New Policy on Missionary Age

As everyone has probably heard by now, at the Saturday Morning Session of General Conference, President Monson announced the minimum age for missionary service is now 18 for Elders, and 19 for Sisters. I want to examine briefly how this could potentially impact LDS higher education.

The most obvious effect of the change in policy is that more missionaries will in fact begin their missions at a younger age. Though President Monson didn't say the lower age requirement was meant to be a new standard, as soon as the announcement was made, my sister immediately started discussing whether or not her son should leave earlier on his mission. My nephew is 18 now, and was not planning on leaving until next August when he turns 19, but now he will probably finish out his first year at school and leave in May or June. Had this rule been in effect before he started college, he probably wouldn't have bothered getting a year of school in before his mission (as would have also been the case with myself). I imagine most young men will feel similarly, and as 19 was effectively the standard start age before, 18 will probably be the standard starting age in the future though as President Monson emphasized, this need not be the case for everyone. While we've always had a large contingent of missionaries that went on their missions straight out of high school, I feel like a significant percentage, if not a majority, had attended school for at least a semester before leaving on their missions, just because their birthdays prevented them from serving sooner. (Based on BYU's one-year retention rate, shown below, one might conclude that in fact only 15% of BYU students leave to serve missions after their Freshman year, or roughly 30% of men, meaning closer to 70% go straight out of high school, but this number sounds too high to me, so I need to research more closely how this number is measured before I draw that conclusion.) With a lower age requirement, this will probably become more rare, meaning most missionaries will not begin college until after their mission.

So what will be the effect on LDS higher education? I can imagine several areas where it could have an impact. The first might actually be an increased demand for education at the Church schools. Though I only have anecdotal evidence, my experience has been that there is a greater desire to attend one of the Church schools after a mission than there was before. This was the case with many of my mission companions, who attended community colleges near home (or even prestigious schools like the University of Utah) before their missions, but tried to transfer to BYU after their return because that is where so many of their mission friends were going. Of course many did not want to go through the hassle of transferring to a new school upon their return. If however, they had that interaction with other missionaries that seems to inspire so many to want to attend the Church schools, before they began their education anywhere, it is possible that the Church schools would have been higher on their radar. We might even get more missionaries out of the process, as some young men who wanted to serve missions lose focus during their first year of college, and these added return missionaries would also be more likely to want to attend Church schools. The effect may only be marginal, but even a marginal effect can put a great amount of pressure on the Church system to make room for more students.

The reverse could also be true. Many members prefer the Church schools because they know it will be easy to defer for two years without applying for readmission. Not needing to take a two-year break in the middle of school may encourage many to attend non-LDS schools that would have otherwise brought complications. However, I believe this potential effect will be minimal, leading to a net increase in demand for Church schools. If that demand is not met by the Church institutions through increased capacity, that would definitely play well for schools like Southern Virginia University or the Desert Valley Academy, trying to capture that excess demand. It could also increase the perceived exclusivity of the Church schools, by increasing admission applications, and thereby lowering the acceptance rate (a factor in the US News and World Report rankings).

More than the increased demand however, the area where I expect the change in age requirements to have the biggest impact is in the 6-year graduation rates for the Church schools. While a bachelor degree theoretically only takes four years to complete, it is no secret in higher education that students frequently take longer to finish their degrees. For this reason, the Department of Education tracks four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates. This figure features prominently in the US News and World Report rankings, counting it for 80 percent of the retention score, which is in turn 20 percent of the score for National Universities (of which BYU-Provo is one) and 25 percent of the score for Regional Colleges (which is where BYU-Hawaii and BYU-Idaho fall). The other 20 percent of the retention score is the freshmen retention rate. A significant improvement in the graduation rates could bring all of the Church schools up in their ranking. BYU's six-year graduation rate, while fairly decent, has long been hampered by two effects: woman dropping out of school after getting married, and men taking longer than six years to graduate. While the change in the minimum missionary age will have little direct effect on the former factor, the age change could substantially affect the latter.

For example, it is not uncommon for a student to need an extra semester to graduate due to missing a prerequisite for a class, especially in some of the more structured majors, where one class leads to another. At a normal university, a student taking an extra semester to graduate may hurt the four-year graduation rate, but it does not affect the six-year rate, which is what the US News and World Report ranking takes into consideration. If however that same student also takes two years off in the middle of their schooling (as is the case with the elders), then the extra semester puts them over the six-year mark. Even without needing an extra semester to get the right prerequisites, for many missionaries the timing of the call would also frequently cause them to miss a semester (as was the case with myself--I attended school for a year, left for my mission in October because of a September birthday, and two years later I came home too late to enter for the fall semester, so I lost a semester without experiencing the prerequisite problem). Multiply this by the number of return missionaries at a school like BYU, and this can have a significant impact on the school's six-year graduation rate and potentially its ranking. If however, the clock doesn't start until after one's mission, as I expect will become more the norm at the Church schools with this new policy in place, then an extra semester will not affect the schools ranking as most missionaries won't matriculate until after their missions. We may be able to see some marginal increase in the ranking of the Church schools as an effect.

