Showing posts with label Weinberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weinberg. Show all posts
Sunday, March 1, 2026
When Only The Best Will Do
Monday, February 23, 2026
Olympic Gold!
We were blessed to watch Dallas native Adam Weinberg play hockey at DA, but it's his sister that is getting all the attention these days... Ellen Weinberg played at UNH (first photo from Hall of Fame Induction at UNH) and is mother to Jack, Quinn and Luke Hughes, all first round NHL draft picks and current NHL stars, also in the HOF photo.
Yes, THAT Jack Hughes...
Friday, June 7, 2024
Weinberg on Career Readiness
OPINION // President Speaks
Liberal arts colleges must embed career services throughout campus life
Colleges should strive to teach students both how to think and to be career-ready when they graduate, the leader of Denison University argues.
Published May 28, 2024
Adam Weinberg is the president of Denison University, a private liberal arts college in Granville, Ohio.
Colleges are facing a crisis of faith: high costs, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and a range of other issues threaten to make the prospect of higher education less appealing to students. Part of the solution to reestablishing trust and demonstrating value is for colleges — particularly liberal arts institutions — to revamp approaches to career readiness.
For years, leaders of liberal arts colleges have argued the education their institutions offer is valuable in and of itself. The liberal arts teach students how to think and problem-solve — qualities that can propel them to success in any career.
While this is true, in a competitive and uncertain job market, liberal arts colleges need to shift their positioning away from, “Trust us, learning how to think will be enough.” Instead, the objective should be teaching students how to think and how to be career-ready when they graduate. We need to give students a life-shaping education that launches them quickly and successfully into lives and careers.
For the last decade, I have been part of a team at Denison University asking questions on this topic.
Adam Weinberg
Permission granted by Adam Weinberg
How do we help students explore what kind of life they want to lead? How do we help them identify career paths that will help build these lives? And how do we ensure that our students graduate with the skills, values, habits, networks and experiences to get started?
Making career launch a central part of our classic liberal arts education required focus, commitment, time and attention to nuance. As we get it right, our students are launching quicker and with more success.
Not surprisingly, our applications for admission to Denison have tripled over the past decade.
What we’ve learned serves as a playbook others will undoubtedly benefit from implementing.
First and foremost, universities too often treat their career services department as an ancillary afterthought, tucked into a small office suite with too few resources and little visibility. That is a losing strategy. The starting place is recognizing that it requires a significant investment in staff, time, money and visibility.
The next step is to align and focus resources in five ways:
Go where the students are. Rather than expecting students to take the initiative, colleges need to weave career services throughout the activities students are already doing, making them unavoidable. This means embedding career work in the first-year experience, connecting with courses, going into residential halls, and working with student groups and athletic teams.
We found success, for example, in reorienting work-study programs to ensure students develop career-related skills — things like learning how to use in-demand technology or going through networking coaching — while working on campus.
Close skills gaps. It’s important to speak to campus recruiters when prioritizing career preparedness, asking not just what they look for in students, but why some get rejected. Overwhelmingly, the answer we heard was that it comes down to a need for certain hard skills.
A liberal arts degree helps students develop critical skills like problem-solving, communication, leadership and the ability to work as part of a team. These are vital in the workplace, and liberal arts students tend to do well in these areas. Fortunately, the hard skills that liberal arts students often miss, such as strong Excel skills, are relatively easy to teach.
In 2021, we launched Denison Edge, which offers short certificate and credential programs designed to provide supplementary skill-building experiences. We leverage regional industry professionals to help us design these courses, which has two benefits — students learn from the people who know exactly what they need to know, and students build relationships with potential employers.
Use the whole ice. In an academic setting, it is easy to fall prey to trying to shove everything into the curriculum. This is a mistake. Students are only in classes for a small part of the week, and the semesters are only about 60% of the calendar year. We can and should use the whole week and the whole year.
While summer internship programs tend to attract high-achieving students, we found that running career programs during fall, winter and spring breaks has also been effective. Students often want to return to campus early for these opportunities.
Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate. While there’s no industry consensus on which metrics truly capture the effectiveness of a university career service program, colleges need to be looking beyond the basics. Average salary and employment rates are fine but they fail to capture the whole story of success. In the modern economy, for example, a student’s first job rarely indicates career success — it’s their second that determines their trajectory.
