College Students Worry About Time

Academics are not the only thing keeping college students up at night. A new survey of more than 1,500 undergrads currently enrolled in a two- or four-year institution found that 36% of respondents said time management and 35% identified anxiety as the key factors keeping them from a diploma.

Students also listed being overwhelmed with managing responsibilities (31%) and working too many hours (24%) to pay for school as other factors. The survey results may be the tip of the iceberg since so many nontraditional students are heading to college.

“We have a lot of students with very complicated lives and they have broader issues,” said Mark Milliron, co-founder and chief learning officer of Civitas Learning, which did the study. “Trying to design the right kind of advising support is going to mean a level of diversification and a level of personalization.”

Advising is becoming much more important to students. The study noted that 40% ranked information on career options after graduation and on staying on track to finish a degree as the highest types of advice they should receive. Time management and academic success strategies were listed by 33% of the respondents.

Students Need a Hand with Basic Costs

Low-income, first-in-family college students sometimes need a little help getting to the finish line. Institutions typically respond with solutions such as tuition aid and academic counseling. That may not be enough, according to speakers at The New York Times Higher Ed Leaders Forum held recently.

“The new economics of college goes way beyond tuition; we spend so much time talking about whether tuition is going up, whether it’s frozen, whether that makes college affordable. But the vast majority of the cost of attending college faced by students in the United States are things like books and supplies, room and board, medical expenses, transportation, clothing,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University, in a report about the conference on Education Dive.

Goldrick-Rab and other speakers pointed out that some students need assistance covering basic living expenses while they’re in school, yet that gap has been overlooked by colleges and universities. A study conducted by Temple University with the Wisconsin HOPE Lab indicated 36% of students are food insecure and 36% are housing insecure.

Similar findings emerged from the Monthly Student Panel survey conducted last spring by NACS OnCampus Research. When asked how concerned they were about having enough money to pay necessary bills such as rent, food, and monthly expenses, 23% of student respondents were “extremely” or “very” concerned. Another 23% were “somewhat” concerned.

In the same survey, students ranked “paying for home/rent expenses” as their No. 1 cost concern and 29% said they “often” or “sometimes” go without food when they’re hungry because they don’t have the money.

Campus Store Weights In on Rental Debate

In an opinion piece earlier this month in Inside Higher Ed, a University of North Dakota professor claimed that rental textbooks limited student access to course materials and stifled critical thinking and conversation. Jason Katzman, CCR, assistant director for academic resource support, CU Book Store, University of Colorado Boulder, says he understands the prof’s points but argues rentals are a symptom rather than a cause.

“Twenty years ago, a student bought a book, sold it back at the end of the semester, and maybe received something close to half (although probably not) of what they had paid if the book was being used again the next semester,” Katzman wrote in his Inside Higher Ed rebuttal. “Of course, professors complained then that the buyback process devalued the educational experience by encouraging students to part with important materials they might need for another class or later in life as a reference. Then, along came the Internet and Amazon, and the model that traditional collegiate textbook retailers had been using for years was upended. For many stores, renting textbooks is a way to compete while remaining financially viable.”

Market forces determine where students decide to get their course materials. Selling a textbook for $400 has become unthinkable, so rental has become a way for bookstores to remain relevant and viable. The current trend of providing students low-cost digital course materials as part of tuition or course fees is another solution that helps publishers and bookstores stay in business while driving prices down for students.

“If the higher-education community wants to spend large amounts of energy working on the high cost of course materials, they should. It’s important,” Katzman wrote. “However, we’re being shortsighted. In addition to course materials delivery, another model that’s broken is higher education itself. What happens when Amazon or somebody else finds a way to offer a bachelor’s degree for 75% of its current cost?”

Prof Vents about Textbook Rentals

Does renting textbooks save students money or cost them the real value of a college education? Sheila Liming, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, makes a case for the latter in an opinion column for Inside Higher Education.

“A degree used to mean learning from texts and racking up a cumulative store of skills and reference materials along the way,” she wrote. “But with the rise of textbook rentals, the rules of learning are getting rewritten, and not by education professionals, and not in accordance with the needs of student consumers, either.”

Her issue with rentals is they’re promoted as a cost-savings option but there are limits to how students can access and use the materials. Those are roadblocks that inhibit critical thinking and conversation, according to Liming.

