College Completion
College Completion
“Right now, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma,” President Obama said in a February 2009 address to a joint session of Congress.“And yet, just over half of our citizens have that level of education, and half of the students who begin college never finish.” With those remarks, the president put the issue of college completion front and center on the national stage.Calling the situation a “prescription for economic decline,” Obama went on to urge all Americans to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. “By 2020,” he said of the goal, “America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”
The “once again” comment refers to the United States’ former stature as the most college-educated nation in the world. Policymakers and educators bemoan the United States’ gradual slide from that once-lofty rank , a decline that has been documented in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report “Education at a Glance,” which tracks college completion rates in industrialized countries worldwide. To meet Obama’s goal, the United States will have to raise the percentage of Americans ages 25 to 64 with a college degree from its measurement of 41.2 percent in 2010 to nearly 60 percent. Considerable debate has arisen over whether America’s gradual decline as first in the world in educational attainment is the result of actual slippage or rather is more a matter of other nations making more progress more quickly. Either way, it is clear that American policymakers and college completion advocates see the drop as a call to action.
And President Obama is not alone in setting a target date for that action to yield tangible results. For example, Lumina Foundation, an influential higher education philanthropy, aims to increase the percentage of Americans who hold high-quality postsecondary degrees and credentials to 60 percent by 2025. The College Board is also aiming for 2025, specifically to have 55 percent of the nation’s adults ages 25 to 34 hold at an associate’s degree or higher. While the dates and goals vary, together they underscore how central the college completion agenda has become to higher education policy and practice. This Topics section examines how this movement has developed and what it has meant for higher education.
Spellings Report
The college completion agenda has been advanced by a number of philanthropic organizations and policymakers. While President Obama gave this agenda a prominent push, many of the issues being championed by today’s college completion advocates were raised in a 2006 report, titled “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.” The report is commonly referred to as the Spellings report for Margaret Spellings, who was U.S. secretary of education during President George W. Bush’s second term.
Like many of the current completion initiatives, the Spellings report called for better data on college graduation rates as the nation’s demographics—and the backgrounds and lives of those seeking college degrees—were starting to shifting substantially. The report was critical of institutions of higher learning for not doing more to move students from enrollment to degree. “Among high school graduates who do make it on to postsecondary education, a troubling number waste time—and taxpayer dollars—mastering English and math skills that they should have learned in high school,” the report states. “And some never complete their degrees at all, at least in part because most colleges and universities don’t accept responsibility for making sure that those they admit actually succeed.”
The Spelling Report’s conclusions regarding college graduation rates gained more urgency during and after the 2008 global financial crisis. As unemployment rates swelled and were slow to recede, prominent research from institutions including the Georgetown University Center on the Workforce and Education concluded that people with college degrees or higher were less likely to be unemployed and earned substantially more over their careers. It is important to note, however, that some advocates for improving college completion rates emphasize the importance of a college education for its own inherent value in fostering self-efficacy and citizenship.
One central question in the efforts to improve college graduation rates is which changes would produce the most effective results? Is the completion problem a result of student’s lack of time, money, or a combination of both? Would it be most effective to revamp postsecondary institutional practices to take into account the reality of today’s students so that the time to degree can be shortened before “life gets in the way,” as has become a common refrain for college completion advocates? For instance, the 2011 report “Time Is the Enemy” from Complete College America—a nonprofit organization that specifically focuses on improving graduation rates—argues that, among other things, college curricula should take into account the “busy lives” of contemporary students, who collectively no longer mirror the “traditional” college student who enrolls in a four-year institution straight out of high school.
Other organizations, such as the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, emphasize the impact of a student’s socioeconomic background. For instance, in a one brief, the institute argues that income-based inequality in educational attainment is “a central obstacle to achieving the 2020 goal and that decreasing income-based attainment gaps must become a central focus of federal education policy.”
Improving the Data
Others who have examined college graduation rates have raised questions about the federal college completion data system, which is the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS. While IPEDS calculates college graduation rates based on full-time, first-time students, a growing chorus of higher education officials say IPEDS fails to capture the realities of today’s college students, who take longer to complete their degrees or who transfer from one institution to another. IPEDS also has been criticized for not tracking the progress of students who transfer colleges, though this practice might be revised to account for their graduation at their transfer institution. (In April 2012, the Education Department released an action plan to enact these revised graduation rate data collection policies, but did not set a date for revised measurements to be in place.) Using the full-time, first-time criteria, only about half of all students who enroll in college earn a four-year degree within six years.
In the philanthropic world, the two biggest players in college completion are the Lumina Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, both of which have devoted millions of dollars to research a wide range of issues in higher education, from lack of college readiness (“college knowledge”) among low-income students to postsecondary remedial education, which is often considered to be one of the barriers to students’ progress toward graduation. (Both the Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation provide grant support for EWA’s work pertaining to higher education.)
In December 2008, the Gates Foundation announced a $69 million initiative of multiyear grants to “double the number of low-income students who earn a postsecondary degree or credential with genuine value in the workplace by age 26.” Many of those grants were given for three-, four- and five-year projects, meaning that over the next few years, the foundation and journalists will be asking questions about what was learned and achieved through those grants, as well as several other multiyear grants projects the Gates Foundation has since launched to improve higher education attainment in the United States.
The same goes for the grants awarded by the Lumina Foundation, whose work in improving higher education attainment is tied to a strategic plan that it announced in 2009 known as Goal 2025. Lumina’s “big goal,” which it describes as “audacious,” is to “increase the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials from the longstanding rate of 39 percent to 60 percent by the year 2025.” (The foundation defines high-quality credentials as degrees and certificates that have well-defined and transparent learning outcomes that provide clear pathways to further education and employment and is looking to raise the percentage of degree holders from 24- to 64-years-old.)