We measure three things: the number of students landing internships and jobs at the top companies and organizations in their chosen professions, upward mobility for lower- and middle-income students, and a Net Promoter Score — a commonly used survey to measure customer loyalty. The NPS lets us understand how well our students and alums believe their college experience prepared and launched them into their careers.
Lean on — and into — networks. Staff within career service centers need to realize they don’t need to do it all themselves. They can be the conductors of the orchestra. Every college has an alumni and parent network and often a network of local companies and organizations.
Institutions need to fully organize and leverage these networks to create robust career service programs and identify mentors for students. We realized that one of the most important things we could do to support our career service team is to invest in a stronger alumni and family engagement office.
College should be a great four years, but not the best of our students’ lives. Higher education should set students up for a life they could never have imagined when they arrived on campus. To do this, it’s time to pay as much attention to career services as we do to other parts of a student’s college experience.
Monday, October 31, 2022
Heritage Award - Dr. Adam Weinberg
Find below the link to the school meeting recording that included Adam's acceptance speech and the text of his speech. Adam looks forward to being back on campus at our 40th reunion, June 9-10, 2023!
https://events.locallive.tv/events/88741
Adam Weinberg, President
Remarks at Deerfield Academy
October 26, 2022
"I want to tell a story. It’s March 2020. I am getting ready to board a plane from Florida back to Denison University when our Vice President for Student Life calls me to say that this “COVID” thing is real and it's likely to shut down our campus. Other colleges are sending students home. I respond by saying that we will weather the storm. Let’s do nothing for now. Let the students enjoy their semester.
A few days later, she comes into my office and reminds me that students are heading home for spring break. If we don’t tell them to pack up their stuff and I am wrong, we (she and I) will be personally packing the rooms of 2300 students and mailing their stuff to them.
Over the next 48 hours the world changes. It’s clear that we need to shut the campus. That day, we made a few decisions that set us down a course that was different from many other colleges. The decisions were hard. They were often controversial. But they were right. Nobody got through the COVID year of 2020-2021 unscathed, but it’s possible that Deerfield and Denison navigated the year better than most any other educational institutions. There is a connection that I will come back to in a few minutes. It starts with Being Worthy of Your Heritage. Much of how I navigated Denison through the crisis started with values and views on leadership that I learned at Deerfield.
Our first real major decision concerned our staff. As colleges shut down, they started to lay off staff. 13% of all staff in higher education would lose their jobs. Most of them lower paid and often hourly. We stood up and promised the 900 people who worked for us that everybody would have a job and benefits. Even if they did not have work to do, nobody at Denison would lose a paycheck. Denison is anchored by relationships. Our faculty and staff had stood by the college and our students for decades. This was the college’s chance to stand by them.
Then in May, we made the decision that we would open in August of 2020. At the time, most liberal arts colleges made similar decisions, but starting in late June and through July, many, probably most, changed course. They would not open their campus, they would be remote, or they would open and welcome back only some students. We stayed the course.
We partnered with a team of epidemiologists at the Wexner Medical Center at The Ohio State University. We made them a deal. We would follow their advice, unconditionally, if we got to set the goals.
Our first goal was to welcome all students back to campus. They said that could happen with proper testing and protocols. We then told them that we wanted to play sports. They were skeptical. We told them it was important, and they didn’t need to worry because most colleges were remote and there would be nobody to play. Then we said it was important to do live theatre and music. We made it happen. It was not easy. We did “walking” theatre outside. There were weekends where we believe we might have been the only live arts in the great state of Ohio.
As it got closer to the start of classes, faculty and staff and the local community questioned our plans.
People were scared about the campus reopening and the impact it might have on them or the local community. Then we did something important. We listened. We listened with intense intellectual humility. We sought out those who had different views from us and we invited them to the table. We course corrected. We did not move the flag. We were going to open. But, we changed how we would do it.
And then we opened. Almost every student came back. That was a surprise! We put up tents where faculty could teach outdoors. We bought hundreds of Adirondack chairs and put them around campus so
students could be together outside. We purchased fire pits. We found food trucks and took social life outdoors.
