College Quality

With the economy stuck in neutral, tuition prices and student loan debt skyrocketing, and parents and students increasingly questioning the value of a college degree, our public institutions urgently need a different approach to the challenge or educating an increasingly diverse mix of students at a reasonable cost. Today, New America's Education Policy Program released The Next Generation University, a policy report about the future of public higher education. The report comes at a time when too many public universities are failing to respond to the nation's higher education crisis. Rather than expanding enrollment and focusing limited dollars on the neediest of students, many institutions are instead restricting enrollments and encouraging the use of student-aid dollars on merit awards. But, according to the report, some schools are breaking the mold by boldly restructuring operating costs and creating clear, accelerated pathways for students.

The report focuses on six public research universities: Arizona State University, University at Buffalo, University of California at Riverside, University of Central Florida, Georgia State University, and the University of Texas at Arlington. These universities are continuing their commitment to world class research while increasing enrollment and graduation rates, even as the investments from their states have declined. 

The report includes case studies on each of the six universities, which were selected after an analysis of federal education data, site visits, and interviews. Based on similarities in their approaches to reform, the report's recommendations include:  

At the Institutional Level

1. Increase size to ensure broad access, test new ideas from pedagogy to student services, and serve growing populations.
2. Create direct connections between two- and four-year colleges to ease access for transfer students.

At the State Level

1. Guarantee a low net-price for low-income students.
2. Adopt performance-based funding.
3. Create transfer policies that encourage completion.
4. Ensure students in the K-12 pipeline are prepared.

At the National Level

1. Develop Next Generation Leaders for Next Generation Universities.
2. Acknowledge that external recognition remains important in higher education, and provide recognition for increasing access and student success.
3. Create a demonstration program that challenges four-year public higher education institutions to innovate.

These recommendation and lessons will be featured at an event held at the New America Foundation from 10am to 3pm. You can learn more about the event and watch a livestream here. Follow the conversation on twitter using #NextGenU.

Download the full report here.

In addition to the report, New America has released two related issue briefs:

In "Technology and the Next Generation University," New America's Rachel Fishman explores the barriers to technology-enhanced education and presents promising practices Next Generation Universities employ to overcome them.

In "Formation of the Next Generation University: Role of State and System Policy," HCM Strategists' Iris Palmer, Kristin Conklin, and Nate Johnson explore how transfer policy, financial aid, net price, performance funding and the K-12 pipeline affect Next Generation Universities within their state context. It makes recommendations for state and higher-education system policymakers on how to ensure public institutions are meeting the needs of the state.

HCM Strategists, in conjunction with the release of The Next Generation University has developed a new interactive tool:

Next Generation Universities: Select Dimensions of Research University Output, Productivity and Efficiency 2006-2011

This dashboard, created by HCM Strategists and Postsecondary Analytics, includes a selection of measures of public research university performance through the great recession, showing how they have fared over time and in comparison to the sector as a whole. It helps illustrate the very different ways research universities have experienced and responded to the challenges of the last several years, and which institutions have been able to sustain or grow the number of students served in spite of the financial challenges they faced.

Please note that the dashboard is a large file (2.5 mb) and may take up to a minute to load. It requires Adobe Flash, which is already installed in most browsers.

Also released at the event are two conference papers from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University: 1) More Students, More Degrees, More Dollars: How Universities Can Close Budget Gaps while Benefiting Students; and 2) The High Price of Excess Credits: How New Approaches Could Help Students and Schools.

For more than 100 years, the time-based credit hour has been the currency of higher education. Originally created to calculate eligibility for Andrew Carnegie’s free faculty pension system, the credit hour evolved to become much more. Entire systems have been built around and upon the time-based credit hour, including the economic lifeblood of many colleges and universities—federal financial aid. But today, the U.S. Department of Education approved Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) College for America (CfA) to be the first program in the country to receive federal financial aid based on “direct assessment” of student learning, rather than the credit hour. This move from the federal government could signal a new era for higher education—one in which we value and pay for learning rather than time.

