By next summer, colleges have to prove it. Under the Department of Education's earnings accountability rule, undergraduate programs must show their graduates out-earn a typical high school diploma holder, or risk losing access to federal financial aid. David B. Johnson has done the math on which cohorts get caught first, and he is treating a compliance deadline as the forcing function his field needed.
Johnson is Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management at Indiana University Bloomington, where he enrolled 10,127 freshmen last year. He led IU to become the first Big Ten institution to go test optional, then watched COVID erase the headline when everyone else followed. Six years of data later he can tell you exactly what happened to those students. He also runs a program that brings eighth graders to campus overnight, an idea his own admissions team came up with.
Highlights:
- Why he refuses the rabbit hole of despair, and what he does with a problem overnight instead
- The three-part reframe he brought back from a summer of conferences: storytelling, ninety-second self-shot video, and outcomes over experiences
- The three questions he wants every recent alum to answer on camera
- What the new earnings rule means for programs that fall below the line, and which cohort is first
- IU Bound: eighth graders on campus overnight, funded by ATI, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Balfour
- What six years of test optional data actually shows about retention and graduation
- Where he lands on the faculty-versus-access fight over academic preparedness
- Why retention analytics moved into enrollment management while first-year experience moved out
- Orientation shoppers: 20% at the pandemic peak, 13% this cycle
- The hard feedback at Alabama that changed his trajectory, and what his boss actually said
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