Nothing was easy about the year. We had to constantly course correct. We had to constantly seek to do better. But we got through it. We had virtually no COVID on campus. We found success by being clear eyed and focused on doing everything in our power to provide our students a life-shaping liberal education while keeping our people healthy and safe. At the end of the year, we were tired (exhausted really), but proud and grateful and possibly stronger as a community.
Why do I tell this story? It’s not an important story. It’s a story about how one college navigated a crisis.
But, it’s also a story about Deerfield. My approach to running a college during COVID was shaped by my time at Deerfield and my belief in “being worthy of my heritage.”
The mantra of “be worthy of your heritage” resonated with me as a high school student. It helped me understand the kind of human being that I aspired to be and the life that I wanted to live. From my time at Deerfield, I took away a few qualities that have rooted my life and my career:
• Have values and use them to guide your actions
• Relationships anchor our lives and communities
• Be committed to things larger than yourself and to the arc of history
• Have intellectual humility and be a daily and life-long learner
• Be committed to doing things well and always strive to do them better
• Learn to see failure as necessary and important if you want to succeed
When faced with an unknowable virus and an uncertain situation, I fell back on my values. When things get hard, you rise to the occasion, and you lean in and lead. You do it with integrity and empathy. You act from a place of reason and rationality. There is no shame in life in failure, but there is shame in quitting.
Relationships matter. If you get the relationships right, everything else falls into place. We were going to do everything we could to keep our people employed and safe, and to give our students the life-shaping liberal arts education they deserved.
That’s the easy part–trying. The getting it right part is “hard” and requires intellectual humility. Walk through life with the view that there is a distinct possibility that you might be wrong, so seek out alternative voices and views. See those who disagree with you as a gift, because you can learn from them. If you do, they will make you seem smarter and more talented than you really are.
Finally, be committed to things larger than yourself and to the arc of history. It would have been too easy to bemoan how hard it was to lead a college during COVID. But I felt honored. How often in your life do you truly get the opportunity to stand up and to step into a really hard and complex situation in service of others and an organization you cherish?
To close, I loved my time at Deerfield. I arrived from Texas in the fall of 1980 with cowboy boots. I quickly learned that I was in over my head. Everybody seemed smarter. They were and many still are.
For the first time in my life, there were people on the hockey team who were better than me. That was hard! People had cultural capital that I did not have.
Then I realized that people here cared about me. I felt the deep relationships that anchor Deerfield. My teachers pushed me hard because they believed that I could do better. My friends pulled me along with them to places that I did not know existed because they wanted me to be part of their communities. I learned that I had come to a place that could help me architect a life for myself that I could never have imagined when I left Dallas and arrived here. All it asked in return was that I be worthy of my heritage."
Wednesday, October 19, 2022
#WORTHY
The Deerfield Class of 1983 contains individuals of excellence and service who have supported Deerfield in many ways. We've had members of our class be Faculty members, visiting scholars, Trustees, Executive Committee members, Parent Committee members, alumni game participants, you name it.
And now we have officially reached the very top!
Deerfield Academy Heritage Award 2022
October 26, 2022
9:40 am ET
Featuring Dr. Adam S. Weinberg '83, President, Denison University
Join us for the livestream<https://events.loca
LIVESTREAM NOW<https://events.locallive.t
CONGRATULATIONS ADAM!
Tuesday, September 6, 2022
Adam on student mental health...
Denison University President Adam Weinberg opines on student mental health in colleges these days.
"There has been a significant increase in anxiety and depression among college students. Recent data from the CDC suggests a disproportionate risk for mental health problems in college-age people; one study reported that nine out of 10 college students believe that colleges have a mental health crisis.
Despite increased awareness about the importance of supporting mental health on college campuses, our conversations too often emphasize averting crises. Instead, we need proactive discussions focused on helping students develop the skills and habits to thrive in a fast-paced and complex world.
We should start by reframing the topic from a “problem with our students” to a “problem with the historical moment in which our students live.”There is a lot to be anxious about today.
We need to assure students that mental health challenges are not a personal failing but a reasonable response to a challenging historical moment when they are reading and hearing a lot about climate change, war in Europe, a global pandemic, political polarization, rampant inflation and declining social and political institutions.
