Should Colleges Be Paid For Completion Rather Than Enrollment In Courses?

Many states pay colleges for  initial student enrollment, credit hour, or after a few weeks in a course. For example, California community colleges are paid by the state after the third week of enrollment. What if colleges were paid only for students who completed courses? This would change the colleges incentives, and spur more student progress toward completion of their programs.

Comprehensive Overhaul Of State College System Proposed in Arizona

Arizona is under svere fiscal pressure to drastically rehtink its public college system. The Arizona Board of Regents is drawing a road map for how to reshape higher education in the state, and ideas being floated include a dramatic expansion of online education and a new taxing source for universities to add to or replace legislative funding. The ideas also include privatizing some universities’ schools, eliminating underperforming or duplicate academic programs and doubling research grant dollars. The so-called Arizona Higher Education Enterprise is part of a strategy approved by the regents that seeks to increase the percentage of adults with bachelor’s degrees by 2020. Source: ECS

Arizona Joins States Cutting Back Merit Scholarships

Citing budget cuts and the need to screen better for college readiness, the board of regents approved changes to the popular Arizona university scholarship but exempted from them existing high school juniors and seniors. The new requirements mean students will not only have to earn an “exceeds” rating on all three parts of the AIMS test but also must score at least 28 on the ACT or at least 1300 on the SAT college-entrance exams. They also must meet certain minimum grade requirements, generally a 3.5 average. The scholarship will be lowered from 100% to 25% of freshman-level tuition.

Georgia Hope Scholarship Running Out Of Money

  The nations flagship state guarantee merit scholarship is Georgia”s Hope Scholarship. It has sent clear signals to secondary school students about meeting course and grade point standards. But now it is threatened.

Losing HOPE
A popular scholarship that has become a near-birthright for Georgians is going broke, and state officials acknowledge they’ll have to cut participation or reduce benefits if it is to survive. Since its introduction in 1993, the HOPE Scholarship program has seen an explosion of participation and spawned similar merit-based programs in other states. But with the lottery funds that support the program slowing in growth, and an uptick in the number of students participating, HOPE’s reserves are being drained and could be completely tapped by the close of 2013. Source:ECS

Lumina Foundation Reports Little Progress On Increasing College Completion Rates

The new report, A stronger nation through higher education, shows that in 2007, 37.7 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 64 held a two- or four-year college degree. For 2008, the number is 37.9 percent. If the current rate of increase remains, less than 47 percent of Americans will hold a two- or four-year degree by 2025-a rate that economic experts say is far below the level that can keep the nation competitive in the global, knowledge-based economy. The Stronger Nation report tracks progress toward Lumina’s “Big Goal:” namely, that 60 percent of Americans hold high-quality degrees by 2025. It measures progress at the national, state and county levels, with individual profiles for all 50 states. For the first time, readers will be able to compare local attainment with that of their county, state and the nation. Get quick access to state data.

National Polls Show Public More Concerned About Higher Education Performance And Decsions

  Here are 2 prior polls from the National Center For Public PolicyAnd higher Education in San Jose, Ca. that demonstrate the public is less pleased with the decision making and perfromance of higher education officials and colleges. The polls  indicate the public thinks colleges operate more like businesses that focus more on their bottom line than on the educational experience of students. The public is skeptical that colleges are doing all they can to control costs. Note the responses between the  polls in  2009 and 2010.

http://www.highereducation.org/reports/squeeze_play_10/squeeze_play_10.pdf

http://www.highereducation.org/reports/squeeze_play_09/squeeze_play_09.pdf

Texas Moving On Many Policies To Improve College Completion

Just more than half of Texas’ college students will graduate in six years, according to Commissioner of Higher Education Raymund Paredes. Despite his concerns, Paredes said he believes progress has been made under the “Closing the Gap Initiative” begun 10 years ago. Since then: the legislature created “college and career readiness standards” for high school students; the state is creating “end-of-course” exams based on those new standards; the number of Hispanic students going to college has risen 75%; and the number of high school graduates who are “college-ready” has risen from 18% to 22%.

