Today, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will announce annual federal Charter Schools Program grants to states and non-profit charter management organizations. This round of grants marks a new milestone in President Obama’s education reform legacy. What distinguishes Obama from his predecessors, and what makes him a true champion of our nation’s schoolchildren, is his coupling of new investments in public school choice with a laser-like focus on high-performance, especially for poor and minority students. This Administration has invested a small but significant amount of funding in the replication and expansion of charter school management organizations that have a proven track record of high performance – something no other President has done. Here is a brief rundown on the beneficial impact of this initiative.
When my colleague and I wrote our Tough Love report last year, we recommended the federal government draw a line at the bottom 5 percent of four-year institutions in terms of their performance in carrying out the core purposes underlying federal student aid: low-income student access, student graduation, and student loan repayment.
The bottom 5 percent of colleges would then be given a dose of Tough Love. Either improve over a set period of time – to show they could still provide students and taxpayers with some minimal value – or eventually lose access to various forms of federal financial aid. Under-resourced colleges, such as many minority-serving institutions, should receive additional financial and technical assistance before any consequences attach.
At the time, student loan repayment rate data was not available to calculate a bottom 5 percent benchmark so we took a look at very suboptimal cohort default rate data. But now, loan repayment data by institution is available thanks to the newly released College Scorecard. Now, we are finally able to identify the country’s lowest four-year college performers in terms of return on investment: colleges where more than 62 percent of former students cannot pay down any principal on their student loans. In other words, these are colleges where 62 percent of students who borrowed to enroll end up in a much worse financial situation than when they first enrolled.
Loan repayment rate data is crucial to our full understanding of problems facing our higher education system; it can pinpoint colleges that not only have degree production issues but also quality degree production issues, as measured by students’ ability to make progress on paying down their student debt.
Yet our federal accountability system – to the extent there is one – is still based on an antiquated measure of cohort default rates that only captures the worst possible outcome among student loan borrowers: those who cannot make a student loan payment for 9 consecutive months. Colleges with a default rate above 30 percent for three consecutive years or 40 percent in any one year can lose access to federal student aid. What’s more is that we know default rates are easily gamed – colleges have been documented to push students into deferment or forbearance so that they will not show up in the default calculation. Only about 20 schools have been subject to sanctions from the most recent cohort default rate standard.
Currently, there is a bipartisan bill to replace our federal accountability system based on default rates with one based on student loan repayment rates. Called the Student Protection and Success Act, it was co-sponsored by Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and is currently under committee consideration. They propose that schools with repayment rates more than 10% below the national average over a three-year period lose eligibility to participate in the Title IV federal student loan system. The problem with that bill though is that it’s Tough, but it doesn’t provide much Love in terms of added support for institutions that are failing because they are grossly under-resourced.
It’s easy for politicians to be tough, and it’s easy for advocates to call for more love. It’s hard to embrace Tough Love, but it’s the right thing to do for students and taxpayers alike.
As Congress debates a re-write of No Child Left Behind Act this week, it’s worth noting that the same issues of inadequacy, inequity, and accountability for underperformance are also present in higher education policy.
In response, national leaders confront the same basic 30,000 feet-high political question: Are you for simply more resources OR reform? Or are you for more resources AND reform?
How did President Obama answer the question and what were the results? You might be surprised at the magnitude of the answer, the successes, and the failures.
Check out a sneak peek of our report on the Obama higher ed legacy and the 2016 campaign.
When it comes to understanding your college degree’s ROI, should you listen to your college educators or to your future employer?
During the opening remarks for the release of a recent study by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Education for Gallup, shared a shocking statistic with the crowd. While 96% of college educators are confident in their ability to prepare students for employment, only 11% of employers agree that colleges are meeting the demand.
How can there be such a massive discrepancy between what “preparation” for the workplace looks like? What are institutions – or students – doing wrong in the process? More importantly, who is to be held accountable?
Cheryl Hyman, Chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago and panelist at the Lumina-Gallup release event, might have a promising idea: develop a two-fold accountability system that holds institutions and students accountable for success.
For example, City Colleges of Chicago has tackled the information gap problem by taking active steps to ensure that the information and resources that students need is readily available and accessible through their Reinvention initiative. First steps included tripling the number of college advisors to cut the student to advisor ratio in half and launching the GradesFirst early alert and appointment management system to identify students marked absent or struggling with their coursework and target them for support.
Hyman also launched a “Student GPS Pathway” project that identifies relevant industries that represent the job market and what four-year colleges look for, and placed them in clear semester-by-semester pathways. City Colleges then help students navigate through class schedule planning, see what majors are available and what career opportunities are tied to them, and understand how the skills they’re currently learning align with jobs currently available in the market.
Though part of this approach also requires the student to be proactive and fully take advantage of the opportunities present, the strategy has more to do with what colleges bring to the table, says Hyman. To put it bluntly, when comparing the relevance of the coursework students take to the skills that employers seek, Hyman says, “If it’s irrelevant, we don’t have it”.
Such a model sets up a dual accountability system. One that requires institutions to provide relevant and high-quality training and support for students and the other for students to follow through on their commitment to being engaged and motivated degree- seeking individuals.
But employers also have a responsibility in contributing to the education of colleges on the vastly changing demands of the market – and they need to do so urgently and proactively. When such a relationship is formed, college curricula can be adjusted to meet the needs of what knowledge and skills the market demands in real time and in the future – not two, five, or ten years later. Students should then get hands-on experience on those new skills so that their education isn’t purely theoretical training. As Eduardo Padrón, event panelist and President of Miami Dade College, noted, “We must also prepare students for jobs that are not present today”.
City Colleges of Chicago has a promising model that begins to answer some of these concerns. Initial data also suggests that this kind of an accountability system works. Just recently, for example, City Colleges of Chicago doubled the number of degrees awarded from 2,000 to 4,000 after implementing Hyman’s new reinvention campaign. If all colleges could implement a similar model – and build into it an employer feedback loop – we could see the gap between educator and employer perceptions of workforce preparation close at a much faster rate. By holding institutions, employers, and students responsible for student success, we can begin to see a system that gives as much to its students as it expects out of them.
