National Standardized Data Needed to Improve College Remediation

A Break The Mold College Is Opening

Minerva has many interesting concepts and components that this article in the Atlantic covers.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-future-of-college/375071/

Colleges Use Big Data To Increase Graduation Rates

Why America’s colleges are embracing big data
Trends that sweep throughout higher education — from for-profit colleges and community colleges to elite liberal arts colleges and public flagship universities — are rare. But an unusually diverse range of more than 150 colleges are now using some form of predictive analytics in an effort to fix their dismal graduation rates. (Vox,  and ECS July 14)

Affordable Online Community College Guide

Affordable Colleges Online, created an expert-driven resource guidebook for students seeking advice and information about affordable programs from Community Colleges that offer flexible online learning classes.  Community colleges are a critical part of our education ecosystem and continue to offer a truly cost effective option for students to earn a 2 year degree or the credits needed to transfer to a 4-year college.  Over the last few years, community colleges have made many of these 2 year programs more flexible by offering fully online or hybrid options.  Three experts from academia contributed to guide elements, including:

– The basics of online learning at community colleges

– Distance learning myths and pros and cons of these programs

– Affordability & Accreditation information

– Student interviews

– Q&A and a student assessment questionnaire

Anyone can access the guide to Online Community Colleges at no-cost here:

http://www.affordablecollegesonline.org/online-colleges/community-colleges/

Media Confuses Higher Education And Workforce Development

Four Years Later: What Happens After College Graduation?

By Watson Scott Swail, Ed.D. President and CEO, Educational Policy Institute

This morning I woke up to a New York Times article  about an unemployed graduate of a for-profit institution. We’ve read many of these types of articles. Although they are mostly anecdotal, the sheer number of these articles, along with our unemployment data, assign more credibility to these writings. We know that people are hurting, and not just those who did not go to college, but also to those who did. The story in question documents an adult student, Joe DeGrella, a former contractor who decided to attend a for-profit institution in Kentucky to retrain for cardiology technology. Two years later, the 57-year old DeGrella is jobless and $20,000 in debt. As the New York Times states, their extensive analysis found that “many graduates wind up significantly worse off than when they started—mired in unemployment and debt from training for positions that do not exist, and end up working elsewhere for minimum wage.”

So I thought I would look at the recent release from the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) 2007-08 Baccalaureate and Beyond (B&B) Report. This report, released in July, doesn’t focus on the type of institution that DeGrella attended, but I thought it of interest to see what happened to graduates from four-year institutions. The B&B report looks at graduates four years after graduation. Here are some of the interesting findings:

• 69 percent of graduates were employed, 11 percent were employed and still enrolled, and 6 percent were going to school and not working. Of the remaining 15 percent, 7 percent were unemployed and the other 8 percent were considered out of the labor force.
• Of those who were employed and not going to school (69 percent), 85 percent had a full-time job; 8 percent had a part-time job, and 8 percent had multiple jobs.
• Graduates had an average of 2.1 jobs in the four years since graduation. Thirty-nine percent had only one job, 34 percent two, and 16 percent three jobs. Eleven percent had four or more jobs in that time period.
• The median income for full-time employees was $46,000 in 2012 dollars. However, not surprising but nonetheless disconcerting, men earned 20 percent the median earnings than women ($51,100 vs. $42,500).
• STEM majors earned considerably more than non-STEM majors: $60,000 vs. $44,000; and education graduates earned the least of all ($37,000).

These are the best data we have. It is collected about once every four years by the US Department of Education. Other studies, such as the Current Population Survey (CPS) by the US Census Bureau, have monthly and annual data, but the data are somewhat lacking due to self-reporting.

Which brings me to my point. Gainful employment.

The federal government is requiring vocational institutions to provide evidence of employment for their graduates. The discussion is well covered in the education press and I won’t digress here. Much of the focus on gainful employment is on for-profit education organizations that have traditionally high tuition, low-graduation rates, leaving students with large debts. This isn’t true for all for-profits, but it certainly describes many of them.

