This is your final Enrollment Growth Briefing from Helix Education. I’m Eric Olsen.

And I’m so excited to share that Helix Education is now a part of RNL, the leading provider of higher education enrollment management, student success, and fundraising solutions.

We’ve loved learning with you over these past 1,100 episodes. 1,100. Oh my goodness. What a crazy number. These daily enrollment growth devotionals have been such an amazing reminder to me of all of the innovation and passion happening all across the country. Thank you for listening, and thank you for your role in being those people, building such beautiful experiences for our students.

So find me on LinkedIn (@ericolsencreative) and drop me a line to say hello if you’ve enjoyed the show. And then head on over to RNL.com. They have an amazing resources section with great blogs, webinars, and interviews. So while this show may be ending, the learning won’t stop.

And may you forever continue to fight the good enrollment growth fight at your institution.

Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with COVID funds from the American Rescue Plan helping keep higher ed’s finances afloat during the down enrollment years of the pandemic, 65% of Chief Business Officers believe their institutions will be financially stable over the next decade.

Reported by EdSurge, new virtual reality games suggest that we’re only scratching the surface as to what immersive education will allow us to teach. For instance, Shakespeare-VR out of Carnegie Mellon University is based out of the premise that Shakespeare is meant to be performed, and merely reading the lines in a classroom doesn’t fully help students understand the art form of Shakespeare’s work.

Reported by Higher Ed Dive, the next generation of this concept has begun, with the acquisition of University of Antelope Island in California, whose physical campus will be digitally replicated to become a metaversity for their online student population.

Reported by Higher Ed Dive, Utahns Against Hunger surveyed nearly 5,700 students for this report, which also shows that this food insecurity disproportionately affected students of color, with nearly half experiencing food insecurity.

Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with half of all confirmed monkeypox cases in the U.S. having been reported in the past two weeks, it is becoming increasingly likely that our institutions will have to deal with both Monkeypox and COVID protocols when students return this fall.

Reported by Inside Higher Ed, with tenure-track faculty options falling dramatically across the board, Brandeis is evolving their curriculum to make sure their graduates have solid postdoctoral opportunity pathways. This includes funding both on- and off-campus internships to help students diversify their experiences.

Reported by Inside Higher Ed, while Bowdoin College was one of the first to adopt test-optional admissions back in 1969, it is now one of the first to provide a need-blind admissions process to international students. A 57.4% return on their endowment investments in 2021, bringing their total endowment to $2.72 billion dollars, may have been a driving force behind this decision.

Reported by Inside Higher Ed, a Bay View Analytics survey shows that 22% of courses in Spring 2022 required the use of open educational resources while only 33% of faculty now believe that “students learn better from print materials”.

Reported by Higher Ed Dive, as Congress is determining whether or not to allow Pell Grants to cover short-term academic programs, specifically those that lead to a postsecondary credential, online-only programs are currently absent from consideration.