Of course the reverse may be true of sister missionaries. Though traditionally some sisters have interrupted school to serve, just as often it seems they finish school before serving, both because of the timing of a birthday, and the decreased urgency of serving a mission. If sisters start opting to leave for their missions at the younger age, those who had previously been finishing school before their missions may not be able to. Add to that the fact that more sisters may serve as a result of their lower age requirements, as I suspect will be the case with marriage not being as likely at this younger age, and we will have even more woman interrupting their schooling, which will put negative pressure on the six-year graduation rate. Overall however, I expect the net effect will be positive, as we will probably still see fewer sisters than elders serving overall, and as sisters only serve for 18 months, a lost semester is less likely to put them over the mark as two years does for men.

Obviously it will be some time before we will know the full effect of the change at the Church schools (and for that matter at other schools with a large LDS presence). For now, here are the graduation and retention rates at the three ranked Church schools, as well as some of their peers in the US News and World Report rankings, and Harvard as a reference for what the scores look like at the top of the list.

	US News and World Report Rank	Four-Year Graduation Rate	Five-Year Graduation Rate	Six-Year Graduation Rate	Full-Time Student First-Year Retention Rate	Part-Time Student First-Year Retention Rate
Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)	Ranked #1 National Universities	87	96	97	98	N/A
Brigham Young University--Provo (Provo, UT)	Ranked #68 National Universities	31	54	78	85	53
Clemson University (Clemson, SC)	Ranked #68 National Universities	50	72	76	89	59
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey--New Brunswick (Piscataway, NJ)	Ranked #68 National Universities	53	70	77	91	56
University of Minnesota--Twin Cities (Minneapolis, MN)	Ranked #68 National Universities	46	66	70	89	60
Howard Payne University (Brownwood, TX)	Ranked #13 Regional Colleges West	22	35	39	67	17
Menlo College (Atherton, CA)	Ranked #13 Regional Colleges West	29	33	33	71	0
Northwest University (Kirkland, WA)	Ranked #13 Regional Colleges West	44	54	55	70	25
Brigham Young University--Idaho (Rexburg, ID)	Ranked #16 Regional Colleges West	25	41	55	71	55
Brigham Young University--Hawaii (Laie Oahu, HI)	Ranked #17 Regional Colleges West	28	45	56	58	17
East Texas Baptist University (Marshall, TX)	Ranked #17 Regional Colleges West	27	33	36	64	0
University of Montana - Western (Dillon, MT)	Ranked #17 Regional Colleges West	18	24	29	68	75

Above data came from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

CES Firesides

Well, it has been a long time since I've posted anything. Sorry to any regular readers. (I don't expect there are any as I haven't posted in over two years.) A lot has changed in the field of Latter-day Saint (LDS) Education since my last post, but a lot has also stayed the same. This is kind of my relaunch for the blog. I hope to be able to update this blog regularly to discuss some of those changes as well as to post new information as it becomes available.

For today, I want to take a look at what I consider to be an interesting trend. Two weeks ago, on  9 September 2012, Elder Holland gave the CES Fireside from Dixie State College. It was a great talk and worth listening to, but what I want to focus on is not the substance of the talk, but the location from which it was given.

For those who don't know, the CES Firesides (CES = Church Education System) are a series of talks put on by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints several times a year, aimed primarily at young single adults (YSA) aged 18-30, but college students of any age and marital status are also encouraged to attend. The speakers are almost always chosen from the top leadership of the Church. Frequently, the speaker is a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, but they also include members of the Quorums of the Seventy, or an auxiliary leader such as the General Relief Society President. The specific topics vary, but most talks touch on a similar theme: i.e. that our college years are a pivotal time in our lives in which the decisions we make (especially the decision of who we marry) can set our path for eternity. It's definitely a message that the Church wants every YSA to hear.