Unfortunately, the truth also holds for public and private, not-for-profit institutions. Many students attend these institutions, some graduate, many do not, and many have high debt ratios and mediocre jobs. As this B&B study shows, 70 percent of public four-year students were employed four-years after graduation. Of that group, 85 percent held a full-time job. Doing the math, that means that only 60 percent of graduating students at a four-year, public institution were fully-employed four years after graduation, leaving 40 percent who were either part-time employed, still in school, unemployed, or deemed “out of the workforce.”

Forty percent. That seems to be a large percentage that many years out.

Three-quarters of four-year students received some type of student aid and 61 percent took out a student loan averaging about $7,300 per year[1]. Over four years, that’s around $30,000.

Forty percent of graduates aren’t working full-time, four years after graduation, with an average of $30,000 in debt. Plus expenses.

So, back to Joe DeGrella, the 57-year old recent student, who completed a program and ended up with $20,000 in loans and no job. When do we start to look at the subsidized education we offer for students and make the connection with employment opportunities in the workforce? We keep selling young and older students that education is the answer. I believe it, but I believe it less sometimes after reviewing the trials and tribulations of those who have leveraged life savings and retirement funds to send their loved ones or themselves to school. The excitement of graduating exercises in early May become the reality of finding a waitressing job in August. And the data from NCES doesn’t suggest it gets much better for a large percentage of graduates.

We’ve hit a point where we need to look at this critically and decide how we want to educate our high school graduates, our young workers, and our adult workforce, employed and not employed. It does not serve any one well to say “go to school,” when we can’t guarantee decent employment, or are educating them in areas that have no jobs and won’t have any jobs in the near or distant future.

Perhaps it is time for job and education panels. Perhaps the decisions that are made about education and training need to be made very differently than how they are. The evidence suggests that the time is ripe for change. Simply put, too many people are hurting. And we are all complicit.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013165.pdf.

About Educational Policy Institute

The Educational Policy Institute is a Washington, DC-based research think tank on education and the social sciences. EPI conducts evaluation and policy studies on various educational issues from Pre-K to workforce outcomes in the United States, Canada, and beyond. Visit us at educationalpolicy.org.

MOOCs Results Better Than Early Reports Suggest

THE REAL VALUE OF ONLINE EDUCATION
Out of all the students who enroll in a MOOC, only about 5 percent complete the course and receive a certificate of accomplishment. This statistic is often cited as evidence that MOOCs are fatally flawed and offer little educational value to most students. Yet more than 80 percent of students who fill out a post-course survey say they met their primary objective. How do we reconcile these two facts? We’re used to focusing on completion rates in higher education, but they’re not the only—or even the most meaningful—indicator of engagement in open online courses. With no cost to enroll, no penalty for dropping out, and little reward for actually earning a certificate, MOOCs are fundamentally different from traditional classes— and students use them in fundamentally different ways. The article is in The Atlantic.

Strategies To Decrease College Drop Outs

From ECS

More than 40 percent of full-time, four-year college students fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, and many never complete their education. A new study examines dropout patterns in an attempt to better support students as they make enrollment decisions. Findings suggest that while preparation in secondary schools needs to improve, it is also important to encourage students with weaker academic preparation to consider starting college at a two-year institution (about a third of four-year college dropouts would have a higher chance of bachelor’s degree completion, had they begun there.) Find out more  here. (New to the ECS Research Studies Database)

Poor Families Pay Half Their Income At Elite Colleges? A Different Perspective

FM and IM—You Say Potato, I like Potahto: But We Can’t Call the Whole Thing Off

Posted by Educational Policy Institute

By Watson Scott Swail, President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute

A recent article published by the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Are Poor Families Really Paying Half Their Income at Elite Colleges? ,” penned by Beckie Supiano and Soo Oh, reminded me of the old Gershwin tune, “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” The graphic-based brief uses data from the University of Notre Dame to describe the challenges between federal government data collection from students via the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and the College Board PROFILE, which many private colleges require from students to help them determine the amount of institutional aid.

Before 1992, the PROFILE was used by just about every college in the country. It was the defacto federal financial aid form, primarily because the federal government didn’t have one. But the 1992 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act changed history by creating the FAFSA as a means to (a) take away the College Board’s monopoly on the data business, and even the methodology business, and (b) to make the process free for students. Prior to 1992, students had to pay a nominal-but-real fee to apply for financial aid. In retrospect, most of us would agree that students should not pay to apply for aid—it seems counterintuitive, which was what Congress thought. But the challenge is that the FAFSA has never collected the detailed financial information that the PROFILE collects, and as we continue to strive for simplification of the FAFSA, even less data are supplied.

