The Other 85 Percent

What Is Student Success?

October 8, 2008 | Filed under: Capella, Capella University, Mike Offerman, academcs, college, college degree, continuing education, distance learning, elearning, higher education, online education, online learning, online university

I have written several times about an initiative called Transparency by Design, which is intended to provide prospective adult college students with information about which programs and colleges that would be best for them. One thing that the schools participating in the Transparency by Design effort plan to report on is how well students who have attended these schools have done. This is identified as “student success and progress” – and it has proven to be one of the most challenging issues we have confronted because there are so many different perspectives on what is meant by “success.”

Unfortunately, discussions about “success” at the national level tend to focus on a time-determined definition. For example, how many undergraduates complete their degree in four years? Or how many complete in six years? I have previously posted on the question of how long is appropriate when talking about part-time, working, and adult students.

As we dealt with this matter in the Transparency by Design group, a question came up about transferring students: should an institution consider a student to be progressing if she continues to pursue her degree but has transferred to another institution? Should an institution consider a student to be successful if he finished his degree after starting at the institution but transferred and finished at another institution? I think the frame of the question is wrong. Never mind how the institution views these situations, how does the student view herself or himself? Isn’t that what the prospective student is trying to sort out? Aren’t they really asking about what happened to those students who have gone before them, regardless of whether they transferred or not?

As I was considering this matter, I was also reading The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn from a Decade of European Reconstruction by Cliff Adelman, Senior Associate, Institute for Higher Education Policy. And what he writes toward the end of this paper, on page 111, seems to inform how we might think about success and progress. That it is not about time but about persisting, learning, having clear pathways. I will let him state it more clearly than I can:

The primary story is about providing students with clear indications of what their paths through higher education look like, what levels of knowledge and skills will qualify them for degree awards, and what their degrees mean. These are road signs that are sorely lacking now. Student “success” does not mean merely that you have been awarded a degree, but that you have learned something substantial along the way and that the world knows what you have learner, what skills you have mastered, and that you have the momentum to meet the rising knowledge content of the global economy. This public evidence does not derive from administering a test to a sample of students to prove that an institution “adds value” to something that, at best, is indirectly taught.

For U.S. policymakers, the primary message to students translates into worrying less about how many pieces of paper we pass out, how many credits qualify someone for those pieces of paper, and how long it takes a highly mobile student population to arrive in a graduation line, and more about the knowledge, the application of knowledge, the information identification and retrieval skills, and the degree of learning autonomy students acquire and take with them into economic and community life. That’s something for U.S. policymakers and academic leaders of the “get-it-over-with-and-get-it-over-with-fast” school (who then complain about what graduates don’t know or can’t do, and for whom persisting part-time students are a paradoxical anathema), should think very seriously about.

It seems that student success is really about what is learned and that the student has acquired the skills that Adelman describes and not about time. That when you look at this from the perspective of the part-time, working, and adult student, time becomes increasingly less important. That success in the eye of the student is persistence in learning what can be applied in life and, ultimately, completing a degree, no matter how long it takes and whether or not you attended one or a multitude of schools to get it done.

What do you think? I look forward to reading your comments.

Mike

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