The Impact of Coronavirus on Higher Ed Enrollment

When Clinton College announced over the summer that it would slash tuition by 50%, the small historically Black institution made headlines in its home state of South Carolina and throughout the nation.

At the time, the deal seemed hard to top. 

Yet the HBCU outdid itself just two months later, when Clinton President Lester McCorn streamed a live online announcement that the school would waive tuition altogether for incoming and returning students during the 2021-22 academic year. 

"Did you hear me?" McCorn asked in the video. "Free tuition. That's a 100% discount." 

Moreover, the school is giving every full-time student a free Microsoft Surface laptop so they can attend online classes even if they don't have a computer. 

McCorn and other Clinton administrators cast the moves as a way to help students afford college during the health crisis, especially if their families are experiencing economic turmoil. 

"We do understand at this time during the pandemic that some families are suffering financially," said Jocelyn Biggs, Clinton's associate vice president of enrollment management. "This is our way of saying that we're here to support and not be a burden on anyone." 

The school is paying for the one-time initiative with help from the American Rescue Plan, the third major federal coronavirus relief package that gave colleges about $40 billion to defray pandemic-related expenses and provide emergency grants to students. 

Clinton received $1.2 million in funding from the legislation, half of which it must use on student grants. That amount is similar to how much the college brings in from tuition and fees each year, according to tax documents. 

In the 2020 fiscal year, the school brought in $1.4 million in tuition and fees. That figure was down from the year prior, when it received nearly $1.9 million in tuition and fees. 

Students won't have to pay the nearly $10,000 annual tuition rate this year at Clinton, though the majority of them already historically received institutional grants or scholarships, according to federal data. More than three-fourths of first-time undergraduates starting at Clinton received institutional grants in the 2019-20 academic year, with the average aid package being almost $3,700. 

Nearly all undergraduates also received Pell Grants that year, with the average award totaling around $4,600. Clinton enrolled 190 students in the 2019-20 academic year, federal data shows.

Students will still be on the hook for room and board costs if they live on campus, however. Room and board totals around $10,000 a year for students, according to Clinton's website. The school brought in almost $600,000 in revenue from this source in fiscal 2020, down from about $900,000 in fiscal 2019. 

Students may be able to use federal financial aid, such as Pell Grants, to cover part of those costs. 

So far, the deal has been an enrollment boon for the college. Biggs said student interest in the offer was so high after the announcement that the college extended its registration deadline by about a week. This fall, a total of 155 students enrolled, a college spokesperson said. That's up from 119 students in the fall of 2020, according to federal data. 

Biggs' email was "going crazy" after the announcement, she said. "Everybody just wanted to know more."

Two public institutions in the state are taking similar steps. Spartanburg Community College is offering tuition-free scholarships to students for the 2021-22 academic year as a "gift to the community" during the pandemic. However, unlike at Clinton, students must exhaust all other grants before the school will cover the remaining tuition. Such setups, called last-dollar programs, make it less likely that students will have leftover funds from their Pell Grants to use on nontuition expenses.

And Denmark Technical College, another historically Black institution, said it would offer free tuition to the first 500 students who enroll for the fall term. It's paying for the program with a mix of donations and money from the state lottery, The Associated Press reported. 

Clinton's program is "unusually generous" and will likely free up some students to apply their financial aid to nontuition costs, Alex Bloom, director of the research division at EAB, a consultancy, said in an email. That "could be the difference for many of their students between being able to afford going to college and not," he said. 

However, Bloom voiced concerns about the school's ability to keep students enrolled who could only afford to attend Clinton because of the free tuition offer. 

"Making one year free will help a lot of students," he said. "But if those students can't pay for next year, there's still a major challenge."

But college officials aren't as worried about that outcome. The free tuition offer will give families time to save up for the next academic year, Biggs said. Financial aid will still be available for students in the future, she added. 

"I don't see that impacting us," Biggs said.

Alexander Conyers became acting president at South Carolina State University on July 13. Two days later, the public historically Black university announced it would use federal relief funding to clear $9.8 million in debt that around 2,500 students owed to the university.

Most of the students enrolled at South Carolina State are financially vulnerable and might not be able to continue attending college if they can't pay money they owe, Conyers said. More than 80% of first-time, full-time undergraduates at the university receive federal Pell grants, according to federal data. Pell eligibility is widely considered a proxy for low-income status. 