“Rental companies insist that a given book can only be ‘useful’ to a student for the duration of a single semester, and so encourage students to see their own learning as fated for expiration and uselessness,” she said. “Even worse, rental companies and vendors—including campus bookstores—actively discourage students’ efforts to use the text they have rented, since wear and tear threatens the longevity of a book that a vendor wants to re-rent over and over again.”

To Liming, rental is just the latest “scheme” to make a buck, and is doing so at the expense of students’ education, depriving them of the ability to look back at previous classes or assignments to gauge their progress.

“Students are paying more and being coerced into renting because they are told they must, and  because they have not been made aware of their options,” she concluded. “It is therefore up to education professionals to show them—and to fight for the expansion of—worthy, cost-friendly alternatives, including both OER (open educational resources) and affordable print editions. Those alternatives do exist, and anyone who says differently is, as the saying goes, probably selling something.”

Liming may have a point when it comes to affordable alternatives for her English classes, but what about required texts for introductory biology or chemistry classes? Do students with other majors actually want to keep them to reflect back on and will they ever consider those textbooks affordable?

Too Early to Tell About Tennessee Promise

Education officials in Tennessee have released data on the Tennessee Promise, a program designed to make community college free for graduating high school seniors in the state. The results were encouraging, but it’s too soon to proclaim a smashing success.

Of the more than 13,000 students who participated in the Tennessee Promise class of 2015, 21.5% graduated with a degree or certificate, an increase over the 13.8% of students who accomplished the same thing the year before the program started. The data also indicated that only 8.3% of students who didn’t enroll in the Tennessee Promise in 2015 were able to earn a degree or certificate in five semesters.

“I have my degree and zero student debt,” one graduate of the program said in a National Public Radio report. “You do have to pay for your books and your parking passes, but that’s a heck of a deal. You can’t beat that.”

On the other hand, the dropout rate for the first Tennessee Promise class was just 2.3% lower than the rate of freshmen who dropped out in 2014. Some in higher ed also argue the data don’t actually show what caused the increase in degrees and certificates attained.

“We don’t have a benchmark for success on this because Tennessee’s the first state,” said Joni Finney, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. “I’m just worried about pulling the carrot out of the ground too soon to see if it’s full grown. I think these programs have to evolve.”

Policy Choices Limiting Promise Programs

Legislative policies may impact states offering free tuition for two-year institutions. Research that looked at 20 existing College Promise programs in 18 states found that some of their requirements could make it harder for some students to participate.

“As debates around Promise programs continue, state legislators serious about spurring enrollment, lowering debt, and addressing inequities in our higher-education system should ensure that proposed Promise programs provide both a clear message and a clear benefit to those who need it most,” wrote Jen Mishory, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, in The Future of Statewide College Promise Programs: A State Guideto Free College.

The report noted that half the programs studied required students to attend school full time, eliminating part-time students who are more likely to be on their own financially and in need of the additional help to attend. Merit-based requirements and limitations on the degrees or certificates covered by the free-tuition programs can also reduce the number of eligible students.

Using federal Pell Grant dollars or other grants to cover the cost of tuition before the Promise program kicks in is another roadblock for students. The report noted that if Promise dollars went to tuition, lower-income students would then be able to use the grant money on some of the other costs of higher education, such as housing transportation, and books.

“At least in their initial stages, few states have recharged their higher-education investments enough to make significant progress toward a more universal benefit—and each state faces their own unique hurdles to getting there, some more challenging than others,” Mishory wrote. “Without that investment, as states launch programs with rationing policies to contain program costs, the choices they make will have very different impacts on who benefits, how well it measures up against the goals of spurring enrollment and lowering debt, and how their program impacts the progress their state makes in closing gaps in enrollment and attainment rates by race and income.”

CA Community Colleges Awash in Aid

In California’s speed to ensure low-income students could afford at least a year of higher education, some community colleges have ended up with surplus assistance funds.

A new state measure just signed into law this month provides funding for students’ first year of studies at California community colleges. The bill was passed in response to former President Barack Obama’s call for community colleges to offer two free years of education under a proposed “America College Promise” program.

However, according to a report in the San Diego Union Tribune, a number of community colleges started their own Promise programs before the state did. As a result, some have more money to support first-year students than they need.

The San Diego Community College District, for example, launched a pilot program in 2016 and raised $300,000 to pay for more than 200 area students to attend at no cost. The district had planned to raise another $700,000 for the program this year. Palomar College secured $1.5 million in donations for its Promise program. Other colleges have similar amounts to set aside to aid students and are now trying to figure out how the money should be used in view of the new law, especially since approximately 60% of California’s community-college students already qualify for tuition-fee waives due to their low income.

