglected large swaths of America.

Kevin R. McClure:
And as Nate mentioned, you know, there’s the idea you have demographic cliff doesn’t nearly D doesn’t do a good enough job of recognizing that there are still a significant number of people that have not had the benefit of attending college. And we should be really working to try to figure out how to better serve that population. So I tend to take that idea of like the demographic decline as a grenade and throw it out the window because I just think it doesn’t quite capture what’s really going on. And yeah. And Amy is 100%, right? I mean, from a finance perspective, there’s no, there’s not really such a thing as athletics supporting a college. It just doesn’t work that way. There’s and if I were to put that on Twitter right now, there’d be a thousand football fans that are like, no, no, no.

Kevin R. McClure:
Look at the ways in which this program does X, Y, Z, listen, it’s just not there. From a finance perspective, it’s easier to think of athletics and medical centers as being legally and financial distinct entities that in some cases create more liability and expenses for institutions than they provide in financial benefits. Those big, big, you know, donations coming in by virtue of athletics, it stays in athletics. It’s not like that money’s drifted over and helping institutions pay the bills. It just doesn’t work that way. So anyway, I, you know, tend to be fairly opinionated about this. I think big time college sports are just stupid. and don’t, they don’t, I mean, you can enjoy the sport. That’s wonderful. Go for it. But like, I don’t particularly entertain the idea that they, these are good for colleges as institutions, as educational institutions.

Keith Edwards:
Great. Great. Well, thank you for the we just got a couple of minutes left. So we’re running out of time. We always end on this Student Affairs Now podcast with, what are you thinking about right now? So, and, and where can we connect with you, Kevin, let’s start with you. Where can we connect with you and what’s on your mind right now?

Kevin R. McClure:
Tweeting all the time, spending way too much time on Twitter. And I dabble a bit on LinkedIn. Recently the big thing I’m thinking about right now is, is staffing issues at colleges and universities and improving the academic workplace. And so these have big financial implications, you know, in terms of meeting our goals as institutions and you know, the ability for in higher education to deliver on the promise and big, big, a big conversation in student affairs right now, we’re losing people, we’re losing talent and we’re not acting fast enough to figure out solutions to that.

Keith Edwards:
Great. Yeah, we need to be much more innovative and creative about addressing this Nate what’s where can we connect with you and what’s what’s with you now?

Nathan Daun-Barnett:
Sure. So I am actually not on Twitter and I do avoid it. Although my daughter might say, I should probably get with that. Linkedin and, and email are great in terms of what I’m following now, it really is about financial literacy for a long time. And I continue to do work in school is to help simplify the financial aid application process, but increasingly we’re finding that that’s just not enough that this is an investment that students and families make once in their, or maybe a couple of times in their lives, and they need more guidance and education about how to navigate that throughout, not just at the beginning and not just at the end, which is typically what we do now. We’re starting a financial literacy program here in part in response to students who are leaving the institution because they can’t afford it in part, in response to the food insecurity issues and the recognition that so many of our students don’t really have what they need. And in part, the growing complexity of the financial aid system that is intolerant of students taking additional time to figure out their path. We still have two thirds of our students who will come in and change their majors before they before they finish, that’s gonna extend their time to degree. If we don’t do a better job, helping them understand what that path is gonna look like.

Keith Edwards:
Great, Amy what’s with you. Now,

Amy Li:
I’ve been thinking a lot about student loan repayment. So right now, and just during the pandemic the students who do have federal loans, they not, they haven’t been required to pay, you know, make new payments on them, but that ends this COVID 19 emergency relief for federal student loans ends on January 31st, 2022. And so borrowers will have to restart their loan payments. And we know that the pandemic has had wider negative consequences for employees and lower paid jobs, you know, such as the service industry. So I’m, I’m really curious how the restarting of loan repayments might widen existing income disparities and from a kind of broader policy space perspective. You know, there’s been ideas done around about forgiving $10,000 of student loan debt, or even up to $50,000 of loans from the very liberal side of you know, Congress, but something like that, getting passed is gonna be really slim, I would say. So it it’ll be interesting to see, you know, how, how loan repayments once start, start up again, you know, who is differencially affected by that and how that might, you know, again, widen, widen existing gaps that we have. Yeah. Oh, and I will say, yeah, you can contact me on email or I am on Twitter.

Keith Edwards:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks so much to each of you for your insights and your expertise and for taking the time to join us today on student affairs. Now, I also wanna thank our sponsors today, EverFi and Anthology. Anthology. Transform your student experience and advanced co-curricular learning with Anthology Engage. With this technology platform. You’re able to easily manage student organizations, efficiently plan events, and truly understand student involvement and continuously improve your engagement efforts at your institution. Learn more at anthology.com/engage and EverFi. For over 20 years EverFi has been the trusted partner for 1500 colleges and universities with nine efficacy studies behind their courses. You will have confidence that you’re using the standard of care for student safety and wellbeing, with the results to prove it transform the future of your institutions and the community serve. Learn more at everfi.com/studentaffairsnow. Huge shout out to Nat Ambrosey who makes us all look and sound good. And if you’re listening today and not receiving our weekly newsletter, please visit our website and join there. You can get the newest and latest episode in your inbox each Wednesday morning. Thanks to our guests. I’m your host, Keith Edwards thanks to everyone who’s watching and listening, make it a great week. All.

St. John, E.P., Daun-Barnett, N., & Moronski-Chapman (2018).  Public Policy in Higher Education, 2^nd Ed. (pp. xxii, 475).  New York: Routledge.