Other major players in the college completion agenda include the College Board, which has an initiative formally known as the College Completion Agenda. The initiative is essentially a two-pronged approach that deals with state policy and national metrics. Specifically, the College Board releases an annual College Completion Agenda progress report that keeps tabs on where the nation is in proximity to its various college completion goals. Additionally, the College Board has produced a state policy guide that features “best-practice policy examples, all aligned around 10 key recommendations.”
Key Coverage
Highlighted journalism and reports for this topic
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California Community Colleges Release Completion Scorecards
April 10, 2013
California’s community college system on April 9 unveiled Web-based “scorecards” on student performance at its 112 colleges. The new data tool is user-friendly and often sobering, with graduation, retention and transfer rates for each of the colleges and for the overall system, which enrolls 2.4 million students. (Inside Higher Ed)
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California Bill Seeks Campus Credit for Online Study
March 13, 2013
If it passes, as seems likely, it would be the first time that state legislators have instructed public universities to grant credit for courses that were not their own — including those taught by a private vendor, not by a college or university. (NY Times)
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Competency-Based Education Has Fans, Detractors
January 2, 2013
But few traditional schools in Indiana have plans to adopt competency-based education in a way that allows students to progress toward degrees on their own time lines. Such schools as Indiana University, Indiana State University and even for-profit educators like Harrison College say they plan to stick closely to their models that require specific amounts of time in class to graduate. (Associated Press)
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For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall
December 22, 2012
The growing role of class in academic success has taken experts by surprise since it follows decades of equal opportunity efforts and counters racial trends, where differences have narrowed. It adds to fears over recent evidence suggesting that low-income Americans have lower chances of upward mobility than counterparts in Canada and Western Europe.
Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees, according to Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan. Now the gap is 45 points. (The New York Times)
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Skilled Workers In Training As Economic Reality Marries Apprenticeships With College
December 7, 2012
An age-old doorway into skilled trades and a middle-class life, the apprenticeship is making a comeback, rebounding after all but disappearing in recent decades in the face of a decline in union membership and dwindling demand for skilled labor. And as the economy changes, today’s apprenticeships combine the chance for workers not only to master skills while earning a paycheck but to get a college degree at the same time. (The Hechinger Report)
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Student-Loan Delinquencies Now Surpass Credit Cards
November 27, 2012
Of the $956 billion in student-loan debt outstanding as of September, 11 percent was delinquent — up from less than 9 percent in the second quarter, and higher than the 10.5 percent of credit-card debt, which was delinquent in the third quarter. By comparison, delinquency rates on mortgages, home-equity lines of credit and auto loans stood at 5.9 percent, 4.9 percent, and 4.3 percent respectively as of September. (CNBC)
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No Income? No Problem! How the Gov’t Is Saddling Parents with College Loans They Can’t Afford
October 4, 2012
A joint examination by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education has found that Plus loans can sometimes hurt the very families they are intended to help: The loans are both remarkably easy to get and nearly impossible to get out from under for families who’ve overreached. When a parent applies for a Plus loan, the government checks credit history, but it doesn’t assess whether the borrower has the ability to repay the loan. It doesn’t check income. It doesn’t check employment status. It doesn’t check how much other debt — like a mortgage, or other student-loan debt — the borrower is already on the hook for. (ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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Teacher’s Wages Garnished as U.S. Goes After Loan Default
July 2, 2012
Lawyers drained Linda Brice’s bank account and seized a quarter of her take-home pay, or more than $900 a month. Brice, a first-grade teacher and Coast Guard veteran, begged for mercy, saying she couldn’t afford food, gas or utilities.
Brice’s transgression: she defaulted on $3,100 she had borrowed more than 30 years ago to pay for college. The chief federal judge in Los Angeles took her side, ruling that Brice should pay only $25 a month. The law firm of Goldsmith & Hull — representing the federal government – then withdrew $2,496 from her bank account. (Bloomberg News)
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Facing Facts
May 29, 2012
In some ways, community colleges have faced the most scrutiny by advocates of the college completion agenda. This article reports on a panel discussion of the impact these efforts have had on two-year colleges. “[If] the focus on completion gets too singular, two-year colleges run the risk of neglecting student access and even the quality of learning on their campuses,” the story notes. (Inside Higher Ed)
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College Dropouts Have Debt but No Degree
May 28, 2012
The consequences of leaving college before graduation are not just educational. Dropping out also can have a significant financial impact: “College dropouts are also among the most likely to default on their loans, falling behind at a rate four times that of graduates.” (Washington Post)
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To Raise Completion Rates, States Dig Deeper for Data
March 2, 2012
With the growing demand for improving college completion rates has come a need for more thorough information about just how well or poorly colleges and their students are performing on a variety of measures. In a growing number of states, that data is being used to improve the number of students who finish their degrees. (The Chronicle of Higher Education) examines the trend.