Some schools are considering using their Promise funds to help students with textbooks or other costs. Because the new state law is aimed at helping first-year students only, some colleges said they may earmark their Promise money to assist second-year students or dropouts who want to return.

Oregon Has to Cut Back on Tuition Promise

Adequate funding has always been an issue for the free community college tuition programs that some states are trying to implement. State lawmakers in Oregon knew their two-year appropriation of $40 million was $8 million short of projected costs, so that program was recently forced to tighten its income-related criteria and won’t be able to provide for every eligible student.

Despite the cutback, the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission has notified more than 8,000 students that they did qualify for the scholarship. The 6,800 students who received the award in the program’s first year will also receive all the money promised to them, regardless of their income.

“Most kids will still be able to get the scholarship,” said state Sen. Mark Hass, chief architect of the program. “It’s just upper-end families who won’t and, frankly, there aren’t too many of those at our community colleges anyway.”

Families that are able to contribute $18,000 or more for college based on information from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form are being cut out of the program this year, which has generated some criticism. Hass expects that full eligibility will be restored next year.

The Oregon Promise was never meant to provide free tuition to everyone in the state. It doesn’t cover living expenses and only pays for tuition costs that remain after other need-based grants are used. However, the program does award a minimum of $1,000 to the poorest students to help defray costs such as fees, textbooks, and transportation.

“I don’t like that they’re getting slammed for it,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, Temple University professor and advocate for college accessibility who is the keynote speaker for the 2017 Textbook Affordability Conference Nov. 10-12, at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. “I think they’re being really careful with taxpayer dollars and I find that really respectable.”

Students Aren't Spending as Much on Books

The news is full of reports on textbook costs in higher education. OnCampus Research, the research arm of the NACS, found student spending on course materials actually decreased during the 2016-17 academic year.

Student Watch, Attitudes & Behaviors toward CourseMaterials, a survey of more than 20,000 college students, noted that average spending on 10 required courses was $579 per student, down $23 from the previous year and $122 from 2007-08. Students also said they spent another $500 on technology and school supplies.

The report found an increasing number of students cut their course materials costs by borrowing, sharing, or downloading free information needed for class, and by using formats such as open educational resources. A quarter of the students reported using free course materials, up from 19% in spring 2016 and 15% from spring 2015.

When obtaining course materials, 82% of students purchased and 57% rented from their campus store. Nearly three-quarters bought new textbooks and 70% said they purchased used copies. Just 23% bought digital, but that was an increase of 8% over fall 2015. On average, the campus store was the main source for students' course materials.

The cost of the Student Watch report is $199 for NACS store members and $999 for everyone else, and includes the final report along with data tables from both fall 2016 and spring 2017 surveys. To purchase, email mmeyer@nacs.org or go to the Insights link at oncampusresearch.com. 

UMUC Takes Privatization to Another Level

The concept of third-party vendors leasing campus services is all too familiar to college store professionals. The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is taking that a step further, spinning off it’s own units into start-up companies offering their own services to others, all in an effort to grow endowments and keep tuition rates down.

“We believe that if you look at higher education, there is a core—what you teach, who teaches it, and how we teach it,” UMUC President Javier Miyares said in an interview for Inside Higher Education. “That is the existential, essential core of the university. Everything else are business processes that do not have to be run in the traditional way within the university.”

In 2015, the UMUC office of analytics was converted into a data-analytics service and there are plans to spin off the IT department into a company to be known as AccelerEd. UMUC Ventures was formed as a holding company to help the university realize some financial benefit when these new firms sell their services.

“UMUC recognizes that higher-education institutions have an obligation to students to reimagine how they achieve their missions,” said Ryan Craig, managing director of the investment firm University Ventures. “Too much of college and university spending is currently allocated to functions that do not directly serve the interests of tuition-paying students.”

However, there are critics of UMUC’s unbundling tactics.

“As a taxpayer of Maryland, I think of UMUC as a state treasure,” said former UMUC employee George Kroner. “The university has a special academic mission, and I hate seeing it put on the back burner. I don’t want to see the great work of UMUC privatized.”

States Boosting Funding, with Caveats

Many states that cut back on higher education funding during the recession are now ready to restore some of those dollars, albeit with strings attached. States are looking for ways to tie funds to student success and affordability.

In Kentucky, the state senate passed a bill to provide $1 billion to public colleges and universities. The amount each school would receive would be based on a variety of performance measures, including:

• 35% on student success metrics such as graduation rates, number of degrees awarded to low-income and minority students, and number of science and math degrees awarded.
• 35% on course-completion statistics.
• 10% on the amount of space devoted to student academics.
• 10% on how much each school spends on instruction and services.
• 10% on full-time enrollment.

In Wisconsin, the governor has proposed giving an extra $140 million to the university system, with $35 million covering the cost of a 5% tuition reduction for students and $43 million contingent on “affordability, workforce readiness, student success, efficiency, and service,” according to the University of Wisconsin. The proposal also calls for allowing students to opt out of paying certain fees that support student organizations. Those amount to about $89 of the total $607 in fees charged annually.

Ohio’s governor has proposed slowly increasing funding to public institutions, but schools would have to submit reports on how they’re cutting costs for students. As part of the plan, colleges and universities would also be expected to provide textbooks as part of tuition with a special fee no higher than $300 per year.

Some Schools Finding Ways to Manage Fees

While college students have always been quick to complain about textbook prices, the fees added to tuition are rapidly becoming as great a concern. A study from Project Muse found that student fees at a four-year public university averaged more than $1,700 each year, adding an additional 27% to the cost of tuition.

The fees pay for everything from student activities to maintenance. In one case, a school of business even charged a “professional development fee” for a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. That has some students seeing red and a few institutions thinking about other ways to approach the issue.

The University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, has rolled fees into its tuition since 2013, making it possible for students to use their financial aid to cover the bill. The results have been promising. The first class of students eligible for the program is set to graduate this year and the university said they borrowed 15% less to pay for their education. Dropout rates also fell, along with the number of applicants who didn’t show up for their freshman year after receiving their first bill.

Dayton is also saving money. The university no longer sends out up to 40,000 separate bills each year to students for the fees.

“This is very much about building trust,” Jason Reinoehl, vice president for strategic enrollment management at Dayton, said in an article that appeared in The Hechinger Report. “It’s our beacon. I think the whole industry is going to have to do this.”

States, Cities Work to Boost Financial Aid

As the presidential candidates discuss the affordability of higher education for all and hold out promises of free community-college courses, at the state level more financial aid is already being funneled to students in need. Municipalities are also rolling out programs.

The National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs found that state-funded aid is up about 6% for the 2014-15 academic year (the most recent year for which it has collected data), according to an Inside Higher Ed report. Grants, which don’t require repayment, made up about 85% of the $12.4 billion in financial aid awarded.

In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti is working on a plan to provide one year of free classes—two years, if he can secure enough donations—at any of the Los Angeles Community College District campuses to students who graduate from an L.A. public high school, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The L.A. College Promise is intended to help a specific segment of the student body: those who would have to work full-time in order to afford to attend school part-time. Many of these students come from families who earn just enough to disqualify them from other aid programs.

The grants would enable these students to cut back on working hours and enroll on a full-time basis, allowing them to earn a degree or certificate more quickly. Students would also have to maintain at least a 2.0 grade-point average to receive grant money.

Fewer Americans Believe College Is Necessary

The number of Americans who think a college education is mandatory is on the decline. According to a survey from the nonpartisan organization Public Agenda, just 42% of respondents said they needed college for workforce success, a 13% drop since 2009.

Conversely, 57% said there were many ways to succeed without college, an increase of 14% over the last seven years. The study also reported that 46% of respondents said college was a questionable investment because of high loans and limited job opportunities.

Around two-thirds said many people are qualified for college but don’t have the opportunity. In addition, 59% said colleges are more concerned with the bottom line and just 34% said they believed schools cared most about education and students.

It Pays to Graduate on Time

A new study from NerdWallet found that taking six years to complete a bachelor’s degree could cost a student as much as $300,000 in additional tuition costs, loan interest, and lost income and retirement savings. That’s a problem since the National Center for Education Statistics reported that just 40% of college students graduate in four years.

One solution being tested is making the fifth year free for students who are unable to finish in four. Such programs normally come with strict eligibility requirements, such as working with an academic advisor, taking a full course load each semester, and passing all classes, but it is a way to help reduce anxiety about college costs, according to Tom Kazee, president of the University of Evansville, Evansville, IN.

Evansville launched a fifth-year-free program this fall, but is not alone in trying the solution. The University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, provides students with a free fifth year when they are pursuing academic interests outside of their majors, while Clark University, Worcester, MA,  offers some undergrads a fifth year for free to complete both a bachelor’s and master’s degree.  In another approach, Howard University, Washington, D.C., offers a 50% rebate off the final semester of tuition to students who finish early or on time.

“It’s increasingly clear that colleges worry about getting students to finish on time,” Ben Miller, senior director of postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, told NBC News. “You see a lot of different approaches to that.”

Tennessee Promise Improves for Year Two

The first year of the Tennessee Promise was a success, but not without challenges. State officials are addressing those issues as the program offering free community college education begins its second year.

More than 16,000 students were enrolled in the program last fall and 80% stayed with the program through the spring semester. The number of students who applied for Tennessee Promise scholarships for the 2016-17 school year increased to nearly 60,000, according to a report in The Tennessean.

The most significant change will deal with how federal aid is distributed to students. Filing rules for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) have been relaxed by the corporation responsible for overseeing the financial parts of the Tennessee Promise. In addition, new federal guidelines allowing students to use more accessible tax data to complete the form go into effect in the fall.

“This is going to change things dramatically for this program, in a good way,” said Mike Krause, executive director of Tennessee Promise. “FAFSA and the FAFSA verification process represent a hurdle for students, particularly low-income students.”

Communications are being ramped up to provide more information and support for students in the program. Officials also plan to introduce the Tennessee Promise to eighth-graders across the state. In addition, colleges are hiring more support staff for students in the program and some professors are using a more team-project-style approach to their classes to encourage greater participation from the Tennessee Promise students.

MOOCs as an Affordability Solution

There will always be students who want and need a traditional college education, but there also have to be less costly methods of earning a degree, according to Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.

Colleges must find new ways to deliver education to remain sustainable and DeMillo says massive open online courses (MOOCs) can play a role. Georgia Tech began offering MOOCs in 2011 and saw a 40% increase in applicants in the first year of the program.

The university expanded the program to include a master’s degree in computer science that costs thousands less than what students working on the same degree on campus are paying. The program will have 4,000 students this fall and all were required to meet the same criteria for acceptance, just like any other Georgia Tech students.

“You don’t change the existing order by fighting it,” DeMillo said in an article for Campus Technology. “You find new ways of doing things that make the old ways obsolete.”

House Passes HEA Bills

The U.S. House of Representatives has decided to take a piecemeal approach to the Higher Education Act by recently passing five bills that address some of the easier aspects of the legislation. Overhaul of the entire act isn’t likely to be completed until next year.

Among the bills passed, one would simplify the application for federal student aid and another focused on financial counseling, according to a report in U.S. News & World Report. Other bills dealt with making information about colleges and universities easier to access and improving benefits to historically black colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions.

“We have more work to do to strengthen higher education, but today we are making important progress,” said Rep. John Kline (R-MN), chair of the House’s Committee on Education and the Workforce, during a speech as lawmakers prepared to vote on the bills.

The legislation passed by the House has a strong chance of passing in the Senate because states will not have to take on spending to deliver the services to students, according to Education Dive. However, the Senate is still trying to tackle the entire Higher Education Act with one overhaul.

Higher Ed Sustains 17% Whack from States

The economic disaster of the past decade has clearly taken its toll on higher education, as states have trimmed funding for colleges and universities by an average of 17% since 2008, according to a recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research and policy institute.

The situation was worse a year ago. Since then, the study indicated, 38 states have restored some of the lost funding, by an average of 4%. However, the cuts in some states have been pretty deep. Arizona slashed hi-ed funding by 55.6%, while Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, and Pennsylvania all reduced postsecondary spending by more than a third. Thirty-one other states enacted double-digit cutbacks.

Translated into hard dollars, the drop in funding amounts to $1,525 per student on average. That ranges from $103 per student in Alaska to $4,602 per student in Louisiana.

Four states did boost their higher education budgets during this time, including North Dakota, where the booming economy allowed the state to pump 46% more into postsecondary schooling, about $3,823 per student. In Wyoming, where higher education has been subsidized to a greater extent than in many other states, the 21% increase in funding represented $3,025 per student.

The report noted that institutions have answered the funding cuts by eliminating programs, services, and staff. Schools have also raised tuition, from 4.8% in Montana up to Arizona’s 87.8%. (Percentages are for the average tuition actually paid by students, not the maximum “published” tuition fee.)

The study found the rise in tuition, in turn, caused more students to assume more debt, forced some students to drop out, and deterred others from enrolling.