Should a college be judged on how many students it enrolls or graduates?
In what represents a sea change, policymakers are pressuring public colleges and universities to focus on completion rates. Now, half of students who embark on a four-year bachelor’s degree finish within six years. At the community college level, only three out of 10 students end up earning their associate degrees.
At one time, top-tier colleges fought for bragging rights on how many students washed out after their freshman year. But those “washouts” are costly, both in lost opportunities for the individual and education dollars spent by states.
In 2009, Georgia spent more than $250 million on students who did not return to college after their first year, said Dean Alford, a former state school board member and chairman of the Technical College System of Georgia’s board of directors, at a recent forum sponsored by the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education.
Among the themes of the discussion: To defray the cost of a degree, colleges must make better use of technology to deliver classes, reduce unnecessary credit hours that students take through sounder advisement, structure class schedules to maximize attendance and keep tuition in check.
Tuition has outstripped inflation and family income, forcing students from all income levels to go deeper into debt. In 1980, tuition at a public four-year college represented 13 percent of the income of a low-income family. Twenty years later, it equaled 25 percent of their income.
“We are reaching limits in our states to keep education affordable,” said David Spence, president of the Southern Regional Education Board and panel moderator.
In 2006, the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued a blistering report that warned, “We believe that affordability is directly affected by colleges’ and universities’ failure to seek institutional efficiencies and by their disregard for improving productivity, since the current system provides institutions with few incentives to do either.”
(At the same time that the forum panelists were discussing affordability, the Georgia Regents were down the street approving a tuition and fee hike.)
Higher education has yet to adapt to the changing face of its students; they are no longer all fresh-faced 18-year-olds who don’t mind being wait-listed for classes they need or being scheduled for classes five hours apart.
Lynne Weisenbach, a vice chancellor with the Board of Regents, said only 25 percent of public college students fit the traditional mold of going straight from high school to campus. The other 75 percent are juggling jobs and families. They are not living in dorms and sending bills home to mom and dad. They can’t spend luxuriant gaps between classes throwing a Frisbee on the quad.
Will Pinkston, a former senior adviser to Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, told the forum how Tennessee is linking its college funding formula to outcomes of students rather than to enrollments.
Tennessee will now look at end-of-course enrollment, student retention, and progress toward degree completion in its funding formula. In the past, enrollments were often based early in the semester when rosters were highest, rather than at the end of courses when they were often lower.
Funding formulas based on enrollment create an arms race among institutions to generate larger pools of applicants, especially at colleges lacking the star appeal of a University of Georgia or Georgia Tech.
Lacking incentives to improve graduation rates, colleges haven’t worried about whether their students took four or six years to finish or whether they finished at all.
But the longer it takes students to complete their degrees, the less likely they are to do so. And students who take longer than five years are saddled with 60 percent more debt than students who finish in four years, according to one study.
A simple way to boost competition is to prod college students to show up for their classes, Pinkston said.
“Take attendance,” he said. “Not every student will respond, but many will.”
In a report for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, Gary Donhardt, director of institutional research at the University of Memphis, warned: “In general, institutions of higher education are not known for their outstanding customer service. In fact, some are not known for even acknowledging that they have customers. The concept sounds too businesslike, and to maintain a sense of academic decorum, one must not do anything that smacks of the corporate world. ... But the reality of the situation is that higher education does have customers.”
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