Southern New Hampshire University, a small, private liberal arts institution, is familiar with pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Over a decade ago, it added a three-year competency-based bachelor’s degree to its regular course offerings. Rather than squeeze four years of “time” into three years through summer and weekend classes, the faculty identified the core competencies students should have upon graduation and then wove those competencies into every course and assignment. By looking at the program holistically, rather than just as a combination of courses, the school was able to eliminate redundancies in the curriculum and focus on what students were expected to learn and do.

A federal district court judge dealt a huge blow yesterday to the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to regulate the for-profit college sector. More broadly, the court’s decision in the case, which deals with the Department’s Gainful Employment regulations, could make it much more difficult to bring greater transparency and accountability to higher education as a whole.

The roots of this case go back to June when the federal district court vacated some of the Department of Education’s Gainful Employment (GE) regulations. While the judge affirmed the department’s authority to regulate on GE and held up requirements that GE programs disclose information like median debt to students, he found that one of the three measures used to determine whether a program prepared students for gainful employment -- the student loan repayment rate -- “lacked a reasoned basis.” And since the judge concluded that all the metrics were intertwined, he threw them all out. With no metrics to report, the disclosure requirements included in the regulations were also effectively eliminated.

The Department went back to the court and asked the judge to reinstate the reporting requirements so that it could implement the disclosure provisions of GE (without program-level information, disclosure would be impossible to achieve). In yesterday’s decision, the judge denied this request on the grounds that the reporting requirements would violate one of the worst laws in the history of higher education: the federal ban on a student unit record system.

As I wrote on Tuesday at Higher Ed Watch, the recently introduced “Students First Act” would require the U.S. Department of Education to automatically conduct program reviews of colleges that are most at risk of violating federal law. But this is only one way in which the bill, which was sponsored by Democratic Senators Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Tom Harkin of Iowa, would strengthen the tools that the Education Department employs to protect the integrity of the federal student aid programs and safeguard students from unscrupulous schools. Here are some key features that would greatly enhance the Department’s oversight and enforcement authority and provide relief to students who have been harmed.

The bill would:

• Hold School Executives Accountable for Compliance

Under the measure, college presidents, chief executive officers, and chief financial officers would personally sign the student aid program participation agreements that the Education Department enters with their schools. They then would be held liable if their schools “knowingly and willfully” violated the agreements, or engaged in “gross negligence.” In such cases, these officials would be fined an amount equal to their yearly compensation, and they would be barred from working at another college that participates in the federal financial aid programs for at least five years.

Does the U.S. Department of Education have the guts to enforce its own federal student aid program integrity rules? Judging by the Department’s record and legislation recently introduced by Senate Democrats, entitled the “Students First Act,” the answer to that question appears to be “No.”

During President Obama’s first term, administration officials went to great lengths – and spent a substantial amount of political capital – to strengthen the agency’s authority to crack down on schools that deliberately mislead students into enrolling. Yet, the Department has shied away from using these expanded powers, even when evidence of abuse has been delivered to the agency on a silver platter.

Career Education Corporation is a case in point. In the fall of 2011, the publicly-traded for-profit higher education company revealed that a significant number of its schools had been cooking the books on the job placement rates they were disclosing to prospective students. But despite this remarkable admission, the company didn’t receive even a slap on the wrist from the Department.

Welcome to the Syllabus, a weekly guide that provides insight into what’s happening in higher education.