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Don’t Lecture Me
January 6, 2012
EWA 2012 National Reporting Contest winner. College students spend a lot of time listening to lectures. But research shows there are better ways to learn. And experts say students need to learn better because the 21st century economy demands more well-educated workers. (American RadioWorks)
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Application Inflation
November 5, 2010
EWA 2010 National Reporting Contest winner. With skyrocketing numbers of applicants and declining percentages of students accepted, how are admissions offices handling the multiple pressures they face? Are schools bringing in more and more accomplished students, or just the same kind of enrollment class compared to students from a decade ago? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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Reframing College Completion
October 28, 2010
The national college completion goals laid out by President Obama and various organizations are literally monumental, aiming to move millions of Americans to college degrees. This article examines efforts to break that large, national goal down into smaller regional and metropolitan goals. (Inside Higher Ed)
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To Pump Up Degree Counts, Colleges Invite Dropouts Back
October 24, 2010
Many advocates for increasing the number of Americans with college credentials assert that one efficient way to raise that number would be to convince adults who have dropped out of college to return and finish their degrees. This article examines the pros and cons of that approach. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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Education Experts Discuss Ways to Improve College-Completion Rates
June 2, 2010
This article examines the ideas experts — including some college presidents — shared in a discussion entitled “Competing in a Global Economy: How to Boost College Completion Rates,” sponsored by the Gates Foundation. “American colleges often focus too much on enrolling students and not enough on making sure they graduate, a number of panelists said.” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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Seminoles helped by ‘LD’ diagnoses
December 18, 2009
EWA 2010 National Reporting Contest winner. For college athletes, how much help is too much if they have learning disabilities? This story features a fired disabilities coach who university officials say blurred the line between aiding student-athletes with learning disabilities and academic fraud. Other members of the university’s athletic academic support unit in some cases supplied answers to tests, and in other cases typed papers, for 61 athletes in football and other sports. (ESPN)
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Gates Fund Creates Plan for College Completion
November 21, 2008
This article covers the Gates Foundation’s original announcement of its college completion initiative. A subscription is required to view the full article. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
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Reports & Data
Notable research on this topic
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A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education
March 26, 2012
This is the third major report the Lumina Foundation has released to assess the nation’s progress toward Lumina’s goal “to increase the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60 percent by the year 2025.” The report found that only 38.3 percent of working-age Americans held a two- or four-year college degree in 2010, concluding that “if we continue on our current rate of production, only 79.8 million working-age Americans (46.5% of those aged 25-64) will hold degrees by 2025…This will leave us more than 23 million degrees short of the national 60 percent goal.”
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Time is the Enemy
September 2011
This comprehensive study challenged the conventional image that most college students enter postsecondary education directly from high school and proceed directly to a bachelor’s degree in six years or less. It notes instead that “Nontraditional students are the new majority” and that “Part-time students rarely graduate,” among its other groundbreaking findings. (Complete College America)
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Developing 20/20 Vision on the 2020 Degree Attainment Goal — The Threat of Income-Based Inequality in Education
May 2011
In this report, the Pell Institute says that “The nation’s failure to keep pace with other countries in educational attainment among 25- to 34- year-old adults can largely be traced to our inability to adequately educate individuals from families in the bottom half of the income distribution.”
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The College Completion Agenda: 2011 Progress Report
2011
Tracking the national progress toward its goal for college completion, the College Board offers 10 recommendations for improving educational attainment. At the postsecondary level, the goals include reforming college admissions, simplifying and improving financial aid, and offering better academic counseling to college students.
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A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education
September 2006
This study, commonly known as the Spellings Report—in reference to U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings who commissioned it—is perhaps one of the earliest landmarks in the current college completion agenda. “We may still have more than our share of the world’s best universities,” the report asserts. “But a lot of other countries have followed our lead, and they are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are. Worse, they are passing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.” (U.S. Department of Education)
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Five Questions to Ask
- Look at the graduation rates for the past five years for the community colleges and four-year colleges that you cover. Have these increased or decreased, and—if so—why? Have they started any new initiatives to improve graduation rates?
- One crucial question to the college completion agenda is the balance between access and graduation rates. If, as many people argue, the most efficient way for colleges to improve their graduation rates is to enroll high school graduates with higher grade point averages and college admissions test scores, then students with less competitive credentials could be shut out of higher education. How have the colleges you cover managed this balance over the years and are the scales starting to tip in one direction?
- Another key question regarding graduation rates is the socioeconomic backgrounds of a college’s students. It is commonly thought that the less affordable a college becomes, the less likely its students are to graduate. What the financial aid policies and practices of the colleges you cover and the average student debt loads for their graduates? How have cuts in state funding and the general economic slump affected the net prices students have to pay to earn a degree?
- What percentage of first-year students at the colleges and universities you cover have to take remedial or “developmental” education courses? What percentages of those groups go on to earn degrees? Many advocates for improving college graduation rates assert that these courses present a major obstacle, leading students to accrue debt for courses that don’t count toward a degree. Are there any initiatives to change how these courses are handled at these colleges?
- Are the demographics of your community changing and, subsequently, are the populations of the colleges in your region in flux? If colleges and universities are to meet the 2020 and 2025 graduation goals proposed by the president and organizations, these institutions likely will have to educate many more Latino, black, and low-income students, the precise groups they historically have struggled with.
Organizations
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in December 2008 announced a $69 million multiyear grants initiative to “double the number of low-income students who earn a postsecondary degree or credential with genuine value in the workplace by age 26.” While the foundation has done extensive, non-education-related work in developing nations, “In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life.” The Gates Foundation has sponsored the Education Writers Association’s work regarding the coverage of higher education.
The College Board runs the College Completion Agenda project. The Board releases an annual completion agenda progress report that examines the national progress on various college completion goals. The College Board’s own college completion goal is to increase the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds who hold an associate’s degree or higher to 55 percent by the year 2025.
Complete College America, launched in 2009, is a national nonprofit set up to “work with states to significantly increase the number of Americans with quality career certificates or college degrees and to close attainment gaps for traditionally underrepresented populations.” The shifting demographics of American society are central to CCA’s efforts as they note “we must move with urgency to reinvent American higher education to meet the needs of the new majority of students on our campuses, delicately balancing the jobs they need with the education they desire.”
