Cass Conrad, Executive Director of The Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, and David Fischer, Principal of Altior Policy Solutions, sit down with Gregory J Morris, Chief Executive Officer of NYCETC, for a conversation on the new report Bold Solutions to Re-Engage. The report “delves into the pressing issue of declining college enrollment, a challenge significantly heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Gregory J Morris, NYCETC: What was the inspiration for having this conversation at this time?
Cass Conrad, The Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation: At the Petrie Foundation, we were following all the issues that were coming up during the Covid crisis years and the way they were affecting young people in particular. Our foundation focuses on college and career pathways as mechanisms for increasing economic mobility. During Covid, we realized that, along with the rest of the country, that massive numbers of young people were choosing not to go to college, and often because of what was happening economically, not working as well or working very sporadically, and we were concerned about that. We launched an RFP and ultimately selected 14 different proposals. Seven were planning grants, and seven were implementation grants, but it was really a set of experiments to say, “Who’s got a great idea? And how might we then leverage those good ideas to help more young people move forward?”
David Fischer, Altior Policy Solutions: Generally, there’s an inverse relationship between how the labor market is doing and how college enrollment is doing. CUNY hit its all-time high in the middle of the 2010s. Before that, in the worst of the Great Recession, you began to see a surge of enrollment into CUNY… When jobs aren’t available, you retreat to education and try to put yourself in a position to take maximum advantage when the labor market recovers. COVID scrambled all those dynamics. Two things happened at once: we almost instantaneously lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in this city. And at the same time, education was profoundly disrupted.
Morris: The data tells us that the pathway to economic security, to career development, to a stable future out of poverty requires engagement in college and a degree. Is that something that has changed over time? Is it that the young adults lost the thread? Or is it that the colleges or the college counselors lost the ability to connect those dots again?
Conrad: We’ve seen over the last stretch of the last decade or more a greater skepticism about all kinds of messages about traditional institutions and traditional pathways. I think that was exacerbated during COVID… Higher ed in the city and in the country has been thinking a lot about completion rates. But there are a lot of people who start and don’t complete and that does undermine that message. I think simultaneously, there’s been a large national conversation about debt and about how expensive college is. The fear of debt is very high. Most students who attend CUNY don’t take on debt. Still, the facts are irrelevant because the conversation has been about the challenges related to student debt. The fear that they wouldn’t be able to pay for college has permeated the landscape.
Fischer: A little over a year ago, Paul Tough wrote a piece in The New York Times about what he called “the college casino.” The big takeaway was that the benefits of completing a college degree are real, but that many of us had been missing the downside risk of pursuing a degree and then not completing it. When you’re in high school, you mostly get the positive side of the college story… But if you’re sitting at home and college doesn’t feel welcoming or compelling, and maybe you had a bad or at least a sort of unpleasant experience in K-12 education, pulling out a chart that policy people like so much that shows average yearly earnings and lifetime income based on what level of educational attainment you achieve might not be compelling.
Morris: The report highlights some of these disconnections.
Conrad: We know that in New York City and nationally, the ratio of college advisors to high school seniors or students is way too high. Each person who is actually trained as a college advisor is supporting hundreds of students, which makes it challenging for students who don’t have an external information system.
When you add the disruptions during COVID, students were operating in the dark; it’s not surprising that young people say they felt like they didn’t have enough information to make that decision. The decisions they need run a pretty wide gamut: How will I pay for it? How do you make a choice among a whole set of options? What am I going to like? What am I not going to like? Do I know anybody who goes to some college? What does it mean to choose a major?
Fischer: We want young people to make well-informed and intentional decisions about their post-secondary paths. It is concerning if more than half say, “I didn’t have enough information.” On the other hand, even the standard of “enough” will vary from person to person. The other thing is that there is variation among high schools because they have different resources allocated toward supporting students. In a focus group that we conducted to inform this brief, we heard, “Our high school tried to funnel everybody to this one college,” or “I never heard anything about community colleges.”
There’s an evolution in mission, certainly in New York City, among how high schools perceive their role and purpose. When Mayor Bloomberg came into office and won control of the public school system, goal one was to get the graduation rate to a more respectable level. The mission has evolved to position young people for post-secondary success. What does post-secondary success mean? How can we get young people into the labor market who are short of bachelor’s degrees?
This is a solvable problem, but it requires well-informed and intentional decisions. We want our policymakers and systems thinkers to act to make it easier for young people to make confident decisions.
