Making the Case for Advancing Age Inclusivity

How do you present the most effective case for promoting age-inclusivity to your campus leadership? Educational institutions differ in their missions and resources; and these factors affect their readiness to becoming more age-inclusive. This presentation suggests that the best approaches are tailored to intentionally and robustly advance your institution’s values, mission, and strategic plan as demonstrated through your proposed age-inclusivity initiative. We review the persuasive arguments for increasing the focus on age-inclusivity in higher education, including securing increasing external research and development funding, supporting employees and alums exploration of encore careers, attracting more students in light of demographic shifts, contributions to overall campus diversity, etc. Identifying the most compelling arguments for particular institutions, consistent with their missions, is connected to the various resources in the AFU toolkit. Finally, we show examples from a range of institutions who successfully made their cases for embracing age inclusivity and have not looked back.

A product of prestige?: “Race unknown” and competitive admissions in the United States

Policy researchers have difficulty understanding stratification in enrollment in US higher education when race and ethnicity data are plagued by missing values. Students who decline to ethnoracially self-identify become part of a “race unknown” reporting category. In undergraduate enrollment, “race unknown” students are not randomly distributed and are highest among the most selective universities. In this “Policy Research Note,” we investigate these patterns at US law schools to understand if they are driven by selectivity. We find that the most competitive law schools, on average, report 8% of their students are race unknown, double the rate of other law schools. We argue that race unknown enrollment cannot be ignored when studying ethnoracial enrollments in higher education because it varies systematically by institutional type and may mask actual rates of ethnoracial diversity. We posit that the race unknown category is likely produced by a combination of individual and institutional processes. Individual applicants may resist disclosing their ethnoracial identities, perhaps because of a perceived threat to their chances of admission. Additionally, institutional actors may willfully ignore race unknown students (not following up upon enrollment) because this category may enhance the appearance of campus diversity by diminishing the percentages of students in over-represented ethnoracial groups. In this way, high rates of race unknown students may be a product of prestigious and highly competitive educational processes.

Beyond Lead Generation

International education is rooted in the ideals of diversity, inclusion, and cross-cultural understanding. However, the industry falls short of these ideals during the student recruitment process, which is often concentrated in just a few source markets, with impersonal systems and practices. New technology, notably artificial intelligence, is creating new opportunities for institutions to address this challenge. New platforms can spread the attention and engagement of university recruiters to every corner of the globe, deliver a more personalized experience to prospective applicants that have historically been ignored, improve campus diversity, and lessen the industry's climate impact by reducing the need for travel. Insights can be drawn from the high technology industry to create trust and scale, adequate venture capital is available globally, and organizations such as the Groningen Declaration Network (GDN) can provide the necessary governance. Together, these factors will enable a global electronic marketplace for education with greater diversity and personalization.