New success measures are better, but flawed

The U.S. Education Department’s plan to include part-time and transfer students in community college success rates is a major step forward, writes Thomas Bailey, who chaired the Committee on the Measure of Student Success and directs the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia. However, the new measures still won’t answer important questions about student success.

The plan will clarify who counts as a “degree-seeking” student and “improve the collection and analysis of data on students who receive federal financial aid,” Bailey notes. It also calls for improved state data systems to track students over time.

However, the federal action plan calculates a “graduation rate” that includes both students who earned a degree and those  who transferred without graduating. The two outcomes should not be lumped together, the CMSS recommended. “Transfer is a key outcome for community-college students, but it is not the same thing as graduating,” Bailey writes.

The Department of Education also rejected the CMSS’s suggestion that colleges disaggregate outcomes for community-college students who are deemed ill-prepared for college-level work and are therefore assigned to remedial education. While this might be difficult for colleges to do, it is important—not least because so many students fall into this category. The action plan should recognize the need to develop better information about the success of these students.

Many questions about student outcomes will not be answered by the new measures, Bailey predicts. To really understand student success, we’d need “a data system that would allow us to track individual students over time as they move around the country and among institutions.”  Because of privacy concerns, this is a controversial idea. But without individual tracking, “our measures of success will remain frustratingly incomplete.”

Changing the grad rate calculus

Community college success rates are expected to rise significantly when the Education Department completes its plan to include part-time and transfer students, notes Jennifer González in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Currently, students who transfer to a four-year institution before completing an associate degree are considered dropouts. But counting part-timers and transfers could be tricky. The department will have to decide how many credits make a part-time student or a “substantially prepared” transfer.

The department will also have to sort out how long those students will be tracked in order to determine whether they graduate. Will it be 150 percent of the conventional time to graduation (six years) or perhaps 200 percent of the time (eight years)?

Clifford Adelman, a senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, said the key “lies in the quality of institutional records and databases, and whether the registrars and institutional research can straighten out some of the sloppiness that has accumulated below the surface of the currently simplistic graduation-rate survey reporting.”

“Making sure everybody can do it the same way, and with consistent results,” he says, “will take a few years.”

State data systems track students who transfer to in-state public universities, but not students who go out of state or choose a private college. More than a quarter of all transfers cross state lines.

AACC: Grad rates aren’t that bad

Community colleges are working to improve graduation rates and don’t need any help from the American Enterprise Institute, writes the American Association of Community Colleges in response to an AEI report on the high cost of low graduation rates.  “The so-called analysis is a pseudo-academic attack on community colleges,” writes the AACC in a statement.

AEI looks at three-year graduation rates (22.1 percent), instead of  “more accurate” four-year rates (27.6 percent), AACC writes. And many students who leave college are “stop-outs” rather than drop-outs.  “Federal data indicate that 62 percent of those who leave a community college in the first year re-enroll at an institution of higher education within the next five years.”

The report assumes that those who leave a community college earn the same as high school diploma holders, rather than those who have “some college.” By definition, students who start and leave a community college have attained “some college.” In 2011, median weekly earnings for high school graduates were $638 as compared to $719 for those with “some college.” The unemployment rate was also 0.7% lower for those with “some college.”

In addition, the AEI report “dramatically understates” community college transfers and their success rates, AACC charges.

Like ‘a bonus for the Titanic’s captain’

“As graduation rates were bottoming out at the City Colleges of Chicago in 2009, Chancellor Wayne Watson was cashing out” with a $800,000 golden parachute, charges the Better Government Association.

On top of roughly $537,000 in sick- and vacation-day payouts, Watson also was given an exit bonus of $124,615, according to City Colleges records recently obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. What’s more, City Colleges is providing him with free health care coverage for life – costing the system more than $22,000 to date in premiums and reimbursements – and a life insurance policy that he was allowed to cash out for $112,602, records show.

Graduation rates within the City Colleges system – which serves more than 100,000 students at seven main campuses – fell from 13 percent in 1999, Watson’s first full year as chancellor, to 7 percent in 2009, when he left.

“This would be like giving a performance bonus to the captain of the Titanic,” says Andy Shaw, CEO of the BGA.

Watson is now president of Chicago State University, which also has a very low graduation rate. He’s paid $250,000 a year and lives in a university house. His annual pension from City Colleges is nearly $140,000.

Counting transfers will raise completion rates

Community colleges’ low completion rates will more than double, if colleges are allowed to count students who transfer after earning at least 30 credits.

An advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Education has recommended the change. Currently, students who transfer to a four-year institution without earning an associate degree are considered dropouts.

(Including transfers) would raise community-college completion rates to 40 percent, according to the American Association of Community Colleges—up from the 18 percent of community-college students who now receive a two-year associate degree within three years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The new completion rate would also count students who take up to four years, rather than the current three, to finish their two-year degrees. It is not clear how much further that would raise the completion figures.

I think the change makes sense: Transfers have completed their community college goals. But it would be nice to know how many go on to earn a bachelor’s degree.

Here’s how to track students’ progress

Nobody knows the college graduation rate  because we’re unwilling to track individual students, writes Andrew Gillen, research director for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Federal data counts only first-time, full-time students and counts most transfers as dropouts, even though 38 percent of students are part-timers, one third transfer and others drop out and back in.

