The Key with Inside Higher Ed

Community colleges and their students are wrestling with plenty of challenges this fall, including obstacles related to affordability, childcare and the digital divide. We spoke with two community college leaders to hear what their institutions are doing to help keep students on track. Sue Ellspermann is president of Ivy Tech Community College, Indiana's statewide two-year system. She spoke about how Ivy Tech used its CARES Act funding and what she'd like to see in a future federal stimulus. We also spoke with Margaret McMenamin, president of Union County College in New Jersey. She talked about the pandemic's impact on enrollment and what the college is doing to make sure all students can access online courses. This episode is sponsored by Cengage, from online to hyflex learning, Cengage supports your changing pedagogy at scale. Learn more at cengage.com/institutional.

Amid growing evidence the pandemic and recession are worsening equity gaps, Excelencia in Education last month released an analysis on Latino representation in higher education, as well as on degree attainment and completion rates. We spoke with Deborah Santiago, Excelencia's co-founder and CEO, about the report's findings and to hear about key data points it identified. She also spoke about what some institutions are doing right with Latino students and where opportunities exist for colleges to do better. This episode is sponsored by Cengage, from online to hyflex learning, Cengage supports your changing pedagogy at scale. Learn more at cengage.com/institutional.

Consumers and employers increasingly are turning to short-term, online alternatives to the college degree, and alternative credential pathways are projected to grow in popularity. To help make sense of this complex issue, we spoke with Paul Freedman, a veteran of innovations in online education and president of the Learning Marketplace at Guild Education, a major player in employer-connected online learning. We also spoke with Jane Oates, president of WorkingNation and a former official at the U.S. Department of Labor during the Obama administration.

Earlier this month the University of Arizona announced a deal to acquire Ashford University, a fully online, for-profit institution enrolling roughly 35,000 students. The arrangement, which in some ways resembles Purdue University's 2017 acquisition of Kaplan University, quickly drew lots of attention, and controversy. To help make sense of the news, we spoke with Kelly McManus, director of higher education for Arnold Ventures and formerly director of government affairs for the Education Trust. We also spoke with Trace Urdan, a managing director at Tyton Partners and an expert on for-profit colleges and online education.

Michael Yarbrough, an assistant professor of law and society at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and his students in a senior colloquium this spring documented the pandemic's impact on CUNY, students in the class and their families. Marjorie Valbrun, a senior editor at Inside Higher Ed, wrote about the group project. And Yarbough wrote about it in a powerful opinion piece in the New York Daily News. For this episode, Valbrun spoke with Yarbrough and Paula-Camila Caceres, a student in the class who helped lead the project, about that experience and how it affected their views about CUNY and higher education.

Many colleges were facing financial pressure before the pandemic. But the crisis has exacerbated those challenges and stoked more questions about the sustainability of colleges with shaky finances.   Nick Ducoff is cofounder and CEO of Edmit, a college financial education company. He has weighed in on this issue with projections of when private colleges are likely to run out of money. We spoke with Nick about those analyses and the gaps he sees in what students and their parents can find out about the financial health of colleges.   We also spoke with Barbara Brittingham, who just stepped down as president of the New England Commission of Higher Education, a regional accreditor. Brittingham has been a well-placed observer of the financial woes of struggling colleges, and is an expert on the U.S. regulatory system's role in overseeing higher education finance.    

Many questions loom about remote learning in coming months. Will online offerings from colleges be more sophisticated? What steps need to be taken to ensure academic quality in online learning? And will short-term credentials be more popular?   To get some answers to these tricky questions, we spoke with Lori Williams, president and CEO of NC-SARA. Williams discussed ideas from an opinion piece she wrote for Inside Higher Ed on the role for states in quality assurance in online education.   We also spoke with Marni Baker Stein, provost and chief academic officer for Western Governors University. Stein spoke about how the large, online and competency-based university has worked to help its students cope with disruptions, as well as her outlook for the fall and the potential for short-term programs.

In roughly a month, many colleges and universities are planning to welcome back students to campus-based learning. But surging COVID-19 cases across much of the country have kept college administrators busy adjusting their plans. The University of Kentucky this spring brought together more than 500 people to create its 187-page "Playbook for Reinvented Operations." The flagship public university also has been particularly open about how it's dealing with the pandemic. We spoke with Eli Capilouto, UK's president and an expert on public health policy, about how the university developed the playbook, and how it's continuing to prepare for the looming fall term. Also featured in this episode is Erin Hennessy, vice president of TVP Communications, who wrote a recent opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed about how circumstances may force colleges to change their fall plans. Hennessy, who is based in D.C., also spoke about how institutions should communicate about those plans.

The pandemic has exposed and worsened equity gaps in higher education, as its impacts have been felt most by Black, Latino and lower-income Americans. What policies and incentives could help close those gaps? To help grasp the scope of the challenge, we spoke with Michelle Asha Cooper, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonpartisan research and policy group. Cooper talked about why higher education needs to change, and how. We also spoke with Kim Cook, executive director of the National College Attainment Network, which has been tracking federal data that suggest some lower-income students may leave higher education. Cook spoke about doubling federal Pell Grant awards and other policies she'd like to see enacted. This episode is sponsored by the ECMC Foundation, which supports building a postsecondary education system that works for all learners through its grant making focus areas of college success and career readiness.

A steep decline in enrollments of international students is among the wide range of possible disruptions U.S. colleges face this fall. To get an entrepreneurial take on what to watch in coming months, we spoke with two experts with global perspectives on higher education and ed tech. John Fillmore is chief strategy officer for Chegg, a learning platform company formerly focused on textbook rentals, which now offers credentials, online tutoring and more. Our conversation with Fillmore also drew from his background as a former planning and research official for California. We also spoke with Doug Becker, the founder and former CEO of Laureate Education, a large higher-education provider with a global footprint. Becker now leads Cintana, a partnership with Arizona State University to create an international network of universities. This episode is sponsored by the ECMC Foundation, which supports building a postsecondary education system that works for all learners through its grant making focus areas of college success and career readiness.