Welcome back, this section of the powerpoint presentation will focus on
the domain of access and enrollment as one of the environmental challenges
facing the Academy. As you can see on the slide I have provided bullet points of
those items that from my perspective, define the environmental challenges
within this domain of issues facing the Academy. As referenced in the prior
lecture the pressure for institutions, historically and from ambition
perspective, to meet the access needs of our state are critical, but those access
needs are becoming more complex as we serve an increasingly diverse and
low-income demographic within the state of Tennessee. Our populations are
shifting and as a result the tensions and pressures for us to meet that access
mission are changing, but then for institutions such as ETSU or on the
other end of the state, Dyersburg State Community Colleges, our ability to serve
rural populations presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities for us
as we tailor programs to meet students from that demographic. The next bullet point
references adults in the non-traditional challenge from the Tennessee Reconnect
to investments that are being made through the Drive to 55 program, we in
the state of Tennessee, and other states across the country are realizing that in
order to hit their broad educational attainment goals that they must enroll
more non-traditional students. That being said our focus remains primarily at
universities on those students who are transitioning to college, those students
who are moving through and that traditional 18 to 24 cohort. For our
institution, more than half of the students who graduate each spring are
the first in their family to receive a college degree,
forty-seven percent of our undergraduate population receives some form of Pell or
need-based financial aid. So even though it's 2016 and we've gone through a
period of massification, in our nation system the predominance of students who
enroll in community colleges or regional institutions such as ETSU, remain the
first in their family to embark upon that journey. But as they come to college
they and their peers, the Millennium generation,
have a different set of learning expectations, a different set of
technology expertise than I had as an undergraduate student. When I was an
undergraduate student at West Virginia University the internet didn't exist my
faculty member would come in with chalk, would write on the board, assign
materials, we would return to class submit those materials and that was the
semester. He had no idea I was in class or not in class. Now through the power of
technology, in d2l, we can track as faculty how long you are logged into the
course, for how long you've watched this video, you may have already to me out, in
the extent to which you are using technology to inform and infuse your
learning experience at a doctoral level. That's magnified tenfold for undergraduate
students with an expectation that materials are online and immediately
available twenty-four-seven as they're working through their University
experience or community college experience. The next bullet refers to
high-impact populations within the funding formula.
These are non-traditional students, adult students, low-income students, students of
color. This aligns with the bullets from prior in the slide but what makes this
environmental threat unique to states such as Tennessee is that our ability to
move those students successfully through their educational journey results in
larger funding for our institutions. So not only do we have a moral imperative
to ensure that these students have a successful experience at our institution,
but we now are financially rewarded or penalized for ability to meet those
objectives. Many institutions, particularly universities, have moved
purposefully to expand their market presence and out-of-state domains or
internationally.
While this may not be an area of market opportunity at the Community College Sector,
as you step back and look nationally, universities, particularly flagships. The
University of Alabama has grown by 16,000 students in a decade done so
primarily through our lines upon out-of-state students, but
across-the-board universities are turning to new markets to help grow and
maintain enrollments. With the advent of promise, with the funding of lottery
scholarships, institutions are looking to maximize the investments that states are
making as they couple those with their access agendas.
You are seeing universities across the nation from Georgia, the home of the Hope
Lottery Scholarship Program, to South Carolina, who has mandated the Palmetto
Fellows to their life scholarship program, to Bright Futures in Florida,
to Tops in Louisiana, to Promise in West Virginia. Institutions are coupling their
aid packages with the three sources provided by their respective states to
help meet their access goals. And then the final element on the slide talks
about the increased competition. Increased competition from MOOCs, from
for-profit institutions, and from the not-for-profit sector. Here in the state
of Tennessee we've seen the development of Western Governors as a recognized
public institution, so as we strive to meet our access agenda, as we strive to
maintain a base of enrollment across all of our respective institutions, our
ability to maintain a base enrollment is increasingly complicated by the
competitiveness that is defining the landscape. So a very brief overview of
major environmental threats that are facing our institutions, these
environmental threats will be explored in detail in the reading materials
throughout the semester. I want to frame those comments within some data points,
data points that helped to define the picture of enrollment shifts at a
national level, a regional leve,l and at a state level. So the chart here in front
of you outlines enrollment growth across the SREB States. SREB is the
Southern Regional Education Board. During next week's section of the course you'll
read an article from the SREB that outlines their agenda and vision for the
community colleges in the South, but you can see nationally the nation's
