New Focus On Students Who Nearly FinishedCollege

The Institute for Higher Education Policy held a meeting focused on how “near-completers” – people who have earned most but not all of the credits they need for a college degree. The organization also discussed their Project Win-Win, which has helped nine institutions award nearly 600 associate degrees and identify almost 1,600 students who are candidates for earning degrees

College Financial Aid:The Grand Illusion

Paul R. Wrubel, College Advisor, San Mateo, Ca. www.paulwrubel.com

Again this year, millions of hopeful Americans will complete the FAFSA and CSS Profile forms in order to qualify for need-based financial aid.  They will pay attention to deadlines and try to follow the rules out of an innate sense of honesty and a desire to play it straight.  They will do their job.

For their troubles, the promised outcomes will rarely if ever occur.  Financial aid awards across the nation will reflect a different reality with elusive, shifting rules and an opaque strategy of determining who gets what.  Families at any income and a few dollars left in the bank will be routinely “short-sheeted” by college-produced aid awards.  If a family reporting an income of $65,000 were judged by their financial aid award, you might guess that the family had an income of $90,000 or even more.  For millions of American families the college financial aid system will be a cruel and costly hoax.

For years, there has been a clamor to simplify the FAFSA so that families can more readily apply for need-based aid but with every passing year, it is clear that simplification would merely add to the growing chorus of disillusioned Americans.  What real benefit is there to gain easy access to a theater if the play is bad?  Simplification of the financial aid paperwork would merely add to the audience of disappointed and increasingly angry college-bound students and their families.  But the illusion runs much deeper than mere paperwork.

An actual experience with financial aid looks like this.  A family had submitted precisely the same financial and demographic information to three private colleges, two in Massachusetts and one in Oregon.  Each college received exactly the same numbers.  Two colleges responded with offers that suggested a family contribution of about $19,000 and $32,000 while a third proclaimed that the family did not qualify for one cent of aid making their family contribution a whopping $45,000+ or an assumption of an income of around $150-200,000.  Same numbers, same formula, different outcomes.  Why?

The mechanics of the system aside, the issue is money.  Colleges can’t offer aid if they don’t have the money.  The primary reason for this fiscal deficit is that the federal government and in some cases the state governments, agencies who may have had a hand in creating the system, have failed to contribute sufficient funds to ensure its ongoing viability.  Federal and state contributions in support of need-based financial aid haven’t begun to keep pace with the realities of inflation or any accepted measure of cost-of-living adjustment.  While college costs for families have gone up by more than 100% over the last couple of decades, during that same period the per-pupil influx of public aid has increased only about 20-30%.  Family incomes may have grown by an even smaller increment in that time frame.  The outcome of this scenario leaves the colleges holding the financial aid bag and they simply don’t have the resources to deal with it.  So families try their best to fill in the gap and they usually do so by cashing in their retirement funds or pulling equity out of their homes or taking on more work if they can get it.

Students And Public Skeptical Of Online Education

College Presidents Are Bullish on Online Education but Face a Skeptical Public
Delivering courses in cyber classrooms has gained broad acceptance among college presidents, but the general public is far less convinced of online education’s quality, according to new survey data released by the Pew Research Center, in association with The Chronicle. (Chronicle of Higher Education,

The Spellings Commission Report To Change Postsecondary Education:5 Years Later

This morning, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on The Spellings Commission of five years ago, noting, in former North Carolina Governor James Hunt’s words: “One of the most important reports in the educational and economic history of our country-if we act on it.”

Five years later, little has been done to acted on the Commission’s recommendations, mostly because the suggestions from the Commission generally cost money and Congress and states have been too busy cutting, rather than adding, money from budgets. That makes it pretty hard to act on a Commission Report with two counter-active realities.

The second reason the recommendations have not been acted upon is that there is zero political will to do so. Higher education is simply not that important an issue in the face of the global economic collapse. Education is seen as one of the most important issues of society-until something else is. During election campaigns, education is always floated about as an important issue. However, “it’s the economy, stupid” reigns supreme in the electorate. Voters think of their pocketbooks first, their health and welfare second, and then comes the other things, like education, wars, and so on.

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College Certificates Lead To Higher Income Than 2 Year Degrees

Professional certificates more valued than associates’ degrees
According to a national longitudinal study of U.S. workers who are now in their mid 30s, approximately “40 percent of those with certificates or licenses were earning more money than their peers with just an associate’s degree; more than a quarter of those with certificates or licenses were making more than those with bachelor’s degrees.”
publicradio.org

After First Year of College, Students Have Some Regrets And Satisfaction

ONE YEAR OUT
One year after graduating from high school, most members of the Class of 2010 believe that earning a college degree is “definitely” worth it, according to a survey released by the College Board. The comprehensive survey on college readiness and affordability, One Year Out, explores how young Americans assess their high school experience and its role in preparing them for life after graduation  — be it work or postsecondary education. This survey was done with 1,500 students, one year after they graduated from high school in the class of 2010. Four in 10 of those students had gone on to a four-year college; one-quarter had enrolled in a two-year college; 6 percent were in trade school or a job-training program, and one-quarter weren’t in school at all. It delivers a variety of messages. Forty-four percent of students, for instance, said they wish they had taken different courses. The biggest regret is not taking more math, science, and writing-intensive coursework in high school. But only about half the respondents wished they’d worked harder in high school, and only one-third said they think high school graduation requirements should be tougher. (The ones who say they wish they’d worked harder, by the way, are not just those who struggled. They include large proportions of kids who got good grades and went on to college.) Source Gay Clyburn, Carnegie Foundation

Boston Area Colleges Join To Increase College Completion

Massachusetts colleges organize to improve attrition rates
In response to a study indicating that the majority of Boston area high school graduates who go on to start college do not graduate, 25 Massachusetts colleges and universities have formed a consortium dedicated to improving graduation rates with initiatives including scholarships and free summer sessions to ease the transition into college life.
boston.com

Community College Students Benefit From Clear Completion Pathways

CHOOSING A PATH IN COMMUNITY COLLEGE LEADS TO HIGHER GRAD RATES
Community colleges should focus more attention on helping students choose and enter college-level programs of study, new research from the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University suggests. The article is in Education News. Students are often overwhelmed by course choices, and end up with wasted credits for their goals. Successful for-profit colleges provide these clear pathways from the initial enrollment of a student.

Texas And Florida Governors Propose Outside The Box Reforms

Scott Explores Changes in Higher Education
Governor Rick Scott is exploring dramatic higher education reforms that are similar to those already under way in Florida’s school districts. Patterned after reforms being championed by Texas Governor Rick Perry, Scott is looking at changing the way professors are paid and moving toward a merit-pay system with limits on tenure. (Orlando Sentinel, 08/22/11)

College Instructors Endorse k12 Common Core Curriculum

To help answer the question about whether the Common Core State Standards reflect what is necessary to be ready for college and careers, the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) has released its first report on this topic, Reaching the Goal: The Applicability and Importance of the Common Core State Standards to College and Career Readiness, which describes the degree to which the knowledge and skills contained in the Common Core State Standards will prepare students for postsecondary readiness.

During the study, EPIC researchers asked instructors from two- and four-year institutions in 25 course categories to rate each standard on its applicability and importance to their courses. A total sample of 1,897 courses from across the nation are included in the study, including courses associated with general education requirements for a bachelor’s degree and those associated with several career pathways.

All of the standards received high marks for applicability and importance. Individual ELA and literacy standards that relate to students mastering comprehension of nonfiction text with grade-appropriate complexity were highly rated, both generally and as they apply to specific content areas. Instructors placed relatively greater emphasis on standards that require students to extract key ideas and details from text, possess general writing skills and write routinely, and use research to support written analysis.

Mathematics standards with the highest ratings include standards related to reasoning quantitatively and interpreting functions. The Standards for Mathematical Practice received the highest importance ratings across all respondents. These standards emphasize problem solving, analytic thinking, and other thinking skills that appear to be useful in a wide range of postsecondary courses.

Ninety-eight percent of respondents agree that the Common Core State Standards as a whole sufficiently challenge students to engage higher-level cognitive skills required for postsecondary success. In response to the question of whether the standards omitted key knowledge and skills, nearly 84 percent responded no. A final open-ended question gave respondents an opportunity to offer opinions on the Common Core State Standards. The largest proportion of responses provided specific examples of why students may be entering college and careers underprepared.

The report suggests that students who are generally proficient in the Common Core State Standards will likely be ready for a wide range of postsecondary courses – and the more Common Core State Standards that students master, the wider the range of postsecondary-level classes they will be ready to undertake and complete successfully.

In tandem with the report’s overall assessment of the Common Core State Standards, Dr. David Conley, CEO of EPIC and director of the study explains, “other important dimensions of readiness exist, upon which the Common Core State Standards are necessarily silent. Careful attention should be given to more complete conceptions of college and career readiness.” With this caveat in mind, the study finds the Common Core State Standards to be highly applicable to and important for postsecondary readiness.

The mission of the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) is to improve educational policy and practices that will increase student success, particularly for students historically underserved by public schools. EPIC conducts a range of policy-related research studies and is distinguished by its pioneering use of state-of-the-art, criterion-based, standards-referenced methods of course and document analysis. To learn more about EPIC’s work, please visit https://www.epiconline.org/.