The Church used to sponsor six firesides a year, but lowered that number to five in 2003, which is where it has stayed ever since. The firesides are translated into a dozen or so languages and broadcast to Church buildings all over the world. They can also be viewed online, so the location of the speaker when the fireside is actually given doesn't matter that much, but as one can imagine, the Church likes to give as many people as possible the opportunity to see these live. This is especially true when one considers how large the Church is and how rare it is to see one of the top Church leaders in one's lifetime. Even Brigham Young University (BYU) students, who would appear to be spoiled with the frequency with which they have Church leaders visit to give devotional addresses, for the most part leave Utah after they graduate, at which point their opportunities to see Church leaders in person will diminish greatly. So the Church chooses to broadcast these firesides from those locations where the largest number of LDS students can benefit. As the Church's flagship institution, BYU is clearly at the top of that list, but as Elder Holland's address two weeks ago demonstrates, there are several other locations that also have large numbers of LDS students.

Though this blog is primarily concerned with identifying LDS educational institutions, it is interested to note the interplay between the Church and secular institutions. For many years, the Church has run Seminary and Institute programs as a way of supplementing the secular education available at public schools and most private universities. (Seminary is for secondary school students and Institute is for students in higher education.) Seminaries and Institutes definitely constitute an area worth examining in LDS Education. It is partly to supplement the instruction one gets from the Institute programs that the Church sponsors the CES Firesides, so it is only natural that in choosing a location from which to broadcast, the Church has occasionally done so from its own Institute buildings. To see how common this practice is, I went back and looked up the location for every CES Fireside from 2001 to the present. The findings are below.

BYU (Provo, UT)	42	68.85%
BYU-Idaho (including one time as Ricks College; Rexburg, ID)	3	4.92%
LDS Conference Center (Salt Lake City, UT)	3	4.92%
Ogden Institute of Religion (Ogden, UT)	2	3.28%
University of Utah Institute of Religion (Salt Lake City, UT)	2	3.28%
BYU-Hawaii (Laie, HI)	1	1.64%
Dixie State College (St. George, UT)	1	1.64%
Mesa, Arizona	1	1.64%
Moscow, Idaho	1	1.64%
Oakland, California	1	1.64%
Pocatello Institute of Religion (Pocatello, ID)	1	1.64%
Salt Lake Tabernacle (Salt Lake City, UT)	1	1.64%
The Mormon Center (Sacramento, CA)	1	1.64%
Utah State University (Logan, UT)	1	1.64%
Total	61	100.00%

Of the 61 CES firesides examined, it is not surprising that 42 were broadcast from BYU in Provo, UT. If one combines the three Salt Lake locations (University of Utah, the Conference Center, and the Salt Lake Tabernacle) Salt Lake City easily becomes the second most common location with 6 CES firesides. Anyone familiar with LDS demographics would not be surprised by the other locations being spread out through the western United States. Though several firesides do not appear to have been broadcast from specific universities (or Institute buildings associated with specific universities), it appears the most likely target live audience included students at nearby state schools with a large number of LDS students such as Weber State University, Arizona State University, University of Idaho, and Idaho State University. The two California locations have no single university with an obviously large LDS student body, but each location is close to several large schools such as the University of California-Berkeley, University of California-San Francisco, California State University-East Bay, California State University-Sacramento, and University of California-Davis. Combined these schools probably boast a respectably sized LDS student body, which may not be on par with the enrollment at state schools inside the Mormon corridor (Utah, Idaho, and Arizona), but which are sizable nonetheless.

The current trend will probably continue for the foreseeable future, with the majority of CES Firesides being broadcast from BYU, with occasional visits to other pockets of LDS students in the western United States. Other cities likely to host a fireside based on the number of LDS students could include Las Vegas, NV; Seattle, WA; or Los Angeles, CA. The East Coast is a less-likely location. Thriving Latter-day Saint YSA communities do exist in New York, NY and Washington, DC, though these consist more of young professionals and graduate students than of the undergraduates that typically make up the target audience for these firesides. As it grows, Southern Virginia University might also be a possible location in the future. With that, I hope everyone looks forward to the next fireside in November, scheduled to be given by Bishop Gérald Caussé. I'll update when I know the location.

The Higher Education List 2010

I guess a good place to begin is to list the schools that are currently operating. In the future I plan to do a piece on each school individually, but the list should act as a guide of where I'm headed.