The Institute for College Access and Success “works to make higher education more available and affordable for people of all backgrounds.” TICAS’s research and advocacy efforts largely focus on the roles that socioeconomic income and student play in affecting whether students earn postsecondary degrees.
The Institute for Higher Education Policy “is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization committed to promoting access to and success in higher education for all students.” IHEP approaches postsecondary improvement with five key goals in mind: access and success; accountability; diversity; finance; and global impact.
The Lumina Foundation for Education is a philanthropic organization dedicated to improving college graduation rates in the United States. The foundation—headquartered in Indianapolis—was established in 2000, and in 2009, Lumina announced its Goal 2025 initiative, which seeks to “increase the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials from the longstanding rate of 39 percent to 60 percent by the year 2025.” The Lumina Foundation has sponsored the Education Writers Association’s work regarding the coverage of higher education.
The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education researches and emphasizes the role that socioeconomic background plays with regard to a student’s ability to earn a college degree. The Pell Institute also studies issues affecting the completion rates of first-generation students and students with disabilities.
Suggest a Change
If you’d like to suggest an addition or change to this section, send an email to EWA Project Director Kenneth Terrell.
Gains and Gaps: Changing Inequality in U.S. College Entry and Completion
Martha J. Bailey, Susan M. Dynarski
We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families.
Experts: The White House Plan to Rate Colleges Has Major Issues
A new rating system backed by the White House aims to evaluate nearly all of the nation’s colleges and universities. Roughly 6,000 schools that educate around 22 million students are about to endure an unprecedented amount of federal scrutiny.
And though a version of the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System is scheduled to be unveiled in the fall, policy watchers are still unsure of what’s in store.
How to Help the 21st Century College Student
When Mark Milliron met with an advertising team to promote a new type of college in Texas, he wasn’t expecting fireworks. Still, the pitch floored him.
“The Texas Two-Step: Sign Up. Succeed.”
It was the sentence that would appear on billboards and in radio advertisements, enticing thousands of working adults to enroll in an online college – Western Governors University Texas. And it totally missed the point.
A Chance to Earn College Credit for What You Already Know
A car salesman, a secretary and a military vet filed into a conference room for a new kind of high-stakes test – one that could earn them up to 30 college credits in a single day.
Study Examines Performance of Hispanic Serving Institutions
New research challenges the assumption that Latino students who attend Hispanic Serving Institutions are less likely to graduate than their peers at other colleges and universities. HSIs have undergraduate enrollments that are at least 25 percent Hispanic.
Researchers examined the graduation rates of Latino and black students attending HSIs and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in Texas from 1997 to 2008.
A College Education Saddles Young Households with Debt, but Still Pays Off
Daniel Carroll and Amy Higgins
The labor market bonus for completing a college degree is not fully realized in the early years of working. Looking at the wage income of households headed by an individual between 30 and 65 years of age reveals a much larger premium, both at the median and the 90th percentile. In many professions, a college degree combined with work experience opens the door to senior-level administrative positions and higher salaries. The average wage-income premium among these older households was 88 percent for degree-holding median earners and 93 percent for 90th percentile earners.
The Summer Jobs Slide
The summer slide doesn’t just pertain to flagging academic skills while kids soak in the sun and skip the books. Increasingly, even as math and literacy fall by the wayside, high school students are losing out on access to summer wages.
In High Schools, Overcoming ‘Undermatching’
Competitive colleges in the U.S. have an image problem: By many accounts, their student bodies are much whiter and richer than the general population. Over at The Hechinger Report, Jamaal Abdul-Alim reports on a program aimed at steering academically high-flying low-income and minority students to the nation’s top-ranked universities.
New Center Will Track Hispanic-Serving Institutions
A new online resource center called the Hispanic SERVING Institutions Center for Policy and Practice will track information on the so called “HSIs.”
New Coach on Campus: Student Success and Support in Higher Ed
The main purpose of college is to transfer knowledge to students, but that requires getting them to the classroom… and actually keeping them there until graduation. Nationwide, less than 60 percent of college students complete a bachelor’s degree within six years.
Performance-Based Funding: Do the Numbers Add Up?
State governments increasingly are tying money for higher-education institutions to performance-based outcomes such as graduation rates, rather than just student enrollment. Twenty-five states now have some sort of performance-based model and four others are planning to follow. But there are still major questions about how schools respond to these models and what outcomes they have. Those issues were the focus of a panel discussion at EWA’s 67th National Seminar, held last month at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Higher Ed: How Satisfied Are College Graduates?
It’s well known that obtaining a college degree can give graduates a leg up financially over their lifetime, but it turns out that a person’s overall well-being after commencement has little to do with the type of institution attended.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Covering the College Student Experience
2014 Higher Ed Seminar
For many college students — whether fresh out of high school or adults returning to school — their most serious obstacles to a degree won’t be homework or tests, but rather the challenges of navigating student life. Colleges are now being forced to face the longstanding problems that have often led to students’ flailing and failing on their own.
San Francisco Group Helps Latino Families
For decades, the Mission Graduates nonprofit program has helped boost education among Latino families in San Francisco’s Mission District.
The program provides after-school programs, encourages parent involvement and college preparatory programming.
Asian Americans and Affirmative Action
Below are tweets I picked that may help reporters tackle this important question of fairness on a demographic group tagged with many myths. Population projections show that by 2050 one in 10 Americans will have an Asian background. Thirteen percent of the U.S. will be African American.
Fisk and Vanderbilt Build ‘Bridge’ to Science Degrees
Trey Mack, a doctoral candidate in astronomy, didn’t believe he could land a spot in a great master’s program, let alone a doctoral program, until a friend of a friend introduced him to the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge program.
Top 10 Higher Education Stories You Should Be Covering
For higher education reporters, Inside Higher Ed editor Scott Jaschik’s annual top-10 list of story ideas is a highlight of EWA’s National Seminar. This year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Jaschik kicked off his roundup with an issue that has affected many institutions around the country: sexual assault. The key to covering this story, he said, is not to imply that this is a new problem. Increased attention from the White House has challenged the ways that many colleges have addressed these incidents.
New Gallup-Purdue Study Looks at Links Among College, Work, and Well-being for Life After College
WASHINGTON, D.C. — When it comes to being engaged at work and experiencing high well-being after graduation, a new Gallup-Purdue University study of college graduates shows that the type of institution they attended matters less than what they experienced there. Yet, just 3% of all the graduates studied had the types of experiences in college that Gallup finds strongly relate to great jobs and great lives afterward.
A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education
A Detailed Look at Postsecondary Attainment - Nationally and in Every State
This is Lumina Foundation’s fifth annual issue of A Stronger Nation through Higher Education, our signature report on progress toward Goal 2025. In this report, we measure progress in the higher education attainment rate — the percentage of the nation’s adult, working-age population holding a high-quality postsecondary credential.
Report Analyzes Latino College Completion State by State
The states with the largest Latino populations don’t necessarily have the best track record for graduating Latinos from college, a new state-by-state analysis shows.
According to the report from the advocacy group Excelencia in Education, in 2011-12 only about 20 percent of Latinos ages 25 and older had at least an associate’s degree. The overall population had a much higher rate, at 36 percent.
Making the Jump to a Four-Year Degree Difficult for Community College Students
Several reports dropped this week about the difficulties community college students face transferring into a four-year college.
Nearly half of all postsecondary students are enrolled at a community college, and a poll from 2012 indicates 80 percent of those students aim to complete a degree at a four-year college or university. But while that goal is shared by many students, few actually successfully jump from a two-year to a four-year program.
Completing College: A State-Level View of Student Attainment Rates 2013 Fall 2007 Cohort
In the state supplement to its sixth Signature Report, a national study on college completion, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center takes a state-by-state look at the various pathways that students take to complete a college degree or certificate.
The Community College Route to the Bachelor’s Degree
It is well established that students who begin postsecondary education at a community college are less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than otherwise similar undergraduates who begin at a 4-year school, but there is less consensus over the mechanisms generating this disparity. We explore these using national longitudinal transcript data and propensity-score methods. …
Strengthening the STEM Pipelines:
The Contributions of Small and Mid-Sized Independent College
This is a report by the Council of Independent Colleges. The report authors say the findings suggest that, as a sector, small and mid-sized private institutions perform better than public institutions in students’ persistence and undergraduate degree completion rates in STEM fields and they substantially outperform public nondoctoral institutions.
U.S. GAO – Federal Student Loans: Better Oversight Could Improve Defaulted Loan Rehabilitation
The Department of Education (Education) relies on collection agencies to assist borrowers in rehabilitating defaulted student loans, which allows borrowers who make nine on-time monthly payments within 10 months to have the default removed from their credit reports. Education works with 22 collection agencies to locate borrowers and explain repayment options, including rehabilitation.
About Tuition Tracker
The 2018 Tuition Tracker online tool, which was updated and relaunched on Oct. 18, 2018, makes it easy to look up and compare the annual prices charged by more than 3,800 public, private and for-profit colleges and universities.
Council for Adult & Experiential Learning
The nonprofit Council for Adult & Experiential Learning, or CAEL as it is commonly called, advocates for initiatives that enable adults to earn postsecondary credentials more efficiently. They “support ways to link learning from [adults'] work and life experiences to their educational goals—so they earn their degrees and credentials faster.” CAEL’s expertise includes efforts such as prior learning assessment and competency-based education.
How Engaged are Minority Males in Community College?
It may seem like a paradox: Many Latino and black male students enter community college with enthusiasm and high aspirations. However, minority males are less likely to complete their degrees than their white male counterparts.
The Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) by the Center for Community College Student Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin came to that conclusion in its report “Aspirations to Achievement: Men of Color and Community Colleges.”
State of the Union: Parsing the President’s Education Priorities
EWA Radio, Episode 3
In episode 3 of EWA Radio, Michele McNeil and Alyson Klein of Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog stop by for some post-State of the Union analysis.
Reports: Universities Helping Close Achievement Gap for Latino Students
Two new reports by The Education Trust recognize universities that are making the greatest strides in closing achievement gaps for Latino students.
The first study identifies San Diego State University and the University of Southern California for significantly increasing graduation rates among Latino students.
According to the report, the six-year graduation rate for Latino students who began school in 1996 was 31 percent. The rate for students who began in 2005 improved to 58.8 percent. At USC, the graduation rate reached nearly the same level as white students.
Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002): A First Look at 2002 High School Sophomores 10 Years Later
This First Look presents findings from the third, and final, follow-up survey of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002). ELS:2002 provides a wealth of information from multiple sources (tested achievement, questionnaire, and administrative records) about the factors and circumstances related to the performance and social development of the American high school student over time.
Getting to Degrees: New Research on College Completion Data
How many students are really graduating from college? This number is becoming more important as policymakers look to tie university funding to completion rates. But as more students start to “swirl”—take extended time off or transfer into another institution, acts that eliminate them from many traditional measures of college graduation –what’s the best way to keep track of which students actually earned degrees?
Bowl-Bound Colleges Punt on Graduating Black Football Players
As the nation’s top college football teams prepare to take the field for the elite bowl games, three new reports out this week raise similarly troubling concerns about dismal graduation rates for many of the black players constituting the bulk of the starting lineups.
States Balk as GED Gets More Expensive
Life for the nearly 40 million Americans without a high school diploma could be about to get harder as testing companies who create high school equivalency exams are rolling out tougher – and in some cases — more expensive
Postsecondary Success for All: Leveraging Partners and Assets
In 2008, FHI 360 and the Citi Foundation joined together to launch the Citi Postsecondary Success Program, now called the Postsecondary Success Collaborative. Five years and 12,000 students later, the Postsecondary Success Collaborative has transformed the way participating schools and partners in Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia and San Francisco map resources and needs and collaborate to support college readiness and completion.
Study: U.S. Workers Behind in Skills, Smarts
The U.S. labor force lags behind other rich countries in smarts and work skills, according to a study that measured the cognitive and verbal abilities of adults in 23 nations.
Recap: What Demographic Changes Mean for Colleges and Reporters
More than 50 journalists joined EWA for our annual Higher Education Seminar, held Sept. 27-28 at Northeastern University in Boston. As always, we look forward to the coverage inspired and informed by the event. So far, we know about the following stories:
More Students Defaulting, Government Data Show
More students are defaulting on their federal college loans, new U.S. Department of Education data show.
Tracking Veterans’ Success in Higher Ed
About 250 community colleges and four-year institutions recently have pledged to track veterans’ outcomes and support them on campus through a new program of the U.S. Department of Education. How much do we know about the recent success rates of veterans at American colleges and what services exist to support them?
The 10 Higher Ed Stories You Should Be Covering This Year
From the “gainful employment” debate to what’s next for MOOCs, Inside Higher Ed Editor Scott Jaschik offers his ideas on topics in postsecondary education that journalists should be tracking.
Black and Latino Males: Getting to and Through College – YouTube
Shaun Harper, director of the Center for Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, previews new research on how New York City addressed the challenge of guiding more of its black and Latino male students to postsecondary success.
Tracking Veterans’ Success
About 250 community colleges and four-year institutions recently have pledged to track veterans’ outcomes and support them on campus through a new program of the U.S. Department of Education. How much do we know about the recent success rates of veterans at American colleges and what services exist to support them? Speakers: Peter Buryk, Senior Project Associate, Rand Corporation; Marc V. Cole, Senior Advisor for Veterans and Military Families, U.S. Department of Education; Ashley Parker-Roman, U.S.
Black and Latino Males: Getting To and Through College
Shaun Harper, director of the Center for Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, previews new research on how New York City addressed the challenge of guiding more of its black and Latino male students to postsecondary success. Recorded Saturday, Sept. 28 at EWA’s 2013 Higher Ed Seminar, Guess Who’s Coming to Campus: What Demographic Changes Mean for Colleges and Reporters.
The 10 Higher Education Stories You Should Be Covering This Year
From the “gainful employment” debate to what’s next for MOOCs, Inside Higher Ed Editor Scott Jaschik offers his ideas on topics in postsecondary education that journalists should be tracking.
Recorded Friday, Sept. 27 at EWA’s 2013 Higher Ed Seminar, Guess Who’s Coming to Campus: What Demographic Changes Mean for Colleges and Reporters.
As Poverty Spreads, So Do the Challenges for Schools
A new report highlighting the growing rate of poverty among suburban residents warns that traditional policies aimed at combating indigence aren’t designed to address the problem adequately.
New Prescriptions for Remedial Education
The biggest obstacles that many undergraduates face en route to a college degree are the remedial or developmental courses in which they will be placed for their first year. These courses, which students must pass before they can take classes that carry college credit, add to the expense and time it takes to earn a degree. Are such classes really needed? Or can schools replace them with other forms of academic support?
For Good Measure: Assessing College Performance
What’s the best way to determine how effectively a college goes about the business of educating its students? If popular college rankings in the media are flawed, what other models of crunching the data might deliver more illuminating comparisons? To what extent is a college’s success at graduating students dependent on the types of students it enrolls? This session offers insights on new approaches on how to use the data available to see a more complete picture of college performance.
How I borrowed a lot and paid back a little: A writer’s take on Income Based Repayment
In May of my senior year at Union College (See photo), the only thing I was thinking about was passing finals and completing papers with pretentious titles. Postgraduation plans, like a job, were nothing more than vapors momentarily wafting in the way of those footnotes buried in my textbooks. I had no idea what kind of job I’d get, but I did know one thing for certain: I’d wrap up my college education with roughly $17,000 in federally subsidized debt.
Making Sense of Higher Education Engagement, Outcomes & Assessment
The latest on what we know about how students learn best, what institutions should be looking for, and how they determine if it’s happening. Panelists: Kenneth Terrell, Education Writers Association (moderator); George Kuh (NILOA) and Robert Gonyea (NSSE); Trudy Banta and Gary Pike, IUPUI. Recorded at EWA’s Seminar for Higher Education Reporters at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Nov. 2-3, 2012.
Different Ways to a Degree
In recent years, various options have emerged to trim the costs of earning a degree. In this session, we will examine whether options such as three-year degree programs and online education can make higher education more affordable. Panelists: Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed (moderator); Kris Clerkin, Southern New Hampshire University; David Daniels, Pearson; Tom Harnisch, American Association of State Colleges & Universities; Burck Smith, StraighterLine; Tom Snyder, Ivy Tech Community College.