And we should recognize that the social isolation and anxiety many of our students are feeling is less about them as individuals and more about how Covid responses negatively impacted their lives during the past few years.
Young people’s prolonged social isolation in the midst of learning to develop healthy social skills and negotiate responsibilities had profound negative impacts on both their physical and mental health.
After acknowledging these stressors, the conversation needs to focus on helping students learn to positively impact their own health. While not all aspects of their mental health are under their control, students have more ownership than they realize.
We should encourage candid conversations about the connection between physical and mental health. If students don’t sleep enough (and few do), eat nutritionally and stay active, they won’t be physically or mentally healthy. For example, one study found that with every additional night of insufficient sleep, the risk of experiencing mental health symptoms increased by more than 20 percent.
We also need to have candid conversations about the connection between social media and increased levels of bullying, harassment and FOMO (fear of missing out) and how this contributes to poor mental health.
Too many students are using social media to find human connection instead of seeking out the face-to-face interactions that build strong relationships and are critical to well-being and development.
Most importantly, we need to introduce concepts like emotional agility and mindfulness into our campus conversations. Harvard professor Susan David talks about how the way we engage our emotions shapes our mental health. We can help students develop the tools to recognize anxiety and depression as feelings that are real but not fixed.
I love this quote from her: “When we show up fully, with awareness and acceptance, even the worst demons usually back down.”
We need to help students understand that suffering is deeply human, and that we can learn to accept it, move through it and emerge more substantial and resilient.
Research done by the Mind & Life Institute and other organizations should guide campuswide conversations about how to transform everything from teaching to residential halls to crisis management in ways that foster students’ development of the skills and habits of well-being.
We also need to set reasonable and realistic expectations for students about the college experience. Tim Bono at Washington University has been rightly critical of our college admissions process that paints an unrealistic picture for incoming students. Colleges need to describe the whole college experience — including its challenges and demands.
While there are many fun moments, there are also times of loneliness, struggle and failure.
We need to help students understand that suffering is deeply human, and that we can learn to accept it, move through it and emerge more substantial and resilient.
By design, college delivers profound personal growth, and this happens through overcoming obstacles and developing tools to succeed. We should not be afraid to challenge students out of fear that it will have a detrimental impact on their mental health. The greatest gift we can give young people is a “push,” because it sends the message that we believe in them and that they can rise to the occasion.
Brandon Slade of Untapped Learning recently said to me, “Too often, colleges are all support and no accountability or all accountability and no support. The best colleges understand that students need two parts support to one part accountability.”
The experience of recovering from setbacks and hardships is something we need throughout our lives. College campuses are good places for students to learn and practice getting up over and over again to achieve more than they think is possible.
Finally, we need a conversation about medical care on our campuses. We need to clarify what our campuses can and cannot provide, and we need to allow students with existing medical providers to continue to receive care virtually.
The time is right for colleges to explore new partnerships to expand the medical care we offer. We also need to be honest with students about when it might be wise to take a semester off. Sometimes students need to give themselves permission to step away from college, focus on their health and then return when they are healthy and ready to continue.
When I look across our campuses, I see a generation of students who are intent on addressing the issues of their time. Colleges can prepare them to meet those challenges, but we need a better conversation about who we are, what we do and how we help students develop the capacity to thrive in their personal and professional lives."
Adam Weinberg is the president of Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
Monday, August 29, 2022
Right Place, Right Time
Whit Sheppard couldn't believe his luck. In a second chance encounter on the Vineyard...
"Two in one week!
Adam Weinberg on the Vineyard to spread the word about Denison at a reception on novelist Amor Towles’s front lawn overlooking the Vineyard Sound. Adam is a terrific and engaging public speaker and his message is strong. Great to see him for the first time in —gulp!— nearly 40 years."
Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Heading to College in the Fall?
More sound advice from Adam!
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/15/perspectives/graduation-college-freshmen-tips/index.html?utm_source=LIVE%20-%20Denison%20-%20Adam%20Weinberg&utm_campaign=87376a579a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_05_10_08_54&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f35b2fd67a-87376a579a-494029565&fbclid=IwAR3phFZZw8fAdomcZJ83MRyyzKLC-UxUqIAxUYGdcYbJ0rO6v9OFYgzGAuI
Adam Weinberg is the president of Denison University in Granville, Ohio. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.
