Pell Grants Should Not Pay For College Remediation

By Michael J. Petrilli / Fordham Foundation

Everyone from President Barack Obama to U.S. Representative Paul Ryan to Bill Gates seems to have a plan for improving the Federal Pell Grant Program for higher education.

Worthy though some of these efforts may be, none get to the crux of the problem: A huge proportion of this $40 billion annual federal investment is flowing to people who simply aren’t prepared to do college-level work. And this is perverting higher education’s mission, suppressing completion rates, and warping the country’s K–12 system.

About two-thirds of low-income community-college students—and one-third of poor students at four-year colleges—need remedial (a.k.a. “developmental”) education, according to Complete College America, a nonprofit group. But it’s not working: Less than 10 percent of low-income students who start in remedial education graduate from community college within three years, and just 35 percent of such students earn a four-year degree within six years.

What if the government decreed that, starting three years hence, students would only be eligible for Pell aid if enrolled in credit-bearing college courses, thus disqualifying remedial education for support?

One could foresee various possible outcomes. Let’s start with the positive. Ambitious, low-income high school students would know that if they want to attend college at public expense (probably their only option), they would first need to become “college ready.” This would provide a clear sign and incentives for them to work hard, take college-prep classes, and raise their reading and math skills to the appropriate level.

Better Preparation

To be considered successful, the high schools serving these young people would need to get their college-bound students to a college-ready level, not just to graduation. They might offer more college-prep courses, especially for those pupils with the most promise, and make sure that teachers are up to the task.

Likewise, state officials concerned about college completion would be prodded to ensure that their high schools produce college-ready graduates, maybe boosting graduation standards accordingly. Better yet, they might start to include college matriculation and graduation rates in their high school accountability systems.

As for colleges, without a federal funding stream for remedial education many would become more selective, only admitting students who are ready for credit-bearing courses.

This would probably raise the academic tenor of the institution, for students and professors alike. And with fewer students using Pell aid, we could afford to make each grant more generous, removing financial barriers that force well-prepared low-income students to leave before graduation, or not to come at all.

In sum, disqualifying the use of Pell grants for remedial education would substantially reduce the gap between the number of students entering higher education and the number completing degrees.

Yes, there are obvious downsides. Most significantly, many students wouldn’t be able to afford remedial education and thus would never go to college in the first place. Millions of potential Pell recipients—many of them minorities—might be discouraged from even entering the higher-education pipeline. Such an outcome seems unfair and cuts against the American tradition of open access, as well as second and third chances.

Then again, it’s not so certain that these individuals are better off trying college in the first place. Most don’t make it to graduation.

Job Training

Many would be more successful in job-training programs that don’t require college-level work (or would be better off simply gaining skills on the job). Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that more than a third of jobs today only require a high school diploma or less. While these jobs won’t make young people rich, they will keep them out of the grip of poverty and can propel them to new opportunities.

Furthermore, it isn’t fair to spend scarce dollars on students who aren’t prepared for college; those dollars could instead be used by needy students who are ready. It would be better to place our bets on low-income individuals who are most likely to succeed by boosting the maximum value of a Pell grant. (At $5,500 a year, it’s worth much less today than when Congress created the program decades ago.)

Perhaps the greatest risk is that colleges would respond to the new rules in a perverse manner: by giving academic credit for courses that used to be considered “remedial.” This would be the path of least resistance. Everyone could keep doing what they were doing before, with a wink and a nod, but would further dilute the value of a college degree.

It’s hard to know how many institutions would be willing to disregard academic integrity in such a way; one could imagine it being a lamentably large number. It would be incumbent on government agencies and watchdog groups to shame colleges that attempt to take this route.

On balance, withdrawing Pell subsidies from remedial courses appears promising enough to try. Congress should require the Education Department to create a demonstration program in which colleges and universities volunteer to eliminate their remedial courses and, in return, their qualified low-income students become eligible for more generous Pell-grant money, thus reducing their own financial-aid obligation.

Perhaps offer the deal to an entire state. Study what happens. My guess is that it would have a salutary effect on the K–12 system, on higher education, and on college-completion rates. Let’s find out.

This piece originally appeared on Bloomberg View.

Useful Study Skills Guide For College Students

Study skills rank pretty high on the “must have” list for successful college students. But they’re not just about memorizing names, dates and places — that might get you through high school, but it won’t cut it for college! On top of having a good memory, you’ll need to know how to evaluate, contextualize, and compare all the information being thrown at you.

 So, how do you gain these critical study skills? You can start with the Study Skills Series on www.FirstGenerationStudent.com. Get a grasp of what college level writing demands in “Having the “Write” Stuff for College” (http://www.firstgenerationstudent.com/blog/study-skills-series-having-the-write-stuff-for-college/). Check out “Now Read This! Effective & Efficient Reading” (http://www.firstgenerationstudent.com/blog/study-skills-series-now-read-this-effective-efficient-reading/) for tips on how to read to learn. Contributing to classroom discussions may not seem like a study skill, but students who ask questions and comment get a lot more of out of the class than those who keep quiet. Go to “Speak Up! Contributing to Discussions” (http://www.firstgenerationstudent.com/blog/study-skills-series-speak-up-contributing-to-discussions/). Tests bring on a lot of anxiety for students; pick up some pointers for how to ease the stress of test-taking and earn a better grade in “How to Become an Ace Test-Taker”.

http://www.firstgenerationstudent.com/blog/study-skills-series-t-e-s-t-isnt-a-four-letter-word-when-you-know-how-to-take-it/. 

