What lousy public policy. What we have developing now is a whole myriad of systems that may or may not communicate with one another, and that frustrate any serious attempt to understand what happens to students who may start at one college and end up at others.  What types of students might do that? Well, the other 85% for starters.  

So, who opposed having the feds develop a single, unified federal system?  Let me quote Peter Ewell from the article:  “It is clear that this agenda is moving forward, despite opposition from the private colleges. The accountability push is such that these numbers are just simply going to be produced whether anyone likes it or not.”  But, doing it state by state is certainly not efficient.

Ewell goes on to say that “private colleges are all in favor of data. They just don’t want anybody but them to know.”

I have blogged many times about Transparency by Design and its Web site, College Choices for Adults, which is intended to provide useful information to adults seeking to enroll in a college. A national database that could track students who attend multiple schools would be very useful for our work. We would be able to indicate how many adults who end up attending multiple schools actually finish their desired degree.  Without this information, we simply don’t know. This is but one kind of information that could be gathered from such a database. And, those institutions in Transparency by Design not only want the data, but we want to share it, to make it transparent.

Why would any colleges oppose having data available?  Because in a world devoid of data, the reliance on reputation (whether deserved or not) rules.  There are many schools that rely on reputations that may or may not have been earned, but that drive their institutional revenues. Any change to rely on something that is based on data might threaten their reputations … and their revenues.

Mr. Ewell is correct when he says that numbers are going to be produced whether anyone likes it or not. Too bad that the numbers could not be produced in the most efficient way, and in a system that considers the entire country.  But, we have public policy to prevent that … because there are some who might lose.

Please feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Mike

But, I wonder how seriously.  For an organization that has “learning outcomes assessment” in its name, why only look at core learning such as writing, critical thinking and analytical reasoning. What about learning outcomes in the student’s major? At the program level? The report states that the most common approach is to use something like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), and to focus on the core areas. Of course, if you aren’t going to pay attention to whatever the assessments have to tell you, maybe it is just too much trouble to think about what ought to be measured.

As I have stated many times in this blog, the basic focus of Transparency by Design and its Web site http://www.collegechoicesforadults.org has been on program-level learning outcomes. Some have criticized us because the outcomes are not directly comparable—that is because every school claims unique program outcomes, and that those outcomes differentiate their school and programs. Regardless, why isn’t any other initiative looking at that level of learning? Why isn’t the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment encouraging that level of assessment?  If we are all going to get real about assessing learning outcomes, let’s get down to the important stuff:  what is it that we intend to have students learn in order to earn a degree?  How do we know if our graduates are actually learning what they are supposed to be?

I would hope the courage is out there for others to begin to do what the Transparency by Design institutions have started. But, the outlook is not promising. Just recently I was warned by a person from a traditional school that we should all be careful what we measure, because if you measure it, you may not be pleased with what you find.  You certainly would not want what you find to get out in the open!

The approach of the institutions in Transparency by Design is the exact opposite. Let’s measure what is important and, if we are not doing well today, let’s get about fixing it.  It is unfortunate that much of higher education goes through the motions of assessment, avoids assessing the really important things, and then ignore what they find.  I would suggest that it is precisely because of this culture that we are under such pressure to measure more, be transparent about what we find, and use assessment to drive improvement.

Please feel free to leave a comment. Thank you.

Mike

But what they propose is just plain silly; self-serving but still silly. They describe ongoing nursing shortages, saying that the growing shortages caused “93% of hospital-based registered nurses to report a lack of sufficient time and staff to maintain patient safety, detect complications early, and collaborate with other health care team members.” I am not at all sure how they conclude that this is a problem to be solved by education but the idea of increasing the barriers to practice nursing by requiring a bachelor’s degree seems counter-productive at best. This is further evidence that not only is health care dysfunctional but so are the politics of nursing and nursing licensure.

What really irritates me about this piece is that the authors attack (though they insist that is not really what they are doing) the associate degree in nursing (ADN) and the colleges that offer these programs, many of them community colleges. Patricia Benner, one of the authors, is quoted as saying such a change “would hold community college nursing programs more accountable.” That “the minimum amount of time a student has to spend in these ‘two-year programs’ is actually three years.”

