--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Host: This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID, and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info. And if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft. LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.
--:-- Host: Over the last few years, undergraduate education has been experiencing what's been called a student slump. Enrollment at universities and colleges across the country has been steadily declining. But there's one type of higher ed institution that's bucking the trend, faith-based schools. For this episode of Morning Wire, we talk to Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham. She'll explain the losses colleges have been facing and explore why so many religious schools have been able to avoid the student slump.
--:-- Host: Thanks for waking up with us. It's January 15th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire. The current administration's New Year's goals are to tax, spend, and turn a blind eye to inflation. If that's at odds with your goals, get in touch with the experts at Birch Gold today. Birch Gold makes it easy to convert an IRA or 401k into an IRA and precious metals. Text WIRE to 989898 to claim your free info kit on gold and talk to one of their precious metal experts. Birch Gold has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, thousands of happy customers, and countless five-star reviews. You can trust Birch Gold to help protect your savings. Text WIRE to 989898 today.
--:-- Megan Basham: So, Megan, we've heard a lot about the struggles in higher ed recently, and that might be a good place for us to start just to get some context. What does the landscape for undergraduate enrollment look like across the board right now?
--:-- Megan Basham: You know, it does not look good. It's been in significant decline for some time. And we can look at the pandemic, of course, and we know that enrollment took a massive toll during that period between 2020 and 2022. In particular, one million fewer students registered for college. Now, that's probably not surprising given that many potential students didn't want to pay for school if classes weren't going to meet in person. But the recent numbers show that the decline hasn't stopped, even though most schools have pretty much returned to normal operations. Enrollment was down another 1% last academic year. So what that means is that U.S. colleges overall have seen a drop of about 7.5% in just the last three years.
--:-- Megan Basham: So you said this problem started before COVID though.
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, that's right. It actually started well before COVID. We can trace it all the way back to about 2012. So over the last 10 years, undergraduate enrollment has seen a total of 13% decline. And it's important to note that this decrease has been happening across all types of higher education, private nonprofit, your standard state schools, your for-profit colleges, and even community colleges. In fact, the Chronicle of Higher Education has referred to all of this as the Great Contraction.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, when we look at the landscape, there are a variety of factors behind it. You might, for example, look to the rising cost of tuition, the declining birth rates that are leading to a drop in college age population overall. But there is one noteworthy outlier, as you said, and that's faith-based schools. And many of them have actually been reporting record enrollment.
--:-- Megan Basham: In fact, the Detroit Free Press reviewed registration rates for 34 four-year schools that are part of the Conservative Association of Christian Colleges. And they found that they're up around 8 over the last decade. Other Christian college associations that are less conservative also reported growth, but not quite as much. They're up around 3%. And when you look at individual Christian colleges, you find that quite a number of those are doing phenomenally well.
--:-- Megan Basham: To give you one example, Michigan schools have seen some of the worst declines in the country. But applications for Hillsdale College, which is known for being distinctively Christian and conservative, are up 53%. And that's actually allowed them to go from a 47% acceptance rate to a 17% acceptance rate in just six years. According to the federal database, enrollment for Cedarville University, which is a very conservative Baptist school, has gone up 25% in the last 10 years.
--:-- Megan Basham: So when you look at studies overall nationwide, they find that the more distinctly religious the school, that is, the more it adheres to traditional doctrine and requires regular faith practices like chapel, the better it's doing in terms of enrollment.
--:-- Megan Basham: So it sounds like students and maybe their parents are seeking out these schools in particular. What's attracting them?
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, you know, for starters, in some cases, it might actually be a backlash to some of the trends we've seen recently in mainstream universities. A lot of parents have concerns about the kind of values that their child might absorb at a traditional liberal arts school. For example, we know that it's not uncommon now for public universities to offer courses on pornography and things like that. So a lot of parents just might not be interested in paying for that.
--:-- Megan Basham: But there's also a case for religious schools that isn't necessarily religious. And that has to do with the resurgence of the classical approach to education. So the trend for the last 20 or so years in most secular colleges, whether they be private or public, has been to shed curriculum requirements. So when you think back 30 or 40 years ago, half of an undergraduate's classes might be made up of core curriculum in the humanities and civics, philosophy, literature, we think of it as the well-rounded education model.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, now the trend has been to an a la carte model that centers on classes that are tightly focused on preparing the student for a very specific career path. I talked to Jeremy Tate, who is founder and CEO of the Classical Learning Test, and that's a humanities-focused alternative to the SAT and ACT. And he said that just as we're seeing a renewed interest in classical education that's fueling the homeschooling boom, it could also be fueling faith-based higher ed, as those schools do often tend to embrace that older classical model.
--:-- Megan Basham: This would be the case with St. John's in Annapolis. There's no majors, you know, at a few of these. It is just one common major that is a deep dive into the Western intellectual tradition, into the great books. And so you graduate having read, you know, from Plato and from Aquinas and from, you know, John Locke and Rousseau and really kind all the great minds.
--:-- Megan Basham: So that's a hallmark. The other, this would be the case for Hillsdale or for the University of Dallas, Benedictine is a very rigorous, serious core curriculum that is often at least half of all of your courses you're going to take. A lot of this push at the more conventional schools to drop the general requirements that were once a core part of higher education has arisen from opportunities in the STEM fields in particular. So that's your science, technology, engineering, math.
--:-- Megan Basham: But I spoke to Hillsdale president, Dr. Larry Arn, and he believes that a philosophical commitment to focusing on understanding itself as a good, as opposed to just acquiring expertise for one industry actually does provide the basis to understand science and technology better. In fact, Arne had some sharp criticism even for Republicans in the Bush administration who he felt also treated higher education as utilitarian.