 This study skills series is written by Amy Baldwin, a community college instructor and author of several books on college success, including “The First-Generation College Experience.” 

Students Can Stack Up Courses From Various Providers For Completion

Conventional College Route Shifts to ‘Education Buffet’
Increasingly, a new type of college student is emerging: one who doesn’t start and finish at a single brick-and-mortar campus, but picks and chooses credits toward a degree or job from a veritable buffet of education options. These include dual-enrollment courses, advanced-placement programs, military or corporate training, career and life experience, and classes taught online. (Hechinger Report, 05/01/13)

USA Secondary School Tests Lag Behind Leading Nations

By Marc Tucker

   Some consumers, evidently, have had enough. Parents in some schools are refusing to send their children to mandated testing sessions, and we have reports of teachers refusing to proctor them. What are we to make of this?

I can think of no high-performing country we have studied in which we have seen this kind of resistance to the development of tests that we are now seeing in the United States.  Why here, and now and what does it mean?
The answer lies in the history of testing in the United States, and, especially recently, how we have used our tests.

Though almost all the top-performing countries have tests that match their standards (Finland being the exception), they are unlike the typical American tests in important ways.  First, they are designed to match the curriculum, to find out whether and to what degree students have mastered the curriculum the teacher has been teaching.  American tests, for many years, have been designed to be curriculum neutral, meaning unrelated to the curriculum.  So American teachers have seen the basic skills tests they are familiar with as their enemy, testing things that they did not necessarily teach, and often don’t believe should be taught.  The Common Core State Standards were developed, in part, to fix this alignment problem, but the standards are not yet implemented and there is no official curriculum available to teachers that is based on the standards and on which the tests themselves are based, as there are in the top-performing countries.  So it will not be easy to overcome an image of testing among teachers that is based on a professional lifetime of experience.

Second, American tests have been designed to be, first and foremost, cheap.  A testing director for one of America’s biggest cities once told me, with great pride, that his city had never spent more then $1 per test per student per year and never would.  They cost as little as they do because of the multiple-choice, computer scored method of test construction that is so prevalent.  American teachers figured out a long time ago that these tests are great at testing the rudiments of the basic skills and not very good at testing complex skills, deep understanding, critical thinking or creativity, the things teachers want most to teach, another reason for them to detest the typical test.  In the top-performing countries, there is very little use of multiple-choice, computer-based testing.  Most tests are essay-based.  They are scored by teachers trained to score them and teachers generally feel that these examinations are testing the things they think really matter.

Third, the frequency of testing is very different in the United States from our top competitors.  They typically do major statewide or nationwide testing only two or three times in a student’s whole school career, usually just at the end of lower secondary school (tenth grade) and again at the end of high school.  Most of the other testing they do at the statewide or national levels is done to monitor the performance of the system and is done by sampling a few students in a few schools.  The testing program mandated by No Child Left Behind—calling for six grades of testing, including five consecutive grades in elementary and middle school, an enormous testing burden—has no counterpart in the top-performing countries.

Not one of the top-performing countries has an accountability system remotely like that of No Child Left Behind.  No one in those countries is insisting, as the U.S. Department of Education does in its Race to the Top Program, that student scores on mandated tests be used as a major—perhaps the single most important—input into personnel decisions made about teachers.

So American teachers’ experience of testing is very different from that of their counterparts in the top-performing  countries.  They see cheap tests, unrelated to what they teach and incapable of measuring the things they really care about, being used to determine their fate and that of their students.  What is ironic about this is that, because these other countries do much less accountability testing than we do, they can afford to spend much more on the tests they do use, and so are getting much better tests at costs that are probably no greater than what we are spending for our cheap tests.

We will have to wait and see what kind of tests will be produced by the two state testing consortia.  It is rumored that they have been struggling to produce high quality tests, because they, too, are working in an environment in which schools and legislatures are not used to paying very much for good tests.  We have to hope that the developers of these new tests will not fall short of the ambitions their designers had for them.  If they end up looking more like the tests teachers are familiar with than the examinations the top-performing countries use, then millions of American teachers may rebel.  The Congress could, of course, abandon the nation’s unwise commitment to grade-by-grade testing, which would enable this country to produce and administer tests and examinations as good as any in the world, and, at the same time, greatly reduce the testing burden on our schools.  But that would mean that it would also have to abandon the current approach to school and teacher accountability in favor perhaps of accountability systems of the sort used by the top performers, but I have not yet detected any interest in doing so.

