Few details are known about President Barack Obama’s proposed Access and Incentive Completion Fund intended to support state efforts to help students persist to graduation or program completion. To help institutions of higher education decipher the opportunities and challenges associated with pursuing a share of available funding, EducationDynamics hosted a Webinar featuring former senior education policy advisor with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Following are those questions from the Webinar that had gone unanswered… until now.
Some feel that institutions should be rewarded for adding value to measured student learning outcomes rather than completion rates since students often attend more than one institution. Instead of focusing on completion and retention to improve student learning outcomes, should legislation focus on student competence and persistence?
The notion of growth assessments or value added assessments is something that has already gained substantial support among policymakers and think tanks working with the public K-12 system. There are a lot of compelling reasons for why this would be helpful, particularly with highly mobile populations, like migrant farm workers, as well as with English Language Learner populations.
One of the problems with such an approach at the postsecondary level is that marginal contributions, such as additional credit hours, may not be very helpful for students until they reach the degree or certificate threshold. An additional year of education is helpful, but it’s much more helpful when it leads to a degree. So in many ways, the idea of value added measurements of student outcomes is most helpful when it’s also combined with a degree attainment standard. That way, you have two separate signals of educational attainment: the value added by the institution on assessed indicators and the credential itself. On its own, value added assessments may help institutions feel good about the work they do and demonstrate some student learning outcomes, but it may not ultimately help the student.
At the same time, institutions don’t control how long students remain enrolled. Students transfer, drop out or stop out, and make all kinds of life decisions that affect enrollment patterns. When a student leaves a program of study, however, it’s impossible to measure his or her learning. Obviously, only enrolled students can be assessed, and if we’re only learning about how much additional value is obtained by students still enrolled, we’re missing much of the information that will help institutions adjust to meet the needs of those students who already dropped out.
Still, I believe there is a real role for competency-based instruction and that such a shift ought to be the future of education at all levels. Right now a degree indicates students have attained a certain number of credit hours―which may be completely independent of a student’s actual learning. If we move away from credit hours as a means of demonstrating academic attainment and replace it with a competency-based model, a degree or certificate would mean a lot more. Such an approach would blend the advantages of value added assessments and completion measurements. A handful of schools are already operating this way, even though it complicates things considerably in a credit hour based world. Western Governors University is perhaps farthest along in completely replacing traditional credit hour programs with competency-based instruction, but others are moving that direction as well.
Is there a concern from Congress pertaining to incentives for retention and completion relating to institutions helping to produce quality students versus just passing them along for the incentive?
The first issue with that concern is that there is no real incentive structure right now. Congress continues to award financial aid to institutions that meet the requirements for participation regardless of completion rates. Efforts to develop incentives are relatively new; institutions interested in “gaming” any existing system would find greater administrative expense than would be warranted by the amount of incentive currently available.
Second, concerns such as those assume a level of control over student behavior that most institutions don’t enjoy. Students who don’t earn a certain number of credit hours can’t be awarded a degree. The accreditation system would also limit the ability of institutions to try to simply move students through a program in order to win any type of incentive that Congress might pass. The existing pieces of the postsecondary quality assurance system work against institutions trying to take advantage of any incentive structure.
Standardization of competency-based instruction could also be helpful in this instance. If degree attainment were tied to specific competencies that were consistently measured across institutions (not unlike nursing or other professional exams), institutions would have a difficult time trying to take advantage of incentive systems.
Since students hold the most volition to complete, transfer or stop out/drop out, are there any direct incentives for students to help them persist to program completion or graduation? For example, reduced repayment schedule, etc.
A number of initiatives are available, such as loan to grant policies adopted by some other countries. Some of these have shown promise in changing behavior, but they are costly in federal budgeting terms. Still, an effort to encourage students to weigh their postsecondary options against the potential costs of not completing might encourage more students to make smarter decisions about their programs of study, as well as the amount of loans they take on.
If Congress were willing, they could provide reduced interest rates for completing students, principal forgiveness, more advantageous repayment terms, and a host of other options on loans. Congress could also provide increased tax benefits for degree-completing students, or even cash assistance. It’s not clear that any of these would directly impact completion and retention rates, but it would probably have some positive effects.
From what I understand, MDRC, a non-profit education and social policy research organization, has been working with incentive systems combined with direct intervention in a handful of cities around the country and has met with considerable success in improving retention rates. That type of coupling of policies may be necessary if Congress wants to move the needle on completion and retention rates.
More than half of our Webinar participants feel that greater learning outcomes assessment measures are needed at the national level. Do you foresee this becoming a hot button issue among Congress? If implemented, what would this mean for higher education?
I think it’s already a hot-button issue in Congress. Research that goes back almost a decade from the National Center on Education Statistics (by Cliff Adelman) has focused on completion and retention and a number of Congressional hearings have already focused in part on completion and retention rates, as well as efforts to determine how much students actually learn. Congress has heard from employers that students leaving college aren’t ready for the workplace, and the earnings differential for students with college degrees has declined when measured against inflation.
Congress may decide that accreditors need to begin to apply more direct learning assessments. Many of the national accreditors and some of the regional accreditors are already asking institutions to report specific outcome data. A federal initiative to increase the data reporting requirements would stretch institutions, but it may not be that far off.
Of course, once the debate over measures begins, the next question is how best to assess institutions that have widely varying missions. For example, are there outcome standards that could be applied to both the small trade school on the corner that prepares students for careers in criminal justice and the major public research university, and would common indicators even be meaningful? Placement rates have a long history in federal postsecondary training programs, ranging from the Workforce Investment Act to the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, but are they an appropriate measure for every institution of higher education? Some would argue yes, but those sorts of debates are going to receive a lot of attention from institutions.
There’s also an unspoken fear from many institutions that once Congress starts down the path of common learning measurements, they may not measure up as well as their peers. Adjusting for student population characteristics and institutional mission will help even the playing field, but there is some risk that poor performing institutions may be pushed out of the field―something that not a small number of institutions may fear.
Scott Fleming is President of Madison Education Group where he leads work on federal relations, strategic management and regulatory issues. He is an expert on student financial aid programs as well as issues related to accreditation, distance education, minority serving institutions and international education. Prior to joining Madison Education Group, Fleming served as the lead higher education policy advisor for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, where he led negotiations of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, and the Higher Education Reconciliation Act.