By law, students must complete the FAFSA to determine their financial aid package. This is determined through use of a formula called the Federal Methodology, or FM, a to determine aid distribution. Students attending private, elite colleges also must use the FAFSA for federal aid determination, but over 350 of these schools  require students to complete the College Board PROFILE to help determine the proper use of institutional aid. For these institutions, the FAFSA never has provided them with the level of detail about a family’s fiscal resources, whereas the PROFILE does. Institutions, like Notre Dame, want a much clearer picture of assets to better distribute valuable and limited institutional aid.

As the Chronicle piece correctly illustrates, institutions that use the PROFILE generally find that some students defined as low income by the FAFSA actually have more assets and are slightly more affluent. Slightly. Conversely, the PROFILE also moves people from middle income to lower-income levels. In essence, the different methodology, called the IM (Institutional Methodology) and created by financial aid officers through the College Board, moves people around the income bands. For low-income students, this generally provides them with more institutional aid, providing them with a lower cost of attendance than what students would get only using the federal methodology. In the Notre Dame example, students who would have had to provide $11,626 of a $60,000/year bill out of pocket through FM would now only provide $4,472 through IM. That’s still real money for families that earn less than $30,000/year. Other income levels changed marginally. The big difference is what is offered to lower-income students.

On one hand this is good news for college access advocates. Low-income students, or Pell-eligible students, can get more funds from elite schools, if they can clear the admissions hurdle. The reality is that most low-income students do not apply to Notre Dame and other elite schools because they either do not think they can qualify for admissions or they think they cannot afford it. Thus, these students are not subject to the PROFILE.

The Chronicle uses this example to showcase the problems that the federal government is going to face in their attempt to provide accurate consumer information about the true cost of college. It all depends, and that doesn’t help consumers very much.

But this is just more proof that our system is rife with issues and complexities that make college somewhere between Pandora’s box and a black hole for students and their families. Finding out the true cost of education is a completely imperfect science due to the nature of funding higher education and the two different methodologies of determining aid, the FM and IM.

There are a few solutions, but none of them are politically viable, which is our problem. The simplest way out, of course, is not to charge tuition and fees at all to students. Then there are no issues with methodologies. Economists, however, are quick to note that this type of fiscal policy is regressive, meaning that it favors more affluent families and students that can afford to pay the going price of college. And second, these policies aren’t refundable, meaning that if a low-income family actually qualified for more funds, the government wouldn’t be cutting them a check. Regardless, no one with any political will or pulpit in the US or Canada is going to support free tuition. In the end, those systems don’t work very well, either. Ask Ireland, a country that would love to get rid of free fees.

A second option is to have an income contingent system. We have one, but it is very limited and still requires students to be awarded a package of federal, state, and institutional grants and loans. Only the federal loans are made contingent on one’s income, of which borrowers pay a percentage of their current income until either their loan is paid off or they reach a 25-year make, at which time the loan is written off (a new law reduces the term to 20 years for new loans as of July 1, 2014). The challenge for students is that these loans are compounding due to interest charges. So, unless borrowers can pay enough to significantly reduce the principle of a small mortgage, it remains a dicey fiscal challenge.

A third option would be to simplify the funding system so that we did not have 4,000+ public and private not-for-profit institutions with variable tuition rates and fees. That just doesn’t work in any respect, but worth the mention. That, in essence, would be a form of price fixing. Either the payer is paying too much, or someone (e.g., the taxpayer) is subsidizing too much.

This doesn’t further our quest to find an answer, but the Chronicle illustrated a very important distinction between the elite colleges and everyone else due to use of IM and the PROFILE.

College Mentoring Programs May Not Help Student Retention

THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM
Buffy Smith, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, says many institutions see mentoring programs as cheap, quick ways to boost recruitment and retention of at-risk students. But for mentoring programs to succeed, they need money and clear objectives, she warns. The article is in Inside Higher Ed via Carnegie Foundation