The fate of the Common Core State Standards may well depend on what this country does about testing and accountability.  Maybe we should be listening to the sounds of nascent rebellion a little more closely.                                                 

High School Graduation Standards Based On Univeristy Entrance Requirements Might Backfire

More California districts are requiring teens to take a course load that exceeds the state’s minimum requirements — the same courses required for admission to the University of California — to graduate from high school. A new report says these ambitious requirements could backfire by making graduation too difficult for some students, and cause them to drop out or fail to earn diplomas after four years. (San Jose Mercury News, 04/25/13)

Community College Student Demand For Online Courses Questioned

Student Demand for Online Courses May Not be as Strong as Colleges Think, New Study Finds

Most community colleges believe that student demand for fully online courses is outpacing supply, but a new study suggests that colleges may be overestimating students’ desire for more online learning, particularly in certain subjects.

The study, from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, interviewed dozens of students who had taken at least one online course at two community colleges. Few students—at these colleges and nationally—take all their classes online: most maintain a mix-and-match of online and face-to-face courses. The researchers set out to understand whether students preferred this strategy, or if they were inhibited from taking more online courses because of limited availability.

The study found that while students appreciated the flexibility of online learning, most would not want to take all their classes online. Students indicated they valued the more intimate connection with teachers and fellow students offered in traditional classrooms.

Students had very clear reasons for choosing to take courses online or face-to-face. They reported that they only took courses online if they felt they could learn the material on their own: If they expected a course to be difficult, or “really wanted to learn something,” they preferred face-to-face courses. Students often equated “difficult” with science and math courses, and many mentioned a reluctance to take these subjects online. 

Students indicated a strong preference for a traditional classroom when taking courses they considered interesting or important, particularly those in their major. They also felt that certain subjects, such as languages, public speaking and counseling, were particularly unsuited to the online setting. 

The study suggests that overall, many students feel they don’t learn course material as well online, and that this deficit is due to reduced teacher explanation and interaction in online courses.  Without substantial improvements in online teacher-student interaction, it is likely that students will continue to prefer face-to-face courses in subjects they perceive as more challenging or incompatible with the online format.

Community college administrators are working within constrained budgets and, as the study’s author argues, these results suggest that an expansion of online courses may not benefit students if it requires a concomitant decrease in face-to-face offerings. While students appear to welcome the option of taking courses online, they may feel less well-served if online classes are offered as a replacement to traditional courses.

For more information, and to read the complete study, please visit http://bit.ly/13xgMab.

Vague Student Goals Hinder Community College Completion

2 Groups Describe Efforts to Push More Community-College Students Toward Degree Completion
Students who enter community colleges with vague goals and shaky academic backgrounds often end up in remedial courses or on “a meandering path through an overwhelming number of course options,” according to Completion by Design and Jobs for the Future. At a meeting, the groups described their efforts, working with state policymakers and higher-education associations, to create structured pathways to graduation. (Chronicle of Higher Education, 04/22/13)

Student Debt Problems Overstated?

by Derek Thompson/The Atlantic

Recoveries are powered by two things. Houses and cars. And young people aren’t buying either. That’s the conclusion from a new study out of the New York Fed, via Brad Plumer, that can be easily read as blaming student debt for holding back the recovery by squashing home and auto sales. The share of 30-year-olds with student debt who have taken out a mortgage has collapsed since the recession struck (ditto those without student debt). And the share of 25-year-olds with student debt who also have an auto loan has fallen since the crash, as well (ditto again those without student debt). This study seems to feed into a familiarly scary story about student debt as a dangerous bubble that is piling unprecedented levels of debt on young people, and is wrecking the economy by preventing them from starting their lives. There’s two problems with that story. First, as Jordan Weissmann and I wrote for The Atlantic, there are so many reasons that cars and houses are falling out of favor with young people beyond student loans (and even beyond the miserable economy) that it’s impossible to pick a single culprit. For example, companies like Ford are vocally worried that smartphones are replacing cars as symbols of grown-up sociability, and young people are bunching in urban and urban-lite areas with many apartments and good public transit. Second, it’s a myth that college graduates have more debt than they used to. In fact, they have less. Total debt for 20-somethings has fallen since its peak in 2008, as it has for every age group in this period of deleveraging. Families that feasted on credit in the last decade have spent the last few years paying back what they owe and cutting back their excessive spending. Young people, with and without student loans, have done the very same. (more)

Focus On College Completion Obscures Process To Attain It

A BETTER FACTORY MODEL
Clive Belfield and Davis Jenkins write in Inside Higher Ed: Economists are often criticized for treating colleges as if they were factories: using models that evaluate college efficiency in creating outputs (student completions) for a given input (cost). In fact, in many ways a college education is like the factory production process: students start at the beginning and then, after a sequence of “inputs” in the form of courses and support services, some graduate successfully at the end. Unfortunately, economic analyses of college efficiency typically do not look at college as a process. Much more work needs to be done in this area. But to better understand the economics of college completion we need to more accurately model the resources that are required as students progress through college.

Provided by Carnegie Foundation From Inside Higher Education

Information Crucial For Student College Choice At Selective Colleges