High school students and their parents devote an extraordinary amount of time and energy to the college search process. But then an odd thing happens once a student is accepted. Families tend to exhale — "All done!" — and mostly put college out of their mind until late summer, when it's time for the incoming freshmen to start classes.
The truth is, much can be done between now and late August or early September to help prepare you for your upcoming educational journey. Students tend to worry so much about whether they will they get in and not enough about how best to take advantage of where they wind up going.
It matters far less where you go to college and much more about how well you take advantage of the place you are going. For example, most studies show that having a college degree more than doubles how much you will earn in your career. But for this to happen, you must finish college and you have to use college to acquire the attributes needed to succeed in your chosen profession.
If you're starting college this fall, keep these tips in mind to ensure you get the most out of your college experience:
First, you need to keep learning everything you can about the college you will attend. Sure, you already know quite a bit about the institution — that's why you selected it — but now's the time to do a deeper dive.
Every college offers a wide array of academic majors, co-curricular activities, arts and athletics. Dig around the college website for more information on these offerings. Check social media to see what other students are doing. Spend time exploring all the opportunities you will have and getting excited about the options. Have fun with it.
Don't stop there. Reach out to current students to get their input. Ask them: What do you like most about the college? What's been your best experience so far?
Talk to people in your hometown who are recent alums. What do they wish they had known before they started? Which are the best clubs to join? What are the experiences most students miss and don't take advantage of? You'll be amazed at the little tidbits of advice you can pick up.
Also, be sure to ask: What are the best local restaurants? What are the best outdoor hikes or day trips in the vicinity?
By gathering all this information ahead of time, you'll avoid the common lament of many college students that they only started to feel like they really knew the place in their junior or senior year. You will also move from "being nervous" to realizing what an amazing opportunity you have in front of you.
College is generally eight semesters, and maybe 40 courses. They go fast. To get the most from each semester, you want to have a strong sense of what you want to accomplish with the investment of time, work and money you will put into it.
The second thing you should be doing before the school year begins is taking full advantage of anything and everything your university offers in terms of orientation.
If the school offers an in-person orientation, go. If they're offering an online Zoom orientation, attend. If they have pre-orientation trips, participate. If they're offering parent orientations, your parents should aim to attend.
Also, don't just skim the orientation materials that are sent to you and toss them aside. Take the time to digest them carefully, and maybe even read through them a second time.
Whether it's meetups or mailings, take advantage of what the school is doing to help you get oriented. They're trying to provide a roadmap, so you don't get lost before the journey even starts.
When the fall semester bill arrives, make sure you understand the financing. If you are receiving financial aid, make sure you understand the package and how it works. Don't be afraid to call the financial aid office and ask questions. If you need to work during college, ask about work-study opportunities. On-campus jobs can be a great way to get engaged on campus, acquire job skills and even develop an important relationship with your supervisor and co-workers
But perhaps most importantly, make sure you're mentally, physically and emotionally ready to hit the ground running come the start of the school year.
College is awesome, and it is hard. Professors will expect a lot from you, and your peers will be smart and engaged. You will get the most from college when you show up in a place in your life when you are ready.
Too often, students start college as soon as they graduate from high school instead of when they are ready to maximize the experience. Too many students go off to college before they are ready, leading to either bad outcomes or wasted opportunities.
Be honest with yourself if you have health issues. You may benefit by using the summer to address them and work with others to develop the tools you will need to manage them in college. If you have study habit issues, use the summer to figure out a plan for how you will stay organized and on top of things as you navigate a new place.
If you need more time, ask for it. That's what gap semesters and gap years are for. It doesn't matter when exactly you start college or when you finish it; what matters is how you show up when you are in college. Your time here is relatively short, so make the most of it.
The next few months are a way of exploring pathways to take full advantage of all that college can offer. Getting ready for it should be half the fun.
Monday, March 7, 2022
Adam's latest
https://chiefexecutive.net/liberal-arts-colleges-a-missing-piece-in-the-search-for-talent/?fbclid=IwAR2vdv5EzyUYXgeUDbfYVOujqlwU2wAPBR7SoFlsRl6G3j0y7ps_-BC8g3c
Liberal Arts Colleges: A Missing Piece In The Search for Talent
Companies need a workforce that is adaptable, flexible and can learn new ways of thinking and doing things—which is precisely what a liberal arts education trains students to do.