The first category I will cover is higher education. As anyone familiar with LDS education is aware, the Church actually owns and operates several institutions, four of which would fall in the higher education category. These schools are Brigham Young University, Brigham Young University--Hawaii, Brigham Young University--Idaho, and LDS Business College. At this point one might want to mention an institution like the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies, as it is owned and operated by the Church, and it offers a higher education curriculum. It even has a separate open application process from the other Church schools. The question here is one of administration and autonomy. While non-BYU students may apply to the Jerusalem Center, it is officially under the BYU umbrella in a way that the Hawaii and Idaho campuses are not. Also, if we list the Jerusalem Center separately, we would have to then consider the Barlow Center in Washington DC, BYU's London Center, and maybe even BYU's Salt Lake Center. These programs generally restrict admission to already admitted BYU students, but I've heard (unsubstantiated) stories of students getting admitted to BYU, with their admission being restricted to their participate in the Washington Seminar. To further complicate matters, the Church runs the Missionary Training Center in Provo (in addition to several others around the world), which is officially under the BYU umbrella, and is arguably one of the best language schools in the country, but one cannot apply to attend in the traditional sense, and no certificate or transferable credit is offered, so I'm really going to have to come up with a better definition of what constitutes "higher education" if I hope to come up with a comprehensive list.

Moving on to those programs which operate independent of the Church, but nevertheless hold to an LDS mission, the most prominent and fully operational program is Southern Virginia University (SVU). This school explicitly mentions the Church in its mission statement and it offers a full undergraduate education which has been certified by Virginia and accredited by the American Academy for Liberal Education, an accrediting body recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. The only other fully functional program that explicitly adopts an LDS mission is the Academy for Creating Enterprise (ACE). This group maintains three campuses, one in the Philippines, one in Mexico, and one in Brazil. The basic program is an 8 week course in entrepreneurship. At one time BYU-Hawaii offered a certificate to graduates of the Academy, but their website has changed several times, so it is no longer clear that this is the case.

There is one more functioning program that deserves mention as being in the LDS tradition, but it is not clear how committed it is to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is Nauvoo University. Though Nauvoo University is clearly being headed up by members of the Church, at one time Nauvoo University had a member of Graceland University's administration (a university sponsored by the Community of Christ) on its board, and for a time it presented itself as serving members of all Mormon traditions. This makes sense in that it claims to be a reestablishment of the original Nauvoo University founded by Joseph Smith, but it leaves one to wonder whether it fits in the above definition of an LDS education. They did adopt the original mission statement given by Joseph Smith as their own, but this does not explicitly mention the Church. Recently they appear to have moved closer to a more exclusive approach as to which of the many Mormon traditions they favor, but even so, they are not explicitly LDS in nature as are the Church-owned schools, SVU, and ACE, and one must wonder how their character will evolve in time given how new this institution is as an independent body. Currently they only offer a semester worth of classes, but they are clearly a functioning institution of higher education.

There are three other programs which are explicitly LDS in nature, but are not really functioning programs. The first is Desert Valley Academy (DVA), which has yet to offer any classes, but plans to open in 2012 as a full degree-granting university. I wish them luck, but only time will tell if they are successful. The second program is Bellota a Roble (or Acorn to Oak), which has held GMAT prep courses in Argentina, and currently operates an apartment in Cordoba where LDS students can stay, but they have yet to implement something consistent enough to be considered a fully functioning program. Their stated goal however is to build a full university someday. Finally, a group of BYU students have gone to Japan every summer under the auspices of the BYU Japanese English Education Research Center for the past four years to teach English in some of the Church buildings to members of the Church who need to get their TOEFL scores up so they can attend one of the Church schools in the United States. This group is headed up by Professor Watabe from BYU. He has also been actively working to build support for something more permanent, including possibly an LDS university in Japan so students would be able to enjoy the benefits of an LDS education without having to pass the TOEFL and traveling to America. As of yet, this project has not taken on a formal structure.

Thanks to some wonderful, but somewhat dated, research by E. Vance Randall of Brigham Young University and Chris Wilson of Loyola University published in proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the LDS International Society, another group has been identified. These are educational initiatives that were founded by LDS members and in which many or most students are LDS, but which tend to be more general in their mission, often having a general humanitarian purpose. Having worked in Bolivia with Ascend Alliance, I know that most of the students in our business classes were initially LDS, and we actually made a proactive effort to find non-LDS students in keeping with the general humanitarian mission. I haven't verified the operation of all of these groups, but this lists some of them: Choice Humanitarian, UNITUS, JUCONI, Ascend Alliance, Enterprise Mentors International, Reach the Children, Norma I. Love Foundation, Rose Education Foundation, Help–International, American Indian Services, Huntsman Armenian Projects, Ouelessebougou–Utah Alliance, Norman Gardner/Braille Resource and Literacy Center, and Universidad Hispana.

And finally I have heard rumors of yet another school in Guatemala, founded by members of the Church for returned missionaries, but I am still looking up the background information.

This brings me to the end of this list. If I missed anything let me know. Next time I will try to shift to primary and secondary.