Students As Customers Policy Shows Promise

Treating students as “valued customers” helps to improves outcomes
A new report from the Center For American Progress outlines a process for “service blueprinting” in higher education, a process that will facilitate collaboration between key university administrators in order to create a “customer experience” for students that meets their needs for flexible schedules, offers marketable skills, and helps them complete their degrees quickly and cost-effectively.  
americanprogress.org

CUNY Provides Analysis Of Effective College Remediation

The Opposing Forces that Shape Developmental Education: Assessment, Placement, and Progression at CUNY Community Colleges
The developmental education process, as it is typically implemented in colleges across the country, seems straightforward: underprepared students are assessed and placed into an appropriate developmental course sequence designed to prepare them for college-level work; once finished with the sequence, these students presumably then move on to success in college. Analyses of student progression through developmental education reveal, however, that this seemingly straightforward process is rife with complexity and confusion, and results in poor outcomes for the majority of developmental students.

Report Finds Colleges Fail To Disclose Vital Information

Recognizing that higher education is a market driven by consumer choice and reluctant to regulate college behavior directly, state and federal policymakers have created a host of college information disclosure and reporting requirements. Armed with better data, the theory goes, students and parents will vote with their wallets, putting pressure on low-performing colleges to improve while avoiding direct government intervention.
The problem, according to Education Sector’s Kevin Carey and Andrew P. Kelly, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is that the reporting requirement provisions are not working nearly as well as intended. In The Truth Behind Higher Education Disclosure Laws, Carey and Kelly investigate scores of four-year colleges and universities to gauge their compliance with the information requirements of the Higher Education Opportunity Act.

The researchers examined five areas of strong interest to policymakers and the general public:

• Pell Grant graduation rates;
• Credit transfer and articulation agreements;
• Employment and graduate school placement;
• Textbook prices; and
• Private student loans.

Researchers  first looked at each school’s website for the elements of the disclosure provisions. For those elements that were not publicly available, researchers contacted the colleges via phone or email.

Carey and Kelly found that compliance rates vary widely.  There is nearly universal compliance on the requirement that schools post their credit transfer criteria (99 percent). But just 25 percent of institutions meet the requirement that schools disclose the six-year graduation rate for students who receive a Pell Grant.

The authors propose policy solutions to some of the biggest issues raised by their survey. Then they ask the broader question: is it enough to provide students and parents with information? “Clearly, information matters,” the authors say. “But mere availability isn’t enough.” They go on to outline a number of recommendations that will both increase transparency and also make it easier for students and families to act on the information.

Read TheTruth Behind Higher Education Disclosure Laws.

Education Sector is an independent think tank that challenges conventional thinking in education policy.

An Overview Of Progress For Hispanic College Completion

One year later, education leaders and philanthropists take stock of movement to improve Latino college completion
By Hispanic-Today
65 national partner organizations reconvene to chart future course of initiative to make America world leader in college degrees by focusing on Latinos. WASHINGTON, October 21, 2011 — One year ago, 50 national organizations came together under the leadership of Excellence in Education to embark on a groundbreaking collaboration to make America the world leader in college degrees by specifically focusing on Latinos. That initiative, Ensuring America’s Future by Increasing Latino College Completion, has since grown to include additional partners, whose engagement has given federal, state, institutional, and community leaders specific tools and information to accelerate degree attainment among Latinos.

Analysis Questions Gains In Community College Graduation

IHELP’s , Institute For Higher Education Leadership And Policy,newest brief
discusses the findings of a new report from the American Association of
Community Colleges titled, The
Road Ahead: A Look at Trends in the Educational Attainment of Community College
Students. The brief offers an analysis of the AACC report’s
claims that the investments made in a community college education are “paying
off” due to the higher increase in certificates and degrees awarded by
community colleges than in total enrollment. While there is cause for
celebration with respect to increases in enrollment and college completions, a
closer look at the data shows some reasons for caution related to the
prominence of short-term certificates among the increased awards and to
minority rates of improvement that lag the improvement rate among white
students.

View the brief

College Placement Exams: Problems And Solutions

Bruce Vandal’s commentary, published in Good Magazine, describes
the shortcomings of college placement testing policies and practices that
direct thousands of students into remedial education. Vandal suggests options
for improving assessments and low-cost, reasonable fixes to help avoid faulty
placement in remedial courses that can deter students’ success in earning a
certificate or degree.

Proposal For A Major Overhaul Of Student Loans

Erin Dillon, Education Sector, Washington, D.C.

Last year, the U.S. reached a troubling new milestone in higher education: for the first time, total
student loan debt in the country exceeded total credit card debt. Today, 56
percent of students have to borrow money to attend college, and the average
graduate leaves school $22,000 in debt.

That increasing debt load has placed major burdens on recent graduates and their
families. A growing number of students are unable to repay their loans. Last
year, the number of students who defaulted on their loans (and thus faced
consequences ranging from ruined credit ratings to revocation of professional
licenses) increased by 22 percent.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In a new Education Sector report, Affordable
At Last: A New Student Loan System, author Erin Dillon proposes a new system (income-contingent loans)

which would allow students to pay back loans on terms they can actually afford.

Economist Milton Friedman proposed the system as far back as 1955. Congressman Tom Petri (R-Wisc.)

continues to support income-contingent loans as the best way to simplify the student loan repayment
system, while also virtually eliminating defaults. Today, a number of countries
have adopted the income-contingent loan plan. Their experience is that
repayment rates go up and default rates are virtually eliminated—in the United
Kingdom, for example, more than 98 percent of loans are repaid.

The Obama Administration clearly recognizes the need to address the problem of student loans.

These changes include a plan to reduce borrowers’ monthly payments to 10 percent of their discretionary
income, with debt forgiveness after 20 years of repayment. A less generous
version of this proposal, known as Income Based Repayment or IBR, is already
available to those with federal student loan debt. But the program is currently
used by only 450,000 borrowers—out of a potential total of more than 36 million.
“Income-based repayment is a great option for struggling borrowers under the
existing loan system,” Dillon says. “But the existing system needs to change—borrowers need more than another
repayment option.”

As Dillon suggests, an income-contingent loan repayment program could be put

in place using the IRS. Students would all be offered loans at a single interest rate.

After graduation, the government would
collect payments on their loans through their employer, with adjustments made
automatically depending on the borrower’s income.

The exploding growth in student loan debt, along
with what Dillon calls a “relentless shifting of college expenses from the
public to students and parents,” demands a rethinking of how we finance higher
education. Affordable At Last offers one effective way to
increase the numbers of students who repay their student loans—while virtually
eliminating the prospect of student loan default.

Read Affordable At Last here.

Obama’s New Finacial Aid Plan Has Small Impact

By
Watson Scott Swail,
President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute/EPI International

This week, President Obama unveiled new programs to alleviate
the debt burden on college and university students. The first program allows
students to consolidate all their college loans into one, US Department of
Education Direct Loan. Although the Department is the only originator of
student loans in the US since 2010, there are still millions of loans that are
owned and serviced by private banks from the FFEL (pre-July 1 2010) days. Obama
is offering students a chance to bring them all together under the federal
government, saving taxpayers money and also reducing the complexity of student
loans for students. As an incentive, the loan interest rate will be reduced by
up to half a percent.

Second, Obama is proposing lowering the percentage of
discretionary income required of borrowers from 15 percent to 10 percent for
graduates enrolled in an income-contingent repayment program. Thus, graduates
with student loans only would have to pay up to 10 percent of their
discretionary earnings toward their loans. After 25 years, if the student still
has loan debt, it will be forgiven by the federal government.

Both of these are positive policy moves. The first allows for
greater savings in the student loan industry, and the second provides a better
option for students with high debt in low-earning jobs.

.”READ MORE…”

K-12 Common Core Standards Align Well With College Expectations

Common Core Found to Rank with Respected Standards
A new report by the Educational Policy Improvement Center pits the common-core standards against those of California, Massachusetts, Texas, the International Baccalaureate and a college-based set. The common core standards are generally aligned to the other standards, but are more rigorous in some content areas. (Education Week, premium article access compliments of edweek.org, 10/26/11)

Bargain Hunters Focus On Public Colleges

State schools gain popularity in a climate of mounting student debt
According to a report from Sallie Mae on college spending in 2011, almost 40 percent of high-income families considered other colleges after looking at the financial aid package offered by private institutions. Dan Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities says that the increasing popularity of public universities is “putting a lot of strain on the system, with severe capacity issues and funding declines in many states. In California, for instance, they’re capping freshman enrollments, and turning hundreds of thousands of students away from community colleges.”
reuters.com