post-secondary system between 2008-13 grew about 4.8 percent. In the South
about a 10.8 growth across all the 16 member states of the SREB. You see in the
state of Tennessee a nine point nine percent growth, but in the majority of
states, absent my former tate of West Virginia, significant enrollment growth
within the southern states. In terms of changes in enrollment, this is more
short-term 2011-2013. So the prior slide was 8 to 13 and capsulating the
significant growth that recurred
as a result of individuals returning to higher education for retooling and
advanced skills and certification as a result of the Great Recession. Now
focusing on the last two years, you see a very different picture. Those individuals
are now returning to the marketplace, returning to jobs, taking those skills
that they gained from their time in post-secondary education and as a result,
minus Delaware, the majority of states and the SREB have witnessed enrollment
declines from a statewide perspective. This chart provides an overview of
enrollment growth within the state of Tennessee, it comes compliments of a
good friend and colleague, Dr. Rus Deaton at the Tennessee Higher Education
Commission. Dr. Deaton and his staff have plotted, on a regression line, enrollment
growth within the state of Tennessee from 1979 to the present. You can see those
fluctuations and shifts over time but a trendline that moves upward,
consistently upward from 79 to 2011. You can see that during periods of economic
downturn, enrollment adjusts accordingly. As the economy improves, enrollment turns
in the other direction, but even with the significant spike and downward flow as a
result of the Great Recession, we still remain on the regression trendline as
projected by Dr. Deaton and his staff. To dive in a level deeper, this chart
provides an overview of total enrollment within the public institutions of the
state of Tennessee. From a headcount perspective and an FTE perspective, an
FTE is full-time equivalence. So the headcount number includes part-time
students, a student could be taking one course, they're included in the 225,000.
The 170,000 number equates all of those students on a full-time equivalency
level. This chart provides an overview of enrollment trends within
universities and you can see across the institution's most have either remained
flat or experienced some form of downturn from 10 to 2015. This chart is
census data for last year, I'm hopeful that if we move into the semester,
particularly when we're together in Nashville, I'll be able to provide a
deeper examination of enrollment
trends for the current year. But this past year was a significant year from a
policy perspective in the state because it was the first year in which students
who are recipients of the Promise scholarship are matriculating to those
institutions that offered associate's degrees, and I preface that with those
institutions that offer associate's degrees because there are two
universities, Austin Peay and Tennessee State that retain their portfolio of
associates degree programs. If you look at those two institutions, they are the
only institutions in the Board of Regents system that recognized
enrollment growth at the university level.
What's interesting for me to note is that among the community colleges, even
with the huge infusion of students via Promise, many, Southwest for example,
continue the downward trend. Southwest would be an interesting case study for
those of you who are looking at dissertation ideas throughout the course
of this program. I would encourage you to go back and look at Southwest prior to
its creation, when it was formerly the State Technical Institute at Memphis and
Shelby State Community College. At one point those two institutions separately
had an excess of 16,000 students enrolled and as you can see now total
enrollment for Southwest last year dropped below 10,000 students. So some
unique things that are happening within the city of Memphis and that institution
that our grounds and fertile grounds for future research and examination. In order
to get a true sense of enrollment, particularly true sense from the
traditional frames of those students moving from high school to
post-secondary education, it's really, I think, informative to examine the
pipeline of students that are moving through our state's k-12 sector. As you
can see on the slide here, there was a significant dip in the number of
students who graduated from high school in the state of Tennessee, that
trendline bottomed out in 13 14 and it has begun to uptick. By 2021 we'll have
about an equivalent number of high school graduates to what we had in
2010-2011. So some of the decline in the number of students enrolled in our
system could be a factor of simply less students graduating from high school.
What will be interesting to track moving forward, is as that trend line moves
upward, the students who comprise that growth look very different
demographically than the students who graduated from our state secondary
system in the seventies, eighties nineties, and two-thousands. More diverse more
first-generation students, more Hispanic and Latino students, students who do not
have the history of post-secondary access that they can rely upon from a
familial perspective. So it's incumbent upon us as institutions, and you'll see
this as you move through the Pascarella and Taranzini work, to really spend
intentional time developing, analyzing, implementing, and evaluating programs to
serve a changing undergraduate student market. One thing that for me is is
really unique to note is the amount of students who are remaining in state
after they graduate from high school, one of the prescribed purposes of the
Lottery Scholarship program was to ensure that more Tennesseans would
remain in state to pursue post-secondary education and you see prior to the
Lottery Scholarship about eighty-one percent of students enrolled in some
form of post-secondary education in state and you see how those trendline
shift, but a pretty nice jump in terms of those students who went to college
staying in-state as a result of the Lottery Scholarship.
