The top U.S. official on higher education policy said recently that new technologies have to be deployed and fundamental changes are needed in institutional settings to encourage students to come back to colleges amid persistent losses in undergraduate enrollment numbers. “For one, enrollment has fallen, instead of grown. So with enrollment down 700,000 students, we’re asking, how do we make sure this interruption is not a permanent scar on our country’s educational attainment? How do we get those people back on the pathway?” James Kvaal, undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Education, said in a Bloomberg interview published on Dec. 3. Kvaal said that the situation has “changed permanently,” and that there are many aspects to how it’s going to be handled moving forward. “We’re going to use technology differently and there’s going to be a different mix of online and in-person learning,” he said. He talked about students having lost …