Fortunately, Kim Tinsley of North Arkansas College and a member of the National Organization for Associate Degree Nursing pointed out that “I teach in a rural setting and the main advantage of offering a two-year RN degree is that it puts the nurse graduate to work in a shorter amount of time so they can support their family. They cannot afford four years of BSN classes and not work. The ADN student does sometimes have to take up to four years to complete their degree but it is due to the fact that they are working (sometimes full time) and have a family to support. The average age of our students is 27. The majority of our students are either married with a family or are a single parent. They cannot afford the time nor resources to attend a four-year program.”

Thanks to Ms. Tinsley. What her statement lays out clearly is that this is not just an attack on a type of degree but on the people who most often pursue that degree—the other 85%. The students in the ADN programs are older. Rather than being financially dependent on their parents, they more often have families of their own who depend on them. And, whether a family or not, they are often working.

Let’s be honest here. Schools like those that the authors of this report work at are not willing or able to serve the audiences that attend the ADN programs. The authors say that these BSN schools would need to “increase capacity by approximately 90 percent.” Is that likely to happen during a recession? Absolutely not and it would not happen during the best of economic times. That is because BSN programs at research universities use the undergraduate programs as feeders for their graduate programs. They want traditional students who compete for entry into elite programs. They don’t want to serve the folks in the ADN programs because the students in these programs don’t fit the mold and some, if not many, of these students might require remedial assistance. The fact is that there is a racial and class overlay here that is just below the surface. Community colleges and other ADN providers are serving a far more racially diverse audience than the BSN schools as well as many low-income students.

The authors claim that they are not opposed to the community colleges and their suggested change might lead to better articulation agreements. Yes, when hell freezes over. All we need to do is to look at the current state of such articulation agreements nationally to have one more proof point that schools like the ones the authors are defending remain elitist and are not interested in seriously getting at the fact that it is the diverse and low income students who are earning ADN degrees and becoming registered nurses. These nurses are holding our health care system together and there is no way that a group of BSN nurses admitted under current admissions standards that are intended to limit access will ever replace them.

The truth is that this call is about getting more funding for the BSN programs. Any call for continued elitism and raising barriers to entry in a profession that is suffering serious shortages is just plain silly.

I encourage you to share your thoughts.

Mike

Your thoughts? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike

Soares uses the term working learners to describe those students who are already in the workforce and are “juggling work and learning.”  He notes that “75 percent of college undergraduates in the 1999-2000 school year were in some way nontraditional.”  He is talking about the other 85 percent of college students who did not come directly to full-time college study on a campus and remain dependent on their parents.  And, consistent with the points made in this blog, he notes that public policy shortchanges these students.  He states that “Pell Grant treats working learners, most of whom pursue postsecondary credentials as nontraditional students, less favorably than traditional students.”  He supports this viewpoint by pointing out that one of the characteristics that define the nontraditional student is being financially independent “for purposes of determining eligibility for financial aid.”  Noting that 60 percent of the 5 million low-income Americans who received a Pell Grant during the 2007-8 academic year were financially independent, he states that “the statutorily mandated federal needs analysis that determines the amount of federal aid puts far more burden on these older students than on their dependent peers.”  “A single, working learner Pell Grant recipient earning $30,000 or less can be required to pay at least 30 percent of their gross earning for postsecondary education.”  He goes on to point out how the Pell Grant program limits aid for students who attend college less than half-time, does not fund shorter-than-semester length courses, and “penalizes students for work.”  Soares concludes that “our financial aid structure today is inadequate to accommodate the different circumstances of working learners.”  He correctly states that working learners need the following:

•    Flexible financial assistance that promotes getting college credit over time
•    Access to 21st century-career coaching to design a successful work-education path
•    Accurate information about education and training quality
•    Educational institutions able to adapt their service delivery to working learners needs

Again, Soares’ paper is an important one, and I highly recommend giving it a read.  Not only because it aligns with the concerns expressed in this blog, but because he makes a compelling argument for the national significance of educating today’s workforce and the failure of our current systems to enable the necessary mix of learning and work.
I think that this paper further documents the serious public policy misunderstanding about what our country needs in regard to postsecondary education due to a reliance on a romantic view of what college-going is in today’s world.  And, it correctly points to some of the policies that not only don’t encourage the working learner, but place barriers in the way of their participation in postsecondary education.  While I am pleased to see a paper like this, I only wish I could claim optimism about whether positive change is coming.  Instead, I see messages out of our nation’s capital that there is concern about things like credit hours – seat time. At a time when we desperately need visionary leadership, we are seeing retrenchment and calls for greater controls. The fact is that federal financial aid, including the Pell Grant, is locked into old ways of thinking about education and is getting more and more locked into approaches that block rather than encourage either innovation or support for working learners.

