Stats Watch

It's not surprising that community colleges lag behind their four-year counterparts when it comes to utilizing the internet to recruit and admit students. What might be surprising is how large that gap can be.

According to the "E-Recruiting Practices Report" from Noel-Levitz, just over 10 percent of two-year colleges surveyed buy students' e-mail addresses, compared to more than three quarters of four-year colleges and universities.

Ted Long, president of Elizabethtown College, a school of 1,600 students in central Pennsylvania, has seen many students go from economic struggle to success thanks to higher education. "It is a way for them to essentially move up the ladder compared to their parents," he says of lower-income students. "We have an alumnus in New York who is already vice president for an investment company, managing the energy portfolio, and he's supervising folks from Stanford and Harvard. He came from an ordinary background. There are stories like that all the time."

Following a pattern that has continued for several years, median senior-level administrative salaries outpaced inflation in the last year, growing by 3.5 percent from the 2004 to 2005 school years, according to a new survey from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).

A new report by the James Irvine Foundation raises questions about campus demographic figures. Each year, a growing number of students list their race or ethnicity as "unknown." Nationally that figure has risen from 3.2 percent enrolled in 1991 to 5.9 percent in 2001, a nearly 100 percent increase.

Licensing Dollars Boost Higher Education's Bottom Line

A new report from the nonprofit Pew Hispanic Center may be welcomed as a step forward in efforts to enroll underrepresented minorities--or as a call for work that still needs to be done.

The report, released last month, looked at Hispanic first-time, full-time freshman enrollment in the country's most heavily Hispanic states (Texas, Florida, California, New Jersey, Illinois, Arizona, and New York). Indeed, Hispanic enrollment in those places increased by an average of 24 percent between 1996 and 2001. In Florida, the number of Hispanic freshmen grew by more than 50 percent.

Prospective students aren't all that picky about their admissions websites expectations--namely easy navigation and functions like campus visit scheduling. Yet, according to the 7th annual Enrollment Power Index (EPI) from the National Research Center for College & University Admissions (NRCCUA), they aren't likely to find everything they need.