However unintentionally, the pandemic has unearthed an opportunity that benefits both employers and liberal arts colleges.
A recent report by Bain & Company starts with a well-known observation —employers are struggling to fill jobs, especially those that demand “specific skills and experiences that can be hard to acquire and demonstrate.”
The report calls for higher education to “rise to the challenge by elevating career outcomes, aligning what they teach with workforce needs, improving the quality of their programs, and partnering with employers to create hands-on work experiences for students.”
Traditionally, employers (especially larger ones) have gravitated to public universities and community colleges to get this work done, often neglecting the smaller private liberal arts colleges.
In some ways, this approach makes sense. Those institutions tend to be closer to urban areas and offer scale. If you’re going to send a team to the halls of higher education to forge partnerships or recruit some talent, it’s easier to send them to a larger institution within easy striking distance of corporate headquarters.
There is also a perception that the liberal arts colleges are not providing much in the way of career preparation and are somewhat slow to change, reluctant to try new things, and difficult to engage with.
The pandemic has created a moment to rethink these assumptions.
For starters, the pandemic reduced the importance of location. Experiments in remote work and learning over the past 20 months have shown that it does not matter where you are located. Technological advancements around videoconferencing, messaging and collaboration make it possible to easily find and connect with talent whether someone is in the big city or rural college towns. Our faculty have also learned to use technology to create more ways to connect with our classrooms and our students.
At my own institution, we have students working with companies during the semester. We have established The Red Frame Lab, an entrepreneurship and consulting lab, where students learn design thinking and then do consulting projects for businesses and organizations. Our students are gaining valuable skills and companies get to know our students.
We are also in the early stages of a partnership with the experiential learning platform Riipen that has also allowed us to provide real-world internships that can take place throughout the entire school year, not just the summer, providing a deeper and more valuable internship experience, including virtual internships that are embedded in courses.
Second, contrary to a lot of thinking, liberal arts skills have never been more aligned with much of what employers need. Burning Glass data on the foundational skills of the digital economy feature a list of liberal arts skills like critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and analytic abilities.
Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, put this well in a recent Wall Street Journal article when he stated that the biggest skill challenge of a more remote/hybrid work environment is, “clarity of writing. If you don’t have that, you can have people thinking they’re on the same page when they actually have different understanding.”
What Mullenweg describes is not just writing skills, but also clarity of thought and the ability to communicate with a wide range of people.
Additionally, the changing nature of work and markets has raised the stakes for companies in developing a workforce that is adaptable, flexible, and can learn new ways of thinking and doing things. That’s precisely what a liberal arts education trains students to do.
Further tipping the scales in favor of liberal arts colleges, our students are hard workers. A common lament among companies is that they are desperate to attract recent college graduates with a good work ethic. A common strategy has been to hire athletes, who have a track record of showing up on time, working as a team, and pushing through adversity.
Walk onto any liberal arts campus and you will be impressed by the students and amazed at all the things they are doing. Our classes are small and taught by full-time faculty who push our students and unlock their potential. We are residential because we want students to learn how to engage with the full community and engage in extracurricular activities. On our campuses, nearly everyone is involved outside the classroom developing skills, developing a strong work ethic, and learning how to deal with challenges.
And we are diverse, which means that our students show up able and excited to work with people who are different from them. Sure, large universities are also diverse, but on a small residential campus our students have to learn to live and work in diverse teams.
Finally, most liberal arts colleges are devoting significant resources to their career centers and to other career-related activities. This creates willing partners for employers who want to partner more closely. At my institution we have multiple centers focused on preparing students for careers, including our Knowlton Center for Career Exploration and Denison Edge, which we have actually opened up to students from other liberal arts colleges.
The bottom line? There are a lot of smart, talented, motivated students in liberal arts colleges—and now companies have more access to that talent than ever.
As HR directors at big companies are thinking about this looming issue around talent acquisition, development, and retention, they would be doing themselves a favor by taking a close look at liberal arts colleges. It’s never been easier to discover the talent there. Now presidents, provosts, CEOs, and corporate HR departments must work together to seize this opportunity.