"Every day that we waited, we lost chances of getting students back, at least for the fall," Conyers said. "Every day that we waited was another student, another family wondering, 'How are we going to get out from under this debt?'" 

South Carolina State is far from the only college to announce debt forgiveness efforts in recent months. A steady stream of announcements this spring grew into a deluge by the end of July.

Early on, many of those making announcements were historically Black colleges. That includes Delaware State University, which announced in May that it would cancel as much as $731,000 in student debt for recent graduates.

But other institutions — often regional public universities and community colleges that enroll significant numbers of low-income students — have jumped in with their own debt jubilees. Higher education systems recently forgave enormous sums: $17 million for more than 18,000 current and former students of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system and as much as $125 million for 50,000-plus City University of New York students.

The details of each institution's forgiveness programs vary. But the institutions announcing forgiveness generally aren't wealthy, and neither are most of their students. They primarily serve low-income students and those underrepresented in higher education.

Usually, colleges are funding their debt forgiveness with federal dollars targeted at students who suffered financial hardships because of the pandemic. They wipe away balances students owed to their colleges, but they do not clear money owed on private or federal loans.

Though forgiveness programs have been presented as relief for students, they benefit colleges, too. Students have a better chance of staying enrolled, which can improve key institutional metrics like graduation rates and tuition revenue. And although it might seem paradoxical, forgiving debt in a certain way at this moment in time means colleges get paid money owed to them that they might otherwise never see.

That's because colleges rarely end up collecting the full amount owed on the types of balances being forgiven. By dedicating available federal money toward forgiving — and repaying — these balances now, colleges get an immediate cash infusion and clear bad debt off their books.

"To eliminate the accounts receivable on some of this is huge for anyone, but certainly for smaller, highly tuition-dependent institutions," said Jim Hundrieser, vice president for consulting and business development at the National Association of College and University Business Officers. "Even carrying $1 million or $2 million annually of outstanding debt is huge for them."

Urged on by federal guidance

Federal legislation passed in March, the American Rescue Plan, paved the way for colleges to use federal relief money to pay for debt forgiveness. Before the American Rescue Plan and guidance documents that followed it, colleges couldn't use HEERF money to write off balances, according to Sue Menditto, senior director of accounting policy at NACUBO.

For colleges, the legislation set up a third round of coronavirus relief money known as the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, or HEERF III. Like two rounds of funding before it, HEERF III uses a formula to allocate money to the country's colleges and universities. It breaks those allocations into a student aid portion and an institutional portion. Colleges have discretion over how they spend each pot of money, within certain limits.

After lawmakers passed the legislation, the U.S. Department of Education issued new details about how institutions can spend HEERF money. Then the agency in May explicitly urged colleges to discharge student debt and unpaid balances — and use HEERF institutional funding to reimburse themselves.

In the guidance, the department gave examples of who this could help: a student who had completed a degree but couldn't obtain an official transcript until paying off debt, a student who couldn't enroll next term because of an unpaid balance, and a student who couldn't get a transcript to transfer to another institution until squaring up on unpaid balances.

Institutions aren't allowed to use the federal relief funds for marketing and recruitment efforts, like commercial advertising or recruitment services. But federal guidance says that "efforts to engage or reengage students who would otherwise be at risk of not completing their college degrees as a result of coronavirus" are allowed. It specifically points to paying off debt students owe to colleges.

Colleges have two options for structuring forgiveness programs, according to Education Department documents: They can provide emergency financial grants to student accounts if a student gives written consent. Or they can discharge the student's balance and count it as lost revenue — then reimburse themselves through the federal grants.

Many colleges are finding the second option is a relatively easy way to wipe away student balances in large numbers. Instead of tracking down students to ask for permission, institutions can run batches through a computer system and zero them out.

Support from the business office

It's a form of debt forgiveness that chief financial officers can get behind. 

Ben Barnes is the CFO of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, which spans four state universities, 12 community colleges and an online college geared toward degree completion. Before the pandemic, the system started work on a controversial merger plan to address financial pressures. Then enrollment plunged amid the health crisis, with the system's community colleges hit particularly hard.

Falling enrollment translates into lost revenue as tuition and federal financial aid dollars follow students. And the students who are enrolled can struggle to pay balances amid economic downturns.

At the end of each fiscal year, the system essentially writes down unpaid student debt that's more than a year old, Barnes said. That's because such debt is historically paid off at very low rates.

Normally, the system writes off about $2 million each year. When the college's fiscal year was ending this June, officials were going to have to triple that write-down to $6 million. They estimated write-downs totaling $10 million next summer.