However, we were unable to significantly move the needle with respect to college
going rates and that's what Promise is so important. Promise has in many respects
changed the dinner table conversation across the state of Tennessee. Through
the provision of last dollar scholarships, all Tennesseans have the
opportunity to enroll in post-secondary education and cost is no longer a factor.
You see here, chart once again provided by friends and colleagues at the
Tennessee Higher Education Commission, that shows the number of students last
year who moved through that Promise pipeline. More than 16,291 students
enrolled in the community colleges, TCATs, or those universities that offer
associates programs last year, and you can see how that enrollment here on this
chart, really has impacted the distribution the academic preparation as
well as the age of students who are enrolling at the Community College
sector. This will be a focus of one of the readings from SREB as well as a
topic of conversation we're together in Nashville, both in October as well as
November, so I'd encourage you to spend some time with this data and I'm hopeful
that when we're together in the fall I'll have some updated slides. You see
here the real driving point there on the Delta column, to the former on the far
end. Significant enrollment growth in the community colleges, 20-percent enrollment
growth in the TCATs, and then a decline in undergraduate enrollment at the
universities and within the UT system. Here at ETSU, we estimate that Promise
costs us about ten percent of our freshman class, and as we move into the
section on finance and the operational aspects of the institution, you really
see the significance of that from a financial perspective on the
universitys. Yet one more chart that shows increases in enrollment, this time
at the college level, you see a seventy-four percent increase in Motlow
State, fifty-four percent increase at Volunteer State, and overall a 25-percent
rounding up increase across the Board of Regents system. Similar trends within the
TCATs. Here's a slide for the universitys, you see Austin Peay up, Knoxville's an
anomaly, they have seventeen thousand applicants, Knoxville can kind of
determine the size of their freshman class but for the regional institutions,
the size of that first time enrollment you see at ETSU down 62,Tennessee Tech down
18.1 percent, so Promise has redistributed the college choice
patterns of students across the state and we'll touch them on that later in
the semester with respect to literature on the cooling out function of certain
sectors of institutions. The next two slides for me are really powerful
because it drives home why Promise has changed that dinner table conversation
that I alluded to earlier. This slide shows the college going rate for the
for the state of Tennessee in comparison to the other states in the
Union. You see the national average there in the red bar, the state of Tennessee is
the green bar. That was pre Promise so, pre Promise and post Promise.
Post Promise you see the major jump that Tennessee made, a jump that is
unprecedented in our nation's history of access opportunities, access related
scholarships, to move from right at the national average to significantly above
the national average in one year really signifies the the powerful impact that
Tennessee Promise had on both the state as well as the students who comprise its
post secondary systems. I want to take a little bit of time to walk through this
chart and then we'll transition to the next section of the lecture, so this is
the last slide that will review the environmental challenges related to
access and affordability, and it's a slide that really ties everything
together for me. When I was a system chancellor in West Virginia, I used this
data in a commencement address at a college of medicine, and you may ask what
the world does pipeline data have to do with the commencement address at a
college of medicine. When I was driving home for those individuals who are
graduating from the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine and moving into
their profession after completion of the residency, was to portray the significant
role that they will play as leaders in their communities, as they meet with
their patients, as they meet with family members, they are looked to to be leaders
within their community. They have an opportunity as a physician, particularly
if they're working in rural areas, to talk about the powerful influence that
post-secondary education has to transform lives, to share their personal
stories. These four numbers, these four simple numbers, drive home not only the
work that we're doing around access but drive home the work that we have to do
to move this needle. So within the state of Tennessee, for every 100 ninth-graders
prior to Promise,
prior to Promise, 71 graduated from high school,
44 went on to college, and 19 graduated from college within the requisite six-year
year as defined by the Department of Education. 19 college graduates for every
100 ninth-graders, ladies and gentlemen as I reflect upon this slide is
I reflect upon the portfolio of programs that are offered nationally from gear up,
to Trio, to Talent Search, to early outreach and intervention programs, to
early high schools that exist in many of the community colleges, to the
University School that exists on our campus.
Those are efforts that we make to move not only the hundred to seventy needle but the
seventy to fourty-four needle, it's that fourty-four to nineteen point that's at the center of complete college Tennessee,
that's at the center of the new performance funding paradigm in the
state.
How can we ensure that those students who invest their resources and our
institution have the opportunity to realize their dreams, unless we're able
to significantly move this number and/or infuse additional adults into the
marketplace, it will be impossible for us to meet the Governor's Drive to 55
objectives. We're going to talk more about this and subsequent readings in
the course, but these series of slides frame the first environmental paradigm
that impacts the nation's post-secondary system that is the paradigm of access
and it's with that I'll bring this section of the presentation to a close
and I look forward to having you join me for the next section of the presentation.
Thanks.