Thursday, November 18, 2021
More from Adam on the college experience
The latest from Denison University President Adam Weinberg.:
Time to Rethink How Students Experience College and Successfully Launch Their Careers
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
A new college arms race?
Adam Weinberg's latest Op-Ed:
From the LA Times
Two of the most persistent challenges facing the U.S. are a lack of meaningful jobs and growing income inequality. And these problems are only getting worse.
Sure, there are jobs out there, at fast-food restaurants or fulfillment warehouses desperate to hire someone — anyone. But what we really need are meaningful jobs that anchor people. This means positions that pay a livable wage, provide benefits and stability, and enhance skills so that people can eventually move on to even better jobs.
Without a college degree, it’s hard to get one of those meaningful jobs. Those who join the workforce straight out of high school used to have an easier time finding steady, well-paying work. But opportunities — especially in manufacturing — are disappearing or being automated out of existence. According to U.S. census data, workers with bachelor’s degrees earn roughly twice as much as those with high school educations.
“Work” is rapidly bifurcating into meaningful jobs and crummy jobs, which only increases the gap between the haves and the have-nots — and fuels income inequality.
We can’t begin to tame these intertwined problems until we start doing a better job of making college more affordable for lower- and middle-income Americans. That means making sure students can get through college with as little debt as possible, because debt creates problems of its own. We could start by doubling the annual maximum amount of federal financial aid available through Pell Grants, taking it from $6,500 to $13,000.
When the program was established nearly 50 years ago, its $1,400 limit was enough to cover 75% of the cost of attending a four-year public college.
Today, even the most generous Pell Grant only pays for about 28% of the same education. But a $13,000 grant would cover almost 60% of the average cost to attend a four-year public college, and 26% of the average cost to attend a four-year private, nonprofit college.
Schools also have a role to play in bringing the college affordability crisis under control. U.S. colleges with strong admissions pipelines and large endowments need to commit to meeting the financial needs of every student they admit.
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About 75 schools currently promise to meet 100% of students’ demonstrated financial needs. This list includes the Stanfords and Ivies of the world, as well as Denison University, the liberal arts college I lead in Granville, Ohio. But given that there are nearly 4,000 colleges across the country, there’s a lot of room for improvement here. Schools that are in a position to make a difference should make a difference.
Most schools use a combination of grants and federal loans to meet a student’s full demonstrated need. Colleges with resources should use their large and growing endowments to replace loans with grants that don’t need to be paid back.
The hidden and not-so-hidden costs that occur once a student arrives should also be part of the financial aid conversation. They can easily exceed $15,000 on most campuses and can include comprehensive meal plans, books and supplies, and health insurance.
Schools need to move away from the “facilities arms race” that characterized the last few decades and embrace a “financial aid arms race.” A university shouldn’t be measured by how plush its dorms are or how grand the athletic facilities seem, but by how generous its financial aid packages are.
It can happen. It’s a matter of schools taking a hard look at their current endowments and asking: Are we really using them in ways that benefit students the most?
We also need to give families more transparency about how much it costs to attend a particular college. Many families shy away from private colleges because the listed tuition price is not affordable. But these colleges also provide the most financial aid, which means that the average family pays only 46% of the listed price, and lower-income families often pay much less.
In addition, most students start looking at colleges during their junior year of high school but don’t know the actual cost of attending until after they are admitted, often in the spring of their senior year when they may have already made up their minds about where they are going.
There has to be a way for colleges to reveal their true cost earlier in the selection process so families can know which ones they can afford. This is the kind of issue that an organization like the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling could take on because of its mission to influence higher education policy.
The private sector can also help put a college education within reach of more people. Many schools shy away from financial arrangements such as income-sharing agreements, in which a funder basically agrees to bankroll a student in exchange for a cut of the person’s future earnings. Higher-education institutions should not reflexively dismiss such approaches. We should be open to working with entrepreneurs and innovators to develop nontraditional ways for students to be able to afford a college education.
College affordability and income inequality are inextricably linked. Putting a college education within reach of more people will go a long way toward making society more equitable.
Adam Weinberg is the president of Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
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