State Data Systems For Higher Education Are Idiosyncratic And Amorphous

THE STATE OF STATE POST-SECONDARY DATA SYSTEMS
This resource presents information based on a study conducted by SHEEO that cataloged 59 state-level student unit record (SUR) data systems containing postsecondary data in 44 states and the District of Columbia.The study describes state postsecondary data systems, a task made complex by the organizational reality that there is often no single, uniform entity or organization within a state to respond to survey questions associated with state postsecondary data systems. Rather, each state has a unique organization that implements and oversees the collection of its postsecondary data. State postsecondary data systems, then, reflect state oversight differences and are an amorphous group. There is often more than one postsecondary data system per state. They may be within a coordinating or governing board of higher education or another state agency or entity. They may contain data from only one institution of higher education, several institutions, institutions within a defined system, or all institutions in the state. Further, they may contain student data in the aggregate or at the unit record level. Ultimately, state constitutions and laws dictate coordinating and governing board missions, duties, and responsibilities, affecting the shape of each state’s postsecondary data system. Understanding these differences is critical to the discussions currently taking place in the design, function, and goals of state P-20 data systems. This study updates and expands the Critical Connections study conducted by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems and funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education.

Community College Transfers Succeed At Four Year Colleges

  There have been a number of articles verifying the sucess of community college transfers. Here is one of the best from Teachers College

e Record on line :

Baccalaureate Success of Transfers and Rising 4-Year College Juniors
by Tatiana Melguizo & Alicia.C. Dowd
The main objective of this study is to compare the effect of being a successful community college “transfer” student instead of a “rising junior” in a 4-year college on bachelor’s degree attainment. Logistic regression is used to estimate the effect of being a transfer student, and the effects and interplay of factors such as socioeconomic background and institutional selectivity on bachelor’s degree completion are estimated. The results indicate no difference in baccalaureate attainment for transfers after accounting for state-level characteristics.

How To Improve Policy For Remedial/ Developmental Education Success At Community Colleges #3

Guest blogger: Nancy Shulock, California State University -Sacramento. This the third and last blog in this series on remedial/developmental education policy. See prior two posts for more context.

A current proposal by the Academic Senate of the California Community Colleges to allow for content review as a basis to set prerequisites aligns with the best thinking nationally on how to simultaneously improve remedial instruction while taking a balanced approach to the prerequisite issue. By encouraging colleges to be clear on the skills and competencies that students need in college level courses and designing basic skills courses accordingly, it is also a major step towards improving basic skills. The proposed policy would also lay the foundation for more diagnostic use of assessments so that students can be directed only to those basic skills courses or modules or contextualized courses that they need – shortening the time they spend in remediation. It lays the foundation for creating a set of clear college readiness standards that can communicate to K-12 what will be expected of students who enter the community colleges. Finally, it replaces problematic statistical processes with purposeful alignment of course content, in line with what the leading reform states are doing and consistent with a new report by two leading national policy centers on improving college readiness by aligning competency expectations and assessing proficiencies.[i]

An expert on state developmental education policy reported that no other state has such a prescriptive policy for what institutions have to do or cannot do to try to improve the basic skills of under-prepared students and none has the kind of “onerous” statistical validation that California has.[ii] He confirmed that leading states, such as Texas, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, are using content review as the driving force in reforming the delivery of developmental education to improve outcomes for under-prepared students.

With more explicit reference to prerequisites, another leading expert summarized the new directions as follows[iii]:

The most thoughtful states are trying to strike a delicate balance on assessment and placement policy. On one hand, policies that are too permissive allow students to enroll in college-credit courses without adequate preparation or support, setting up both the student and the institution for failure. On the other hand, overly restrictive policies may require students who have a reasonable chance of succeeding without intervention, such as those who fall just below the established cut score for placement into remediation, to enroll in developmental education anyway….Effective state assessment and placement policies will strike a balance between restrictive and permissive rules. (Collins, p.9)

The ASCCC proposal to allow content review reflects these best efforts by putting the focus on course content and letting faculty at the colleges determine what mix of separate basic skills courses, modular courses, integrated courses, etc. will help students acquire the competencies they need in the shortest possible time.

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[i] Beyond the Rhetoric: Improving college readiness through coherent state policy.  National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and Southern Regional Education Board, June 2010.

[ii] Bruce Vandal, Education Commission of the States, personal communication, July 2, 2010.

[iii] Michael Lawrence Collins, Setting Up Success in Developmental Education: How State Policy Can Help Community Colleges Improve Student Success Outcomes.  Boston: Jobs for the Future, June 2009.