The fact that we spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on higher education and can’t determine something as basic as a national graduation rate is a dereliction of duty.

Student Unit Records — databases that assign each student an individual number — would make it possible to calculate an accurate, meaningful graduation rate, Gillen writes.

Matching educational records from a SUR with earnings data from the IRS would allow for accurate employment outcomes to be published for each college and program. Such information would help students make better decisions which would in turn help discipline and focus colleges.

Bad colleges oppose SURs: Accurate data would take away their excuses, writes Gillen. Good colleges are opposed too, “terrified of being compared to other schools on something like value-added earnings.”

Privacy advocates also oppose tracking students, but “convincing methods of safeguarding privacy while implementing a SUR have been developed, Gillen writes.

College consumers need more info

Do Colleges Need a Consumer’s Report Card? asks career Marty Nemko in The Atlantic. He’s seeking feedback on his nutrition label for higher education.

If government can require “every package of taco-flavored Doritos (to) tell you the percentage of the FDA recommended daily allowance of vitamin A to zinc is in each ounce,” colleges should provide information to help prospective students make what “may be our life’s most expensive (and important?) purchase,” Nemko writes.

The data might include: the percentage of freshmen that graduate in four years, the progress they make in reading and critical thinking, the employment rate and earnings for recent graduates by degree, and (as the Occupiers would approve) the actual four-year cost of school, including cash and loan financial aid, broken down by family income and assets.

There are plenty of college guides out there and “more statistics, facts, and opinions are a mere Google-search away,” Nemko concedes. Would a standardized college report card just add to the information overload?

‘Dream’ adds 23 ‘leader colleges’

Achieving the Dream has added 23 community colleges to its list of 52 “leader colleges,” reports Inside Higher Ed.

These colleges improved graduation rates, closed achievement gaps and changed lives, said the nonprofit. For example,  Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas strengthened remedial education coursework and increased the college’s three-year completion rate to 24 percent from 10 percent over a four-year period.

Few Baltimore students earn degrees at 2-year college

Baltimore high school graduates increasingly go to community colleges rather than four-year colleges, according to a Johns Hopkins report (pdf). It reported in the Baltimore Sun. Only 5.8 percent of those who started at a two-year college earned a degree in six years compared with 34 percent of those who started at four-year-colleges, reports the Baltimore Education Research Consortium. The report tracks the class of ’04 through 2010.

Baltimore lacks a “college-going culture,” researchers said. The city sends fewer high school graduates to college than the national average. Some city schools now focus on career preparation, offering the chance to earn certificates in a range of fields such as health, bioscience, hospitality and cosmetology.

Since 2008, the number of career-preparation programs offered in the city has jumped more than 50 percent, and the number of students participating in them has increased by nearly 40 — to more than 6,200.

Parents are concerned about “their kids’ readiness to do well in the real world,” city schools CEO Andres Alonso said earlier this year in a discussion about career preparation versus college preparation.

Guidance counselors should encourage more students to attend four-year colleges, the report advised.

That’s not realistic, responded Mark McColloch, vice president of instruction for the Community College of Baltimore County. Eighty-nine percent of new CCBC students in 2010 needed remedial classes, he said.

Only 5 percent of Baltimore students completed a CCBC degree from 2004 to 2010, according to the report.

“The achievement is a function of background … not a function of someone doing something wrong, whether it be in college or high school, to Baltimore City students,” McColloch said. “It’s that students who are more at-risk come to two-year schools. And we are better prepared to deal with someone from that kind of background.”

Sending unprepared students — 89 percent fail the CCBC placement test! — to four-year colleges and universities doesn’t seem like a bright idea to me.

States link funds to college performance

Increasingly, states are linking some college funding to performance goals, reports Stateline.

Missouri will link increases in state funding to state goals, such as graduation, retention, performance on professional certification exams and low tuition, after fiscal 2013.

In most states, performance-based funding isn’t big money.  Pennsylvania will set aside 2.5 percent of its higher education budget for target-linked funding.

Tennessee is the exception: Eventually, more than 90 percent of higher education funds will be tied to performance.  Colleges receive credit when students achieve goals with extra points for at-risk and non-traditional students.

Performance funding isn’t a new concept in higher education. From 1979 to 2007, 26 states — including Missouri, Pennsylvania and Tennessee — implemented the concept in some form, according to a recent report from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Many of those programs were established in the 1990s, when states were flush with cash, and then subsequently abandoned. The current climate of fiscal austerity has made lawmakers more receptive to reviving the programs.

Models should be simple and clear, advises Julie Bell, director of the education group at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

States should link performance funding to graduation, rather than relying on internal measures, such as student evaluations of teaching quality.

The state has to offer enough money to give the institution a genuine incentive to change behavior.

Missouri has been cutting funds for colleges and universities, concedes Paul Wagner, deputy commissioner of higher education. “A lot of people are saying, ‘What’s the point of talking about how you’re distributing new money?’ ”

Some fear that performance-based funding will pressure colleges to lower standards to raise graduation rates. Tennessee professors call that “watering the soup.”

Community college funding declined by $488 per student from 2008 to 2009, according to a Delta Cost Project report. Community colleges’ tuition increased $113 per student, while spending declined by $254.