Your thoughts? Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike

The institutions most often cited as having low completion rates are community colleges, for-profit colleges, and colleges that serve adult students.  The reported completion rates can be incredibly low, even zero, and invariably, when reported, set off a flurry of self-righteous condemnation of these schools.  But the indignation may be misplaced.  I say “may” because the way the data is collected, we really have no idea what the real completion rates are.  That is because federal data (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System—IPEDS) on completion rates counts only a very limited and specific set of students.  It only counts those students who start college for the first time and remain enrolled at the same institution on a full-time basis throughout their college career.  The way this is described is “first-time, full-time.”

If you have read this blog before and understand my main premise, then you will realize immediately that only a few students in today’s world actually go to college and remain as full-time students through to completion at the same institution.  That is just not the way students act anymore.  Add to this that the calculation of completion rates also assumes that the student will finish within six years of when they start.  That is something else I have written about—when many students are attending part-time, six years may not be an appropriate timeframe.

The idea of “first-time, full-time” is only relevant to the minority of students who go to college full-time after high school.  It is only relevant to that romanticized view of what college is like and that view is not at all accurate in today’s world where students are older, mixing work with study and enrolled part-time.  The latter type of student attends community colleges, for-profit online schools and schools that serve adults.  Take Capella as an example.  Virtually every one of our students is older.  They have very likely attended other schools before coming to us.  And, they are studying part time.  The fact is that if you have almost no students who meet the “first-time, full-time” criterion (Capella had a whopping 3 students who fit this criteria in 2008), you will have almost no completions.

In addition, the Department of Education has identified several variables that predict low completion rates.  Those include being older (delayed enrollment), studying part-time, working full-time, having children or being financially independent of parents.  Four of more of these factors predict completion rates of only 10 percent.  Those variables literally define the students who attend the schools that have relatively low completion rates.  So, the “first-time, full-time” definition and the audience served both work against colleges serving these audiences.

Fortunately, influential public-policy organizations recognize the problem with use of “first-time, full-time” and are calling for changes.  For example, the National Governor’s Association has published an “issue brief” that cites this problem and others and calls for states to take steps to measure more effectively.  The report cites the fact that federal data excludes too many students, and that about half the students in public colleges and universities are not counted.  The report specifically states that “many long-held stereotypes about college students—that they live on campus, enroll full-time, and graduate in four years—fail to describe the U.S. college student population.”  The report goes on to say “meaningful data on postsecondary students should track part-time students, full-time students, first-time students, transfer students, and students pursuing education for non-credential purposes.”  I agree with that statement and the implied fact that the federal data is not meaningful.

So, the next time someone gets bent out of shape over supposed low completion rates based on federal data, remember that the data are biased to an outdated, romanticized view of college and fail to count many, many students—the very students who attend the types of schools that receive the criticism.

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike

I have posted in the past about Capella’s involvement with Transparency by Design, an effort to create a trust-worthy, non-marketing site for adults trying to find a college to attend. This initiative involves a number of regionally accredited institutions that specialize in serving adults at a distance. Because many of the universities involved are not household names, the adult seeking a place to attend college can wonder about their legitimacy. The accreditation process is one means to assure that an institution is viable and has been objectively reviewed by knowledgeable educators.

However, the adult seeking a college can be bombarded with options and some of those options are not always legitimate. It is a harm to the consumer and to the higher education sector to have diploma mills out there. Worse yet, there are also accreditation mills. We all need to work to identify these mills and eliminate their ability to prey on the unsuspecting, or to accomodate those who seek to simply add a degree to their resume without doing any work to earn it.

CHEA has done good work to support legitimate accreditation and create resources for those who want to verify the validity of an accreditation agency. All 50 states need to prohibit the use of bogus degrees. This would be a good step toward undercutting the business of running a diploma or accreditation mill.

Please feel free to share your comments.

Mike

At the state level, the headline is “41 percent in state don’t finish college within 6 years.” And the paper quotes one of the reports authors, Kevin Carey, as follows:  “But in a state that size, if 41 percent are not graduating, those are lost opportunities.  When we talk about higher education, we usually only talk about access. We don’t talk nearly as much about success.”