Morris: What are the specific takeaways and recommendations that you landed on?
Fischer: Bold Solutions was agnostic in working with young adults who had never enrolled, or those who had stopped out and were open to coming back. But one thing we heard from grantees was that they had an easier time working with those who had stopped out. I’m starting to wonder if college persistence is less of a telling indicator than perseverance.
This idea of, “I’m not actively enrolled right now, but I still intend to return. I haven’t given up on it.” And if there’s a way to support that, make it easier to use on and off ramps. Even the community colleges, which serve a relatively lower-income population, and more first-generation students, aren’t where they need to be in presenting consistently welcoming policies and norms that meet these students where they are. That means more flexible scheduling. It means advising that is focused. It can be peer or near-peer advisors. It means helping young people figure out how to balance part-time employment with part-time or full-time education.
Conrad: A theme coming out of Bold Solutions, but also other work we have been involved in over time, is the real importance of relationships. Students who were re-engaged and brought back into a pathway often it was because they felt like they had developed a trusting relationship with an advisor or someone at the campus, a near-peer advisor. Someone they could trust, ask questions of, and engage with as they made this big life decision.
We talk about the importance of relationships in other domains, such as social capital. When you’re starting to either think about higher ed or think about careers, close relationships and less close relationships are incredibly important as people gain information about “Is this job the right path for me?” “Is this college the right path for me?” It’s an important lever for organizations, institutions, funders, and policymakers to think about that. That’s not just ‘change a guideline,’ or ‘change a rule,’ or even fund a specific thing. It’s attending to those circumstances that help young people develop productive relationships. The relationship component to all of this is the only thing that we’ve seen that works. That’s the antidote to the lack of trust.
Fischer: A few of the CUNY college grantees thought about that—how the traditional approach to recruitment and enrollment was falling short and considered how they could do things differently. “Concierge service” was the term they used at the College of Staten Island, where one of the folks there said to me, “We need to make this more attractive than a $20-an-hour Amazon warehouse job.” That was an admirably specific way to frame the question. Maybe you won’t be doing 35 hours a week, making $20 an hour. But we can find a job 15 hours a week where you’re making $18 an hour.
There was another college [Kingsborough Community College] where they got the records going back into the teeth of the COVID years of young people they had accepted but never took the next step to enroll. They called them. When they didn’t initially hear back, they kept going. They would email again. They would look for different numbers. They would work through informal networks of friends and peers, and the message was, “We want you here. This is for you. The student body is entirely composed of people like you.”
You need a human being to come along and say, “I’m going to walk you through it. I’m going to be here when you have questions. I’m going to be here when you need help. I have the information.” Everything Cass said about the primacy of relationships is 100% correct. The responsibility of systems and institutions is to position human beings best to do good things for others. That’s the intersection between institutions and individuals. If we can figure out how to do that, then we’ll begin to have a system that approaches the values that we profess.
Conrad: We did see the programs that were able to offer financial incentives for stopped-out students – the ability to clear out balances that they might have or some other financial barrier to get back in the door. Sometimes a relatively small amount of money, less than $1,000 for a student, is not insignificant. When focusing on economic mobility for young people in New York City and around the country, it’s important to think about the path to where they’re going. But it’s also important to remember that we’re thinking about economic mobility because their economic circumstances are fragile right now. Some fines and fees can get in the way. I do not want to counter any of the things that we talked about in terms of mindset, relationships, competence, and where folks are going, but the financial piece is incredibly important. That was reinforced for several of the grantees as well.
Fischer: We focused the report mostly on what colleges should be doing and what providers could do to support re-enrollment. The best way to avoid this challenge is to never stop in the first place. There should be a continuum of support for the young person as they move from secondary to post-secondary. That requires a lot more intention and coordination on the part of the K-12 system and the post-secondary system. Pieces of that are beginning to come into place. If you’re a high school senior (on pace to graduate), on the first day of senior year, there’s a letter from CUNY saying, “Congratulations, you’re accepted.” And then giving you guidance toward some next steps. That’s a brilliant innovation. It got some media coverage. How are we doing in building the infrastructure to fully support that? Make sure that that young person never feels left in the lurch as they begin to apply to specific colleges, fill out the FAFSA, and determine where they want to study and how they’re going to pay for it. Again, that’s the intersection point between systems and people and trying to get everything working in harmony to get the results we want.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited and condensed based on the conversation on September 24, 2024. Watch the full 40-minute conversation on NYCETC’s YouTube channel.