Forgiving student debt and repaying the sums lost with federal money provides a financial bridge of sorts. It's an infusion helping the system's cash flow even as it can encourage more students to stay enrolled.

In other words, the financial incentives were aligned with the system's mission of educating students, Barnes said.

"We're trying to shore up our finances in the short run while also doing everything we can to shore up our enrollment," Barnes said. "We see this as very positive to students."

'Our business is about helping students'

Colleges sometimes targeted their debt forgiveness efforts to specific student groups. Shaw University, a private HBCU in North Carolina, experienced a high demand for summer classes this year. It forgave $1.2 million in summer class balances for more than 230 students, according to its CFO, David Byrd.

Students sometimes struggled in classes last year because of the pandemic, Byrd said. That was especially true for first-year students, who unexpectedly finished their high school careers studying at home only to enroll in college and again face classes on a screen.

Helping students in summer classes was a way to keep those first-year students from falling behind in their studies, Byrd said. Shaw also used federal money to cancel balances for seniors who were graduating, he said.

"For us it was, 'Get students graduated, out the door and in their careers, and help our students keep on track,'" he said.

Northern Kentucky University in July announced it was eliminating $600,000 in student debt, zeroing out balances for degree-seeking students from the spring 2020 through spring 2021 terms. About eight in 10 students affected are undergraduates, more than half are Pell eligible and almost two-thirds come from within Kentucky, said the university's president, Ashish Vaidya.

The move aligns with the four-year university's focus on benefitting its home region. Students who graduate from Northern Kentucky go back to work in the area, Vaidya said. University leaders wanted students to notice the forgiveness program as soon as possible to keep that pipeline moving. They worried students were not enrolling in the fall — that they were standing on the sidelines — because of unpaid balances.

"Let's get them off the sidelines, and then we can talk about other kinds of student support services," Vaidya said.

With so many colleges issuing balance discharges, it's worth asking whether leaders felt they had to announce forgiveness for their own students for fear of losing enrollment to competitors. But that's often not the case.

Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, worries that students would drop out of higher education entirely without forgiveness. Trinity Washington, a Roman Catholic institution in the nation's capital, primarily serves low-income women of color from the area, McGuire said. They're underserved by higher education. If unpaid balances push them out of Trinity, they might turn to low-wage jobs and miss the opportunity to earn credentials that can boost their career trajectories.

"If it gets too hard, they are just going to go back to work and forget about college," McGuire said. "We are competing with the students' urge to stop out of college entirely and keep working."

Trinity Washington used American Rescue Plan funding to pay off $2.3 million worth of balances for 535 undergraduates. Doing so would have been a financial hurdle without the federal money, McGuire said.

When deciding how to spend the federal dollars, university leaders faced competing needs. They used some funding from the first round of federal relief to upgrade servers for online education and to purchase laptops for students. They paid faculty members to learn about teaching online. 

The institution could have continued spending on technology or other priorities, McGuire said. It opted not to do that.

"Our business is about helping students," McGuire said. "We can still figure out how to buy other stuff."

Only about two-fifths of students who applied to college during the 2020-21 school year using the Common Application included their SAT or ACT scores, a sharp decline from the prior year, when more than three-fourths of college prospects did so. 

That's according to research conducted by the Common App, the online portal enabling students to apply to 900 or so member colleges. Common App recorded a sharp drop in the number of its member institutions requiring test scores.

Common App found that first-generation and underrepresented minority students were also less likely to provide admissions exam scores than other applicants, lending credence to the argument that test-optional policies can help colleges draw more applications from these groups.

The pandemic upended a convention of college admissions when it forced K-12 schools and other common testing sites to close last year, limiting students' ability to sit for entrance exams.

In response, colleges adopted temporary test-optional admissions rules en masse, though policy experts predict these will stick after the health crisis. More than two-thirds of bachelor's-granting institutions aren't requiring SAT and ACT scores for fall 2022, according to data from FairTest, an organization advocating for more equitable uses of standardized assessments. The group's count includes colleges that were test-optional before the pandemic and those that have historically never asked for scores.

Testing providers say exams give underrepresented students a way to stand out in the college admissions process. But advocates for test-optional admissions say removing test scores from application requirements can eliminate roadblocks for disadvantaged students seeking to attend college. Several studies found test-optional policies modestly boost campus diversity.

The new research from Common App also seems to support the idea. Rates of students reporting test scores fell for both first-generation students and their peers for 2020-21. Only 30% of first-generation students provided test scores versus 48% of non-first-generation applicants. This is a wider gap than a 9 percentage-point divide from the prior year, when 69% of first-generation students submitted scores compared to 78% of their counterparts.

Similar trends played out for underrepresented minority applicants, which the Common App defined as Native American, Black, Latinx and Pacific Islander applicants — 31% of these students included their scores, while 47% of other groups did.

Nearly 90% of the Common App member institutions did not mandate the scores. The organization noted that while colleges' admissions policies likely influenced students' decisions to report their results, its data suggests that so too did testing sites shuttering in the spring and summer.

Common App also found the rates of students reporting scores were highest in some Southern and Midwestern states. Several Southern states are well-known for embracing assessments, including Florida and Georgia. Florida's public colleges were a prominent holdout in maintaining their entrance exam requirements during the pandemic, and Georgia only allowed students to withhold their scores for one admissions season.

The report urges colleges to contemplate whether the SAT and ACT impose barriers for low-income and minority students. And it asks them to consider whether the information they glean from the tests is valuable enough to justify these potential roadblocks.

"Finally, institutions should continually monitor their admissions processes to determine whether components aside from standardized testing requirements may be undermining their stated aims to expand access and opportunity to a more diverse cohort of students," the report states.

It's a day many college enrollment managers love to hate: The annual publication of U.S. News and World Report's Best Colleges rankings. The hierarchy seldom shifts significantly, and its flaws are well-documented. But the rankings are still influential in students' search processes and institutions' strategic plans.

This year, higher education groups, including the National Association for College Admission Counseling, had hoped U.S. News would make one change, though — ridding the SAT and ACT from its methodology. 

It did not. Standardized test scores remain 5% of the rankings formula. This percentage has declined over time.

But next year's rankings may be different. This year's release still reflects a test-taking period that occurred largely before the dawn of the health crisis, from 2019 to early 2020. The pandemic forced testing sites to close and meant many students couldn't sit for the exams. Only 1.5 million students in the high school class of 2021 took the SAT at least once, a major drop from the 2.2 million who took it in the 2020 class, according to the College Board, which runs the test.

Many colleges responded by no longer requiring admissions tests, either permanently or temporarily. Nearly three-quarters of bachelor's degree-granting institutions are test-optional for fall 2022, including those that didn't require tests pre-pandemic, according to FairTest, an organization advocating for more equitable applications of assessments. 

An even more surprising trend on the admissions landscape was the number of schools that are newly declining even to review scores, an approach known as test-blind or test-free. Big names like the California Institute of Technology and the University of California System adopted these policies during the pandemic. More than 80 institutions are test-blind now, albeit some provisionally, like CalTech, when a few years ago there was only a couple.

Some higher ed leaders and pundits believe this combination of the assessments' weakened role in admissions, and public pressure, will force the publication to nix the scores.

"It's a stubborn adherence to a flawed measure," said Bob Schaeffer, FairTest's executive director. 

Campaigns ramping up

It's first notable that the movement calling for the magazine to remove test scores is so visible. NACAC, the top admissions trade group, signed on to it. Although the organization has made this request three times before, it had not done so during a period when so many institutions were adopting test-optional and test-blind rules — and when criticism of the SAT and ACT has reached new levels. 

Opponents of the tests argue they favor White, affluent students and that extracting them from admissions would bolster the diversity of campus bodies. This critique gained new relevance amid a racial reckoning in the country last year that accentuated such inequities.

The College Board did not respond to a request for comment. It previously told Higher Ed Dive that although "real inequities" exist in American education, the "SAT itself is not a racist instrument."  

Colleges have historically relied on test scores because they distill a complex concept, academic prowess, into a metric that is easily explained and marketable to students and families, said Jay Rosner, executive director of the Princeton Review Foundation, which helps underrepresented students prepare for standardized exams. 

"We can see which number is better, and it enables colleges to say: 'I have a better average incoming freshman test score than you, my university is better than yours,'" Rosner said. "Which is absurd."

U.S. News preserved the scores in the methodology but said it made tweaks to acknowledge the growth in test-optional policies. Typically, if three-fourths of a new class does not submit scores to a college, the publication will scale back the weight SAT and ACT in its placement by 15%. This year, it lowered that threshold, to half of students. 

This adjustment did little to assuage critics, who said it didn't solve the fundamental problems of the test scores' inclusion. And some were riled because the magazine continues to assign test-blind schools a "value equal to the lowest test score" in their respective categories. U.S. News didn't rank test-blind schools at all before last year. 

Colleges could be dissuaded from piloting test-blind policies if they know they effectively will be punished, said Stephen Burd, a senior writer and editor at New America. The left-aligned think tank is one of the organizations pressing the magazine to no longer incorporate the scores.

Assigning test-blind institutions the lowest score was "done out of fairness," Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News, said in an email. It prevents these schools from scoring higher than ones using the SAT and ACT.

It's not clear how much consideration U.S. News has given to the idea of eliminating test scores. Morse, asked whether scores will persist in the methodology, said U.S. News doesn't announce upcoming changes to its formula this early.

But Rosner said he doesn't believe the momentum of schools moving to test-optional policies — and more importantly, those going test-blind — will be curtailed after the pandemic. 

"I cannot see U.S. News being able to include a test score component and give it any substantial weight," he said.  

A needed sea change

NACAC's chief executive, Angel Pérez, also doesn't think colleges should be rated based on students' skill on a test. In his mind, it's like crediting hospitals that admit the healthiest people. And colleges should also be serving not just the financially healthy but those who are low-income and first-generation students. 

However, he worries a sea change is needed among students and families for U.S. News to pay attention to calls to remove the tests. Too often, applicants feel the tests are needed when applying to college, he said. 

Several months after the swaths of colleges started switching their admissions policies, NACAC created a "test-optional means test-optional" campaign asking institutions to affirm that students truly wouldn't be penalized for not submitting scores. It was a reflection of students' concerns, Pérez said. More than 500 colleges have signed NACAC's statement. 

Colleges too have a role in diminishing testing's significance in a way that might force the magazine's hand. But sometimes they have announced test-optional policies that are ambiguous and confusing for students to interpret. Some signaled officials still valued the scores even though they would allow students to apply without them.

Schaeffer also accused U.S. News of peddling false information about colleges' testing policies. As an example, Schaeffer pointed to its profile of top-ranked Columbia University, which the publication states requires either the SAT or ACT for admissions. And right now, Columbia is temporarily test-optional. 

U.S. News receives this information directly from colleges, Morse said in his email.

But in Schaeffer's view, "it's not hard to keep this information up to date. It confuses applicants at best."

A statement from the ACT also seemed to suggest scores have no place in the rankings. It said that while the "assessment offers a valid and trustworthy measure of a student’s individual academic readiness, it was never intended for use as a measure of institutional prestige or quality."

The ACT remains "a significant and appropriate part of the college-going process," but the sector should seek out new and more effective tools that allow students to measure success and completion, the statement said.

The last academic year was a grim one for transfer students. Nearly 200,000 fewer of them enrolled in college, a drop of 8.4% from the year before, according to recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. That's more than twice the 3.7% enrollment drop in the nontransfer population over the same period.

Certain types of transfer suffered more than others. Reverse transfers, or those from a four-year college to a two-year school, fell 16.2%. Lateral transfers, which are those between the same level of college, declined 11.9%. Both types of transfers also fell the year before, though by much less. Meanwhile, upward transfers — or those from a two-year college to a four-year school — had the smallest decline, of 1.3%.

Gender differences were stark. Enrollment of men fell more steeply than that of women across every transfer category. Their steepest declines were concentrated in lateral transfers between two community colleges, where enrollment of men fell 21.5% compared to a 10.7% decrease among women. The Clearinghouse data did not have a category for nonbinary students.

The data also revealed striking racial disparities. Enrollment of Black transfer students declined the most, at 12.9%, followed by Native American and White students. These three groups also had some of the largest enrollment decreases out of nontransfer students, though the drops weren't as steep.

Upward transfer suffered the least during the 2020-21 academic year. And the data shows one bright spot: Highly selective colleges saw their transfer population increase 10.3% in 2020-21. That's compared to just a 0.3% increase the year before. Conversely, less-competitive and noncompetitive institutions saw their transfer enrollment drop 4.4% and 11.6%, respectively. But it should be noted that even after the changes, less-competitive institutions enrolled more transfer students than highly selective institutions, about 101,000 versus 82,000.

However, these trends weren't even among racial or gender categories. For instance, highly selective institutions saw an 18.3% increase in Asian students' upward transfers compared to a 6.1% increase in White students. And noncompetitive institutions saw deep losses across all racial and ethnic categories tracked.