Now, I admit that the headlines and articles correctly point out that the graduation rates were after 6 years.  But, the tone and message conveyed is literally what Mr. Carey communicated.  This is failure. We have lost these students. The schools have failed.  Have they?  Why is 4 years or 6 years so magic?  What relevance do those timeframes have for students who work and study only part-time.  If full-time study should result in a bachelor’s degree in 4 years, then why not measure after 8 years since we have so many part-time students?  Why not 12 years?

Are we “failing” simply because we have set an artificial timeline?  More importantly, what is the message sent to the student who works and studies part-time?  Are they failures if they don’t finish in 4 or 6 years?

Or, is this just another example of researchers driving public policy discussions based on out-of-date assumptions about who college students are, how they pursue their studies, and the ways in which they ultimately succeed?

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike

So you can imagine how pleased I was to see this Boston Globe article, which describes what it calls “the four-year college myth,” the idealized view that college students graduate from high school and go directly to a college campus, study full-time, and finish in four years.  Not the way it happens.  In fact, the article’s author, Neil Swidey, states that his rough calculations using federal data would indicate that fewer than 10 percent of adults who have a bachelor’s degree earned that degree in four years or less.  He writes, “By definition, that’s no longer traditional.  It’s radical, and it makes you wonder why we still call them four-year colleges.”

Swidey believes that the reason our perceptions are so far from reality is that the “old path still dominates at name-brand private colleges.”  Maybe. But I think the answer lies more in his description of how Gerald Chertavian, founder of the successful “Year Up” program that deals with students who struggled in high school, asked participants in a summit meeting of the New England Board of Higher Education about how many had finished a bachelor’s degree in four years.  About 80 percent of the hands went up.  That is the way that these education leaders did it, and that is the way today’s legislative leaders did it, and that is the way many of us older folks did it.  And, we just assume that nothing has changed … that the world is just going along the same old way.  We fail to understand the realities of the people we claim to serve.

Not only has the world changed, but it is reasonable to expect that the current economic situation will drive even greater changes.  And we throw out ideas like going to “three-year degrees,” most of which are simply accelerated programs that are totally unfriendly to students who must work and attend part-time.  These programs are intended to be attractive to parents who don’t want to pay for four years if they can only pay for three years.  But again, most students these days are older, working, studying part-time.  What they need is the fastest and least costly track to a degree, but three years versus four years is the wrong way to think about meeting those needs.

Swidey presents some examples of students who are part of the other 85 percent.  He ends by quoting Allison Hartle, who took six years at two colleges to earn her baccalaureate degree, “The traditional path is painted as being the proper thing to do, that if you don’t take it you’ve somehow failed.  But that’s not true.  I know a ton of kids who went off to college and wasted their parents’ money.  I don’t think I wasted anything.”  Swiney concludes with the statement, “How radical is that?”  My answer is that it is not radical, it is real.  And many, if not most, of the other 85 percent of students, who are like Allison, would say something similar.  What is radically wrong is that public policy continues to be driven by outdated and inaccurate assumptions about who attends college and how they do it.

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike

While it is often argued that demand for higher education increases during economic downturns, this study indicates that less than half of the respondents thought the value of an education had increased over the last year.  And twenty percent thought the value had decreased.  Thirty-six percent said that the recession had caused them to “slow down or delay” plans to enroll in higher education.  And forty-three percent were worried about their ability to remain enrolled if they were to start work on a degree.  Like many Americans, these prospective students are worried about possible job loss or taking on additional educational work when they may face increasing expectations at work. 

What is perhaps the strongest message about what is important to prospective adult students during these anxious and uncertain times is that they seek programs that are more flexible, including online programs, and those programs that allow a quick pathway to career enhancement.  That should come as no surprise.

While some of this information is not surprising, it is helpful to have data to better understand the pressures that prospective adult students are experiencing as they weigh the pros and cons of pursuing a higher education degree.  This audience is critically important to the national goal to remain internationally competitive by assuring a well educated and highly skilled American workforce.  That goal will only be accomplished by increasing higher education participation rates, as President Obama has called for.  We must seek ways to help those adults who are considering higher education enrollment to participate in ways that fit within the competing demands they face, reduces their risk, and provides support for them as they balance work, life, and furthering their education.

Your thoughts or reactions? Feel free to submit a comment.

Mike