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Poor Scholars Hit by Money Squeeze From Wealthy Colleges, Janet Lorin
Bloomberg

It’s the classic game of bait and switch: Low-income student gets accepted to a selective, high-tuition/high-aid college, only to have institutional aid taken away once awarded an outside scholarship. This practice, known as displacement, reduces the grant aid awarded to students who win outside scholarships, giving aid to other students. Furthermore, many students find they can’t apply their scholarship funds to summer savings requirements. At Barnard, for example, students must save about $2,200 over the summer to help cover costs of their education that cannot be covered by scholarships. The National Scholarship Providers Association, a group whose 320 members include the Gates, Coca-Cola Scholars, and Michael & Susan Dell Foundations, argues that if a college rescinds funding because of outside scholarships, it “takes away a reward that the student earned through hard work and concentrated effort.”

Welcome to the Syllabus, a weekly guide that provides insight into what’s happening in higher education.

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Obama, Rubio Put Higher Education on Notice, David Wessel
The Wall Street Journal

Senator Marco Rubio and President Barack Obama may not agree on much these days, but they do agree that the way the federal government spends money on student aid needs to change. In this year’s State of the Union, President Obama called for incorporating measures of value and affordability into higher education’s accreditation system or establishing a path to alternative accreditation for nontraditional providers. Senator Rubio, in his response to the State of the Union, said, “We need student aid that does not discriminate against programs that nontraditional students rely on—like online courses or degree programs that give you credit for work experience.” While it is unclear how and when accreditation could be changed, something needs to update the archaic 19^th century practice and bring it to the 21^st century. “The focus by Mr. Obama and Mr. Rubio on accreditation suggests a worry that the old system could stifle innovation,” writes Wessel, “And prevent competition from new, perhaps more efficient forms of teaching.”

Starting in 2014, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandates that employers with more than 50 employees must provide health insurance to those working more than 30 hours per week. To prevent having to give their employees proper benefits, Papa John’s Pizza voiced intent to cut the hours of employees to fall just below the 30 hour threshold.  Customers expressed reprehension at the prospect of the pizza giant further limiting the earnings of its lowest income employees in the name of corporate revenue. The public backlash was so powerful that Papa John’s founder and CEO, John Schnatter walked back his loophole planning, but it remains to be seen whether universities—American cultural bastions of fairness and opportunity—will fare differently. The government has hedged on behalf of adjuncts, but the question of whether and to what degree universities will ultimately be allowed to implement similar plans to fudge compliance with the ACA remains unresolved.

This post ran first on the Future Tense blog.

The opposition response to the State of the Union is normally a time to denounce the president and all his works. For the most part, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., kept to form last night, repeatedly slamming Barack Obama for his big government, job-killing agenda. But there was one area in which, perhaps without realizing it, Rubio and Obama agree: They both want to unleash a wave of innovation that could transform American higher education and finally bring the eternal problem of rising college prices to heel.

As a rule, speechwriters put the most dramatic parts of a president’s agenda front and center in televised speeches, leaving the boring policy details to the supplemental notes. Last night, the Obama administration did the opposite: the higher education section of the State of the Union address was much the same as last year’s, focusing intensely on college affordability and putting institutions on notice that the gravy train of public support for rising prices would have to end. But the truly earth-shaking policy initiatives were left for the supplemental policy document  released directly after the speech, in which the Obama administration proposed the biggest change to federal higher education policy since at least the Higher Education Amendments of 1972.

Those laws created what would become the Pell Grant program for low-income students, which has grown to a $40 billion pillar of government support for higher learning. The Pell grant is a voucher system--any eligible student can use their grant to pay tuition at any accredited college of their choice.

The key words in that sentence are “accredited” and “college.” There are lots of ways to learn, but Pell grants can only be used to purchase learning from organizations that fit the model of colleges as we know them today. And who decides, legally, what a “college” is? Accreditors, a group of independent non-profit organizations run by...colleges as we know them today. By controlling access to Pell grants, student loans, and other forms of financial aid, existing colleges determine the price, structure, and character of higher learning. This regulatory monopoly has had severe and sadly predictable negative effects on price and innovation in higher learning. To compete on a level financial playing field, you have to teach, spend, and ultimately charge like established institutions.

The Obama administration wants to change all of that: