A Few Changes Bump Grad Rate

Over the course of 14 years, Georgia State University managed to boost its six-year graduation rate from 32% to 54%. Some of the methods used by the university to raise that rate didn’t cost a lot and, in hindsight, seem rather obvious.

For instance, the school realized that how well (or not) students did in introductory courses in their major served as a fairly reliable predictor of their academic success (or lack of it) later on. However, students who needed help could only receive generalized tutoring in writing, math, and languages. So, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the university hired high-performing students to attend course sections and provide tutoring on that specific content each week to other students who needed it.

Many intro courses were moved to a “flipped” format, which required students to complete reading assignments beforehand so that they could use class time to apply the concepts in the course materials.

Students also used to change their major an average of 2.6 times, which forced them to stay in school longer to complete degree requirements. Georgia State now provides students with a lot more information about majors—including more opportunities to meet with faculty and alumni—to help them make better-informed decisions about their field of study, cutting the rate of major-hopping by 32%.

One tactic that did cost the school a little more up front was hiring a number of academic advisors to get in touch with students more promptly when analytics indicated they were in need of help. The extra expense paid off, however, as fewer students dropped out.

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.”

Debt Situation More Complex Than Money

Some 39% of college students who have taken out loans to finance their education don’t want to assume any more debt and would think about dropping out first, according to a new survey by MagnifyMoney.

More than half of the students answering the survey owed at least $20,000. But when questioned more closely why they see leaving school as an option, it turns out the size of the loan debt isn’t the only—or even most critical—factor.

Of the student respondents with loans, 51% admitted to having a difficult time juggling their studies with a job and 20% were grappling to accommodate family-related responsibilities. More than a quarter were pondering whether to drop out after realizing their intended field paid relatively low and 10% didn’t even expect to work in the major they were studying.

Dissatisfaction with the college or university they were attending also played a role in considering whether to continue or drop out.

Not all of the respondents with student loans, though, were having trouble. More than a third viewed their loans as a worthwhile investment and estimated they’d earn at least $30,000 more annually once they attain their degree.

More Enrollees Are Just a Phone Call Away

There could be tens of thousands of potential community-college students out there who haven’t enrolled yet, apparently because they never got around to completing the paperwork. A simple phone call could reel them in.

According to Education Dive, a recent presentation at the American Association of Community Colleges Annual Meeting described how several colleges decided to conduct a call campaign to reach two groups of prospective students: those who had applied but didn’t finish forms for financial aid and those who had submitted financial-aid papers but hadn’t enrolled in classes.

The results of the calls were pretty amazing. Hillsborough Community College in Florida, for example, increased enrollment by 745 students compared to the previous year, amounting to more than $3 million in revenue. San Juan College in New Mexico got 17% of the individuals called in the first semester to enroll; the percentage went up to 46% in the second semester. Like Hillsborough, San Juan enjoyed a nice bump in revenue, helping to keep the institution afloat as state support declines.

Schools that called students who had taken courses but not re-enrolled also saw similar results.

The effectiveness of the phone calls suggests that many students may need that extra point of contact to stay on track. Some may struggle with complicated forms and don’t know where to get assistance, some may have missed a deadline and weren’t sure how to proceed, while others may simply require a little more encouragement.

Four-Year Degrees at CCs Boost Numbers

One of the arguments against permitting community colleges from offering bachelor’s degrees has always been that doing so would just shift students away from existing four-year schools in the area. However, a new study shows the opposite.

According to a report on the Education Dive site, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) found an overall increase in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded after community colleges began such programs. The study focused primarily on Florida, which in 2014 gave its community colleges the green light for bachelor’s degrees. As a result, 24 of those campuses now have at least one bachelor’s program.

AERA determined that there wasn’t much negative impact on enrollment or graduation rates at the four-year institutions located in the vicinity of baccalaurate-degree community colleges. In fact, most of the public four-year schools even experienced a rise in graduation numbers, although private schools didn’t get a similar bump.

On the other hand, for-profit schools did see a drop in degree output, which correlated to the growth at the neighboring community colleges.

“Both [two-year and four-year] school types should look to leverage connections in degree access and industrial development to create pipelines where neither campus type is competing with another,” noted the Education Dive report.

More Freshmen Persisting to Graduation

A small but significant uptick in the number of U.S. college students attaining their degrees last spring is being hailed as a positive indicator for the national economy.

“For the more than 2.27 million students who started college six years ago, the signs of postrecession recovery are clear: adult students shrank as a share of the cohort, four-year public and private nonprofit institutions increased their share of the cohort, and the total completion rate surpassed the prerecession high,” said Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Research Center, in its annual report on enrollment and graduation patterns for each incoming class. A key benchmark is the graduation percentage after six years.

Approximately 56.9% of the fall 2011 freshmen had graduated as of 2017. That outpaces the six-year graduation mark for the 2010 freshman class (54.8%) and the 2007 freshman class (56.1%), which had previously been the highest to date.

Almost 12% of the 2011 starters are still taking courses and the report anticipates many of those students will achieve a degree within the next two years, based on the freshman class of 2009, which managed to raise its total completion rate this year by six percentage points over its six-year rate.

Four-year schools overall had higher completion rates than two-year schools (66.7% versus 37.7%), but a much higher percentage of students who enrolled first at two-year schools would go on to earn a degree or certificate within six years (37.7%, compared to 8% of students who began at a four-year institution).

11 Ways to Keep Low-Income Students in School

Low-income college students are far more likely to drop out than better-off students and lack of funds is usually the reason. A new report by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation puts some of the blame on institutions for not providing sufficient information in clear terms about the total cost of attendance and how much financial aid students can expect.

Making College Affordable: Providing Low-Income Students with the Knowledge and Resources Needed to Pay for College lays out 11 recommended strategies for colleges and universities to help lower-income applicants better understand their options before they enroll and to assist them if they run into trouble later on.

No. 9 on the list calls on schools to “utilize low-cost textbooks,” noting that high course-materials expenses may “place a burden on students with unmet financial need.” The report points to open educational resources as a potential solution, although it acknowledges that “awareness of these alternative resources among faculty tends to be low.”

The report also endorses a five-pronged set of recommendations from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group for encouraging adoption of open materials on campus.

The first five strategies in the report advocate that institutions should furnish detailed, jargon-free information about the types of financial aid available, eligibility requirements for aid, total costs to attend for four years, and accurate estimates of living costs, and also urge students to meet with a financial adviser. Three strategies ask schools to prioritize need over merit in giving aid, commit to providing aid for all four years, and stop cutting institutional grants when students receive private scholarships.

The remaining two strategies recommend that schools set up programs to help students with financial emergencies and to find ways to integrate local social services with financial-aid programs.

Those with ‘Some’ College Need More Push

Some 31 million adults in the U.S. have earned enough college credits to be classified as “near-completers,” but it will take a village to help them cross the finish line to graduation, according to a new report from the Education Commission for the States.

The commission “looked at the progress of legislation and initiatives in the area,” said an article in Education Dive, and found they were overall insufficient to boost graduation rates among dropouts. Some legislative measures were well-intentioned and may have helped new enrollees—such as state policies and funded programs designed to improve the affordability of higher education—but they didn’t move the near-completers any closer to completion.

One reason is that near-completers may have been unaware of such policies and programs, or weren’t motivated to take advantage of them. The senior policy analyst who wrote the report told Education Dive that “a consistent hurdle for states is they often need a champion for near-completers, in the form of a governor or other prominent figure, to help garner interest from institutions, policymakers, and the community at large” in contacting and encouraging near-completers to return to the classroom.

The report lauded those states that had introduced initiatives aimed directly at near-completers. For example, the University of Rhode Island works with the commercial fisheries industry while in Tennessee a new “last-dollar” scholarship program assists adults who need just a little more aid to cover the rest of their school costs.

Community colleges generally do a better job of reconnecting with dropouts than four-year institutions, according to the report.

Spend More on Students, Get More Grads

Colleges and universities that spend more on students—even if they raise tuition prices—are more likely to see a bounce in enrollment and graduation rates than schools that trim their budgets and tuition rates.

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research appears to upend the conventional wisdom that reducing tuition would attract higher enrollment and also help students finish their studies faster. At least for public schools, according to a MarketWatch article about the study, the numbers are different.

“If your goal is to graduate more students, spending increases work better per-dollar than tuition cuts at accomplishing that goal,” noted David Deming, who was among the researchers in the study. Deming is a professor of public policy, education, and economics at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The study found that, from 1990-2013, enrollment and graduation rates rose with each 10% jump in a public institution’s spending. Schools that raised tuition did not see any effect on those rates.

The explanation, according to the MarketWatch article, is that institutions that cut back on their budgets—and were unwilling to increase tuition—often covered the financial gap by eliminating class sections. The end result was that more students were closed out of courses they needed to complete for graduation.

Competitors’ Data Keep Students on Track

College and university administrators are increasingly using data not only from their own institutions but also from other, potentially competing, schools to predict when their students might require an academic intervention.

Observing and understanding data on common factors that impact student retention and success—such as feeling isolated or overwhelmed, selecting the wrong classes, or being unable to afford the next semester—enhances administrators’ ability to proactively identify which students need help. For example, using predictive-analysis processes developed by the University of Texas at Austin, administrators at the University of Kansas discovered that 1,200 out of 1,500 students having difficulties on their campus hadn’t received any kind of intervention.

Both schools are part of the three-year-old University Innovation Alliance, a consortium of 11 research universities dedicated to raising undergraduate graduation rates. Since the group’s founding, its member universities have managed to increase the number of degrees awarded by 10%, with a 25% bump among Pell Grant recipients.

First-Gen Profs to Inspire First-Gen Students

Many college campuses offer some type of academic and social support to students who are among the first in their families to enroll in higher education. The University of California is trying a different tack with a new program involving faculty.

The program, dubbed First-Gen Faculty, encourages professors who were first-generation students themselves to open up about their experiences with their classes. Those who sign up to participate will wear special shirts or buttons during the first week of school next fall so students can identify them.

According to a report in Inside Higher Ed, an estimated 800 faculty from nine campuses are expected to take part. About 42% of UC students are the first in their families to enroll in a four-year school.

“The idea is that first-generation students can seek out professors with similar experiences as role models or mentors,” the report explained. “Faculty members can share advice and alert students to essential campus services.”

The program will also provide training about first-generation issues to UC faculty and staff.

Initiative Promotes Graduating on Time

Missouri is addressing college affordability with an initiative called “15 to Finish” that encourages students to take 15 credit hours each semester. Fewer than a third of students at Missouri public institutions take 15 credit hours per semester, according to the nonprofit group Complete College America, even though that’s what it takes to graduate in four years.

As part of the program, the Missouri Department of Higher Education is working with Complete College America on promotional materials and ways to personalize the initiative for each campus in the state.

“In many cases, students need to take just one more three-hour course every semester to graduate on time,” Zora Mulligan, Missouri commissioner of higher education, said in a release. “But completing 15 hours of college credit each semester, students can graduate earlier, enter the workforce sooner, and save thousands of dollars in education.”

An issue for many students is that they are already in the workforce, trying to make ends meet while attending classes. The University of Missouri-St. Louis has been working to push more traditional students to take 15 credit hours for the last year, raising its four-year graduation rate to the highest level in school history, but administrators remain mindful that it’s not for every student.

“Lots of our students are holding full-time jobs, making it more difficult to have students managing a workload of 40 to 50 hours per week and classes,” Adam Bryd Jr., dean of enrollment services, said in an article for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “But we’ve done this already. We’ll just work case-by-case, looking at their work schedule and class schedule. In many cases, our students find they can pick up an online class to get them those extra three credit hours.”

Enticement for Graduating on Time

Many colleges and universities are working on ways to encourage students to graduate in four years. Marymount California University, Rancho Palos Verdes, has come up with a pretty unique enticement.

The school partnered with a local car dealership to allow incoming freshmen to purchase new Mini Cooper automobiles at fleet pricing. Students have to make the first four years of payments, but if they graduate on time, the university will make the fifth and final year of payments, up to $5,000.

“Our students will commute to and from our campuses, drive to their internships, and explore the abundance of beauty, culture, and fun that Southern California has to offer,” said Marymount President Lucas Lamadrid. “And our graduates who participate in the My Marymount Mini will have a reliable and ‘cool’ car that’s fully paid for to drive to their first job after college.”

Innovators Push for Changes in Higher Ed

To those who don’t work on a college or university campus or in a related field, the term “higher education” often conjures up moldering institutions stuck in an outdated time warp, unwilling to change. But, many schools are indeed trying new things to help their students succeed and to ensure more people can afford a college education.

Washington Monthly profiled 16 leaders in higher ed—not presidents or chancellors, but administrators and academics at schools, government agencies, and nonprofits—who have helped lead the charge in innovation in postsecondary education and access.

“These front-line innovators don’t always have a lot of power,” wrote Gilad Edelman. “So when they try to advocate for new and better ways of serving students, they are typically pushing against resistant leadership, indifferent or threatened colleagues, and a general institutional inertia that makes progress painfully slow.”

The people highlighted in “The Sixteen Most Innovative People in Higher Education” are responsible for programs that support potential dropouts, encourage students to graduate within four years, enable students to take online courses at a lower cost, admit more low-income students, and use technology to monitor student progress and intervene when necessary.

Other programs focus on competency-based education, remedial course requirements, student advising and mentoring, open educational resources, and student-success coaching.

New Approach to Higher Education

There has been plenty of discussion about the future of higher education. Flipped classrooms, competency-based education, team-based learning, collaborative education, and problem-based learning all have proponents who see their format of choice as the best way to proceed.

However, campuses continue to use the same term-based and credit hour-based formats that have been in place for generations. Most institutions also continue to offer lecture-based courses where progress is determined by midterm and final exams.

The University of Texas System is ready to try something new. It is launching a format that include career-aligned and personalized courses to attract new students who are looking for a different way to study and earn a degree, according to Steven Mintz, professor of history at UT-Austin and executive director of the system’s Institute for Transformational Learning.

“Too often, a single model is deemed the solution to higher education’s challenges: high costs, deficient student engagement, or unsatisfactory graduation rates,” Mintz wrote in a blog post for Inside Higher Education. “Instead of embracing a single solution, instructors might consider implementing differentiated paths to a degree. Students, then, might choose the path that best reflects their needs and aspirations.”

The UT programs will not replace current curriculum, but will emphasize career skills. Students will receive a traditional transcript with grades as well as a competency-based transcript that highlights the skills and knowledge the student has mastered.

“Given the diversity in student circumstances, goals, and motivation, a differentiated approach makes sense,” Mintz wrote. “Personalization is the watchword of the contemporary consumer economy, and this principle might be applied to postsecondary education as well.”

Georgia Tech Online Program Shows Promise

Low completion rates have been a stumbling block for massive open online courses (MOOCs). Studies have shown that just 5% of the thousands of students enrolled in the first MOOCs from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finished the courses, while another found the number of students now enrolling online is at its lowest rate in a decade.

However, good news may be on the horizon.

The online master’s degree program in computer science offered by Georgia Institute of Technology has gotten off to pretty solid start with 375 students enrolled in the first semester of the program. The average age of the students is 35, most are employed, and all are paying a fee.

Working students who pay a fee, which was estimated at less than $7,000 to complete the three-year program, could be the key to success for the program. Georgia Tech faculty and officials believe those two elements keep students more engaged in the class than traditional students on campus.

Of course, the program isn't “massive” with just 375 students, nor is it “open” because of the fee, according to Michael Feldstein, partner at the education consulting firm MindWires. But that doesn’t mean it can’t work.

“To be able to offer an online degree at the level of quality consistent with Georgia Tech at a lower cost would be an important innovation,” Feldstein told The Hechinger Report.

Drive for Diploma May Leave Books Behind

Under pressure from state and federal legislators to graduate more students in a shorter period of time, colleges and universities are searching for ways to remove barriers to student success. Some of their efforts might have an impact on course materials.

Coordinated by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Transformational Planning Grant project gave money to seven urban universities for new initiatives to bump up grad rates. The University of Akron in Ohio is using its grant to explore how to award credits to students for their personal experience or knowledge, possibly by testing out of course content. In Oregon, part of Portland State University’s project also involves giving credit for previous learning.

“These different approaches to credentialing knowledge could theoretically speed up students’ time to graduation and knock off semesters of tuition,” noted Government Technology magazine. With fewer courses to take, students could also knock off a number of textbooks.

Georgia State University is looking to build off its successful mathematics program, which uses online adaptive-learning software to engage students and help them complete the course. Using only traditional textbooks, as many as 40% of enrollees failed or dropped out of introductory math. The school wants to try using adaptive-learning software with accounting and introductory chemistry classes, which also have high withdrawal rates.