Bingo! Education Buzzwords to Look For in Tonight’s Presidential Debate
With the help of EWA members, we’ve put together a bingo card of some of the more popular education buzzwords and phrases you can expect to hear at tonight’s debate. If you are planning a debate-watching party — and who isn’t? — you can print out all five cards and play along.
Click here to download your own set of bingo cards.
Start-Ups Gamble on Higher Education Innovations
Making Sure the College Completion Numbers Add Up
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education released an action plan that would revise how colleges and universities are evaluated, with graduation rates to now reflect students who attend part-time, as well as those who are returning to school.
The new formula is particularly important for community colleges, which have long complained that two significant segments of their student populations were being underreported. And a new web tool launching today from the College Board could offer more perspective on how community colleges are performing.
A Glass Half Full: A Look at Student Retention
Panelists discuss the challenges facing first-generation college students, the difference between “retention” and “persistence,” and the challenge of matching students with ideal institutions. Recorded at EWA’s Nov. 4-5 seminar for higher education reporters at UCLA.
Graduates From Low-Performing D.C. Schools Face Tough College Road
Past valedictorians of low-performing District high schools say their own transitions to college were eye-opening and at times ego-shattering, filled with revelations that — despite taking their public schools’ most difficult classes and acing them — they were not equipped to excel at the nation’s top colleges.
What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready?
“The nation is, at long last, engaged in a serious discussion of what it might take to make sure that our students leave high school college and career ready. But what exactly, does that mean? Almost three years ago, we decided to find out, by looking at the levels of mathematics and English language literacy high school graduates need to succeed in their first year in our community colleges.”
The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education
The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education researches and emphasizes the role that socioeconomic background plays with regard to a student’s ability to earn a college degree. The Pell Institute also studies issues affecting the completion rates of first-generation students and students with disabilities.
Lumina Foundation
The Lumina Foundation for Education is a philanthropic organization dedicated to improving college graduation rates in the United States. The foundation—headquartered in Indianapolis—was established in 2000, and in 2009, Lumina announced its Goal 2025 initiative, which seeks to “increase the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials from the longstanding rate of 39 percent to 60 percent by the year 2025.” The Lumina Foundation has sponsored the Education Writers Association’s work regarding the coverage of higher education.
Institute for Higher Education Policy
The Institute for Higher Education Policy “is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization committed to promoting access to and success in higher education for all students.” IHEP approaches postsecondary improvement with five key goals in mind: access and success; accountability; diversity; finance; and global impact.
Complete College America
Complete College America, launched in 2009, is a national nonprofit set up to “work with states to significantly increase the number of Americans with quality career certificates or college degrees and to close attainment gaps for traditionally underrepresented populations.” The shifting demographics of American society are central to CCA’s efforts as they note “we must move with urgency to reinvent American higher education to meet the needs of the new majority of students on our campuses, delicately balancing the jobs they need with the education they desire.”
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in December 2008 announced a $69 million multiyear grants initiative to “double the number of low-income students who earn a postsecondary degree or credential with genuine value in the workplace by age 26.” While the foundation has done extensive, non-education-related work in developing nations, “In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people—especially those with the fewest resources—have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life.” The Gates Foundation has sponsored the Education Writers Association’s work regardin
The College Board
The College Board is known primarily for their SAT and Advanced Placement tests, which play critical roles in the college admissions process, both for students and admissions officers across the country. The College Board, however, does also have an Advocacy & Policy Center that actively researches key issues of college access and success. Their annual reports regarding trends in college costs and financial aid are key tools of the higher education beat.
Data Reveal a Rise in College Degrees Among Americans
The number of Americans graduating from college has surged in recent years, sending the share with a college degree to a new high, federal data shows.
GED Faces Competition As States Weigh Two New Entrants
The GED no longer has a lock on the market for tests that serve as the equivalent of a high school degree. Three states have switched to new competitors from Educational Testing Service (ETS) and McGraw-Hill — and many more are mulling a change.
How to Assess the Real Payoff of a College Degree
Looking at college explicitly in terms of its “return on investment,” measured in starting salaries and potential earnings, is something new—a confluence of anxieties about the rising cost of college, mounting debt among students, a flaccid economy, and the ubiquitous vocabulary of the market.
The Institute for College Access and Success
The Institute for College Access and Success is an advocacy group that works to promote college affordability. Based in San Francisco, they can offer perspectives on various aspects of college costs, such as net price calculators, student debt, and income-based repayment of student loans.
California Community Colleges Release Completion Scorecards
California’s community college system on April 9 unveiled Web-based “scorecards” on student performance at its 112 colleges. The new data tool is user-friendly and often sobering, with graduation, retention and transfer rates for each of the colleges and for the overall system, which enrolls 2.4 million students.
California Bill Seeks Campus Credit for Online Study
Legislation will be introduced in the California Senate that could reshape higher education by requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to give credit for faculty-approved online courses taken by students unable to register for oversubscribed classes on campus.
If it passes, as seems likely, it would be the first time that state legislators have instructed public universities to grant credit for courses that were not their own — including those taught by a private vendor, not by a college or university.
For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall
The growing role of class in academic success has taken experts by surprise since it follows decades of equal opportunity efforts and counters racial trends, where differences have narrowed. It adds to fears over recent evidence suggesting that low-income Americans have lower chances of upward mobility than counterparts in Canada and Western Europe.
Student-Loan Delinquencies Now Surpass Credit Cards
Of the $956 billion in student-loan debt outstanding as of September, 11 percent was delinquent — up from less than 9 percent in the second quarter, and higher than the 10.5 percent of credit-card debt, which was delinquent in the third quarter. By comparison, delinquency rates on mortgages, home-equity lines of credit and auto loans stood at 5.9 percent, 4.9 percent, and 4.3 percent respectively as of September.
No Income? No Problem! How the Gov’t Is Saddling Parents with College Loans They Can’t Afford
A joint examination by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education has found that Plus loans can sometimes hurt the very families they are intended to help: The loans are both remarkably easy to get and nearly impossible to get out from under for families who’ve overreached. When a parent applies for a Plus loan, the government checks credit history, but it doesn’t assess whether the borrower has the ability to repay the loan. It doesn’t check income. It doesn’t check employment status.
Teacher’s Wages Garnished as U.S. Goes After Loan Default
Lawyers drained Linda Brice’s bank account and seized a quarter of her take-home pay, or more than $900 a month. Brice, a first-grade teacher and Coast Guard veteran, begged for mercy, saying she couldn’t afford food, gas or utilities.
Brice’s transgression: she defaulted on $3,100 she had borrowed more than 30 years ago to pay for college. The chief federal judge in Los Angeles took her side, ruling that Brice should pay only $25 a month. The law firm of Goldsmith & Hull – representing the federal government — then withdrew $2,496 from her bank account.
Facing Facts
In some ways, community colleges have faced the most scrutiny by advocates of the college completion agenda. This article reports on a panel discussion of the impact these efforts have had on two-year colleges. “[If] the focus on completion gets too singular, two-year colleges run the risk of neglecting student access and even the quality of learning on their campuses,” the story notes.
College Dropouts Have Debt but No Degree
The consequences of leaving college before graduation are not just educational. Dropping out also can have a significant financial impact: “College dropouts are also among the most likely to default on their loans, falling behind at a rate four times that of graduates.”
A Stronger Nation Through Higher Education
This is the third major report the Lumina Foundation has released to assess the nation’s progress toward Lumina’s goal “to increase the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60 percent by the year 2025.” The report found that only 38.3 percent of working-age Americans held a two- or four-year college degree in 2010, concluding that “if we continue on our current rate of production, only 79.8 million working-age Americans (46.5% of those aged 25-64) will hold degrees by 2025…This will leave us more than 23 million degrees short of the national 60 percent goal.”
To Raise Completion Rates, States Dig Deeper for Data
With the growing demand for improving college completion rates has come a need for more thorough information about just how well or poorly colleges and their students are performing on a variety of measures. In a growing number of states, that data is being used to improve the number of students who finish their degrees.
Don’t Lecture Me
EWA 2012 National Reporting Contest winner. College students spend a lot of time listening to lectures. But research shows there are better ways to learn. And experts say students need to learn better because the 21st century economy demands more well-educated workers.
Time is the Enemy
This comprehensive study challenged the conventional image that most college students enter postsecondary education directly from high school and proceed directly to a bachelor’s degree in six years or less. It notes instead that “Nontraditional students are the new majority” and that “Part-time students rarely graduate,” among its other groundbreaking findings.
Developing 20/20 Vision on the 2020 Degree Attainment Goal — The Threat of Income-Based Inequality in Education
In this report, the Pell Institute says that “The nation’s failure to keep pace with other countries in educational attainment among 25- to 34- year-old adults can largely be traced to our inability to adequately educate individuals from families in the bottom half of the income distribution.”
The College Completion Agenda: 2011 Progress Report
Tracking the national progress toward its goal for college completion, the College Board offers 10 recommendations for improving educational attainment. At the postsecondary level, the goals include reforming college admissions, simplifying and improving financial aid, and offering better academic counseling to college students.
Application Inflation
EWA 2010 National Reporting Contest winner. With skyrocketing numbers of applicants and declining percentages of students accepted, how are admissions offices handling the multiple pressures they face? Are schools bringing in more and more accomplished students, or just the same kind of enrollment class compared to students from a decade ago?
Reframing College Completion
The national college completion goals laid out by President Obama and various organizations are literally monumental, aiming to move millions of Americans to college degrees. This article examines efforts to break that large, national goal down into smaller regional and metropolitan goals.
To Pump Up Degree Counts, Colleges Invite Dropouts Back
Many advocates for increasing the number of Americans with college credentials assert that one efficient way to raise that number would be to convince adults who have dropped out of college to return and finish their degrees. This article examines the pros and cons of that approach.
Education Experts Discuss Ways to Improve College-Completion Rates
This article examines the ideas experts — including some college presidents — shared in a discussion entitled “Competing in a Global Economy: How to Boost College Completion Rates,” sponsored by the Gates Foundation. “American colleges often focus too much on enrolling students and not enough on making sure they graduate, a number of panelists said.”
Seminoles helped by ‘LD’ diagnoses
EWA 2010 National Reporting Contest winner. For college athletes, how much help is too much if they have learning disabilities? This story features a fired disabilities coach who university officials say blurred the line between aiding student-athletes with learning disabilities and academic fraud. Other members of the university’s athletic academic support unit in some cases supplied answers to tests, and in other cases typed papers, for 61 athletes in football and other sports.
Gates Fund Creates Plan for College Completion
This article covers the Gates Foundation’s original announcement of its college completion initiative. A subscription is required to view the full article.
A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education
This study, commonly known as the Spellings Report—in reference to U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings who commissioned it—is perhaps one of the earliest landmarks in the current college completion agenda. “We may still have more than our share of the world’s best universities,” the report asserts. “But a lot of other countries have followed our lead, and they are now educating more of their citizens to more advanced levels than we are. Worse, they are passing us by at a time when education is more important to our collective prosperity than ever.”