--:-- Megan Basham: Margaret Spellings, she was Bush's policy person on education from first days in Texas as governor, right up through the presidency. And he appointed her the head of the Department of Education. And what she says, they took it off the website, but I have a copy because I made a stink about it, is that the purpose of education, we have to spunk up education and make it a lot better so we can compete with China.
--:-- Megan Basham: And the point that I made was that turns the students into factors of production, which is how we think of them these days. That's what all this STEM stuff is about, right? Whereas STEM is not different. I've said it 10 times. STEM is a thing to know. And you'll never understand it fully unless you know it for its own sake for the beauty it can give.
--:-- Megan Basham: So Hillsdale and schools like it seem to be attracting students that similarly reject thinking of college simply in terms of how it serves their career goals.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now that's interesting because you often hear people say that general education doesn't prepare students to be competitive in the modern workplace. Do you have any sense of how well these programs are preparing students to compete in that sense?
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, I wondered that myself and I asked Tate about it. And he said he's actually seeing employers who find certain kinds of degrees from mainstream schools as a potential drawback. I've talked to a number of other CEOs and employers who they view a lot of degrees from a lot of institutions actually as liabilities, right? I mean, you get a resume, you get an application, and they've spent four years ingesting a bunch of bad ideas and ingesting this concept that they're oppressed and marginalized and everything else.
--:-- Megan Basham: And they graduate with a sense of entitlement, no serious core knowledge about anything. And they haven't been, you're supposed to graduate college more responsible, more open-minded, open to viewpoint diversity. They're not getting any viewpoint diversity at all.
--:-- Megan Basham: I also spoke to Paul McNulty, who is president of Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and he said something similar, though he focused on the individual ethics that a faith-based education that you find at places like Grove City will naturally tend to emphasize.
--:-- Megan Basham: Our students are very successful in getting hired because even as they go into large corporate environments that would not in any way want to affirm a specific kind of Christian worldview, nevertheless, they look at our students and they see them as ethical. They see them as compassionate, as people who have a humility to them. We sort of emphasize the idea of intellectual humility, and that's very appealing.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, what about the fact that America is becoming more secular? Is that a concern for these colleges going forward when it comes to enrollment?
--:-- Megan Basham: You know, it's not really, and I'll get to why in just a second. But I will say that what they are concerned about is their ability to maintain the standards that are attracting students. So many of these schools require students to sign a statement of faith or a code of conduct that adheres to biblical views on gender and sexuality.
--:-- Megan Basham: And there are already lawsuits that are in the pipeline from activist groups who want to see these schools either do away with those standards or lose federal funding. And the Biden administration has signaled that it's very open to doing that with the Title IX education law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.
--:-- Megan Basham: Already, we've seen some executive orders that classify LGBT identification under that prohibition. So that would be a big blow to some of these schools.
--:-- Megan Basham: On the other hand, there are some like Hillsdale and Grove City who famously refuse to take any federal funding for that very reason. And they also believe that their stance to forego government money actually does help attract applicants because it builds trust with prospective families who are looking for that kind of independence?
--:-- Megan Basham: Families know that we take our independence seriously to the point that we're willing to forego the kind of financial benefit it might be. Just as an aside, there was probably somewhere between $5 and $10 million that we could have received with COVID funds that we didn't get.
--:-- Megan Basham: And it's those kinds of sacrifices that over the years have helped us really from a brand perspective. People just realizing that, see, this is a school that has convictions, is willing to stick with its convictions, and they see that it sort of plays itself out in the way in which we go about our academic work, too.
--:-- Megan Basham: So if these schools don't take any federal money, though, which, of course, includes federal student loans, that really limits who they can afford to admit. That sounds like it would be a disadvantage from a business standpoint.
--:-- Megan Basham: You know, I wondered about that as well. And both Arne and McNulty told me that Hillsdale and Grove City are able to offset any disadvantage with endowments. But obviously, not every school is going to be able to do that.
--:-- Megan Basham: For those that are, though, they said that essentially donors are enthusiastic to give where they feel that their money is going to be helping to fuel a mission that otherwise wouldn't be possible.
--:-- Megan Basham: Here's what Arne told me about that.
--:-- Megan Basham: A pretty big place now, and it's a movement of citizens, people who want to strike a blow, who want to save something valuable, something they love. And they feel like this is a way to do it because it's the same reason why a student would come here. If you can get into Hillsdale College these days, you can get in just about anywhere. Why would they come here? Well, it's hard, and they have to do it. That's how we advertise it, right? Well, people who support us, We're very clear, just like with the entering students, what is it we're trying to get done? What are the goals? What are the principles on which we proceed? And what are the objectives? And then that makes it possible for people to join us.
--:-- Megan Basham: And then going back to kind of where we started in talking about how declining birth rates have been part of driving this enrollment crash, McNulty said something that was particularly interesting about why he thinks the success of religious schools could continue even as the United States is becoming generally more secular.
--:-- Megan Basham: So you'll often hear the argument that demography is destiny in relation to the political landscape because of issues like immigration. Well, in this case, because religious people do tend to have many more children than their secular counterparts, it could give religious schools an enduring advantage.
--:-- Megan Basham: The reality is Christians are having children and they believe very strongly in family life and that being central to the calling of what needs to be human and to be human in a way that is biblically faithful.
--:-- Megan Basham: I think that it may be the case over time that this trend continues because that's where the kids are. So it'll be interesting to keep an eye on these schools over the next couple of decades to see if McNulty is correct and they continue to fare well.
--:-- Host: Right. Well, it's interesting to see the rise of this alternative college landscape. Megan, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Megan Basham: Anytime.
--:-- Host: That was Daily Wire culture reporter, Megan Basham. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
