The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future ...]]>

NEJHE's New Directions for Higher Education examines emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future of the credit hour; the second featured DiSalvio's interview with Fastweb.com and FinAid.org Publisher Mark Kantrowitz about student debt.

In this installment of the series, DiSalvio talks with Jamie P. Merisotis, president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, about Lumina’s commitment to enrolling and graduating more students from college and the changes needed in higher education to help encourage that goal.

The context

The U.S. ranks ninth in the world in the proportion of young adults enrolled in college and has fallen to 16th in the world in its share of certificates and degrees awarded to adults ages 25 to 34—lagging behind Korea, Canada, Japan and other nations. In addition, while high school graduates from the wealthiest families are almost certain to continue on to higher education, just over half of U.S. high school graduates in the poorest quarter of families attend college.

A Schott Foundation report suggests that without a policy framework to create opportunity for all students, strengthen supports for the teaching profession and strike the right balance between support-based reforms and standards-driven reforms, the U.S. will become increasingly unequal and less competitive in the global economy

In February 2009, President Obama declared that “ ... by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” Around the same time, Lumina Foundation released its first strategic plan in 2009 with the goal that 60% of Americans obtain a high-quality postsecondary degree or credential by 2025—a goal Lumina now calls Goal 2025.

Expansion of undergraduate enrollments and the need to improve degree-completion rates—essential in both the Obama plan and Goal 2025—call for recasting the role of American colleges and universities and system-level change to improve student access and success in higher education.

Merisotis observes that there are significant obstacles that stand in the way of these attainment efforts. Expressing urgency for widespread systemic change, he provides useful insights on what reforms are necessary and offers recommendations on how higher education campus leaders and policymakers can help manage those changes.

The interview

DiSalvio: You have said that the current generation of college-age Americans are on the way to being less educated than their parents. Why is the educational attainment rate so important to America's future?

Merisotis: The drive for American success in the 21st century is going to be talent. Talent is the driver of our economic success, cultural success and social success. What we know from extensive research in this area is that the talent that is required now is different from what it was in the past. The talent that we need as a society is overwhelmingly that which is attained by having a high-quality education at the postsecondary level.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to enroll in a postsecondary educational institution, because what we know is that there are many different ways in which postsecondary learning is now taking place. But postsecondary institutions, i.e., higher education institutions, are going to continue to be extremely important for the foreseeable future.

I think what we’re facing as a nation is this rapidly increasing demand for talent and the challenge of being able to actually meet that talent demand with our educational system. This challenge is growing more acute, and the gaps between those who have talent with a postsecondary education and those who do not, is increasing. You see it in terms of wages and employment rates and other economic indicators. You see it in terms of quality-of-life indicators, in terms of the way in which communities that have high aggregations of people with college education, postsecondary education, actually drive the cultural and the social well-being of communities. And you see it in the ways in which people who have postsecondary education literally have a higher quality of life. They live longer, their family structures are better, and their quality of life in general is much higher.

So for lots of reasons, increasing educational talent is extremely important to our country’s future. And the challenge before us is to figure out how we’re actually going to get there given the significant challenges that we face at a government level and at a personal level.

DiSalvio: Lumina Foundation's most recent strategic plan released in 2013 identifies two broad areas of action that will help the nation increase the number of college graduates. You have characterized this as another step in the organization's long-term shift away from simply awarding grants as the key strategy for fulfilling its mission. What are these two areas, and how successful has the effort been thus far in helping the nation increase its number of college graduates?

Merisotis: Lumina’s focus is essentially around two imperatives. We think these two imperatives are going to be critical in aligning the country’s efforts on getting to Goal 2025.

The first imperative is mobilizing all of the key actors that need to focus on increasing educational attainment to get to that 60% goal. That mobilization includes policymakers and employers. It includes regions and communities. And most importantly, it includes higher education institutions and their ability to focus on student success. It also includes the broader public, particularly students.

In our mobilization strategy, there are five strategies aimed at helping to support those actors to focus on increasing attainment and to give them tools that they can actually use to help increase high-quality postsecondary attainment.

The second imperative is to help design and build a 21st century higher education system. Here the idea is to help build greater system capacity so that we can actually support that mobilization. Focusing on designing and building that system is an acknowledgement that we won’t be able to supersize the current one. We are actually going to have to help create a better system that takes advantage of all the successes we’ve had but gives us a lot more capacity to increase high-quality attainment rapidly. That includes things like redesigning student finance and the systems that support student financing, helping to create new delivery models and a different business model for higher education and helping to support the advancement of a different system of credentials that are focused on high-quality learning that can actually be better articulated in our labor market and for society at large.

DiSalvio: In 2012, Lumina Foundation made more than 100 grants for a total commitment of roughly $45 million. How will these grants advance that focus on increasing Americans’ success in higher education and increasing the proportion of Americans who have high-quality, college-level learning?

Merisotis: ​The Lumina overall approach is that we see ourselves as a leadership organization. By that I mean that we have a large base of assets … the largest private foundation in the country focused on higher education. Therefore, we have both capacity and expertise. And so we’ve tried to apply that through our work—through our grantmaking, but also through a lot of the other activities we undertake, whether it’s our work in terms of communication in public will building, whether it’s our efforts around informing the public policy process, etc.

Grants are obviously a critical tool for that, and the grants that we’ve made are important in terms of our capacity. But we see ourselves as an organization that does more than simply make grants. Our hope is that we are providing leadership for system-level change. I think that is the key issue. Our efforts, in terms of our grants and the rest of our work, are really aimed at creating system-level change that will help increase educational attainment in the country. Goal 2025, the goal we’ve been operating under for the last five years, is the “north star” for our work. It’s a way of organizing all of those efforts in a very coherent and cohesive way.

The focus of what we’re trying to do is to create system-level change that will improve student access and success in higher education. Toward that end, we hope our efforts will work toward increasing the capacity of the higher education system to serve more students in a better way and to help ensure that there is high-quality learning associated with the degrees and other credentials. That will help the outcomes of higher education to be shared broadly, both from an individual perspective as well as from a societal perspective, particularly from the perspective of employers.

DiSalvio: Most agree that a preeminent higher education system is needed to meet the global economy’s growing need for talent. With that in mind, you have said that the American higher education system is in need of systematic change. What elements of change in higher education are necessary to further America’s preeminence?

Merisotis: I see three elements that undergird the need for change: student finance, new business and delivery models, and new systems of credentialing.

Keep in mind that for student finance, the current tuition and financial aid systems were developed decades ago for a student cohort that essentially doesn’t exist anymore. Only one out of five college students today attend a residential institution where they  go immediately to college after graduating the prior year from high school. The diversity of students is dramatically greater than in the past. And perhaps most importantly, our tuition structures simply are not supportable by a growing number of families. That is, affordability has become a serious challenge for families. So for lots of reasons, creating a different model of student finance is very important.

Similarly, it’s important to develop new and improved delivery models to better serve more students. We need to take advantage of technology and use what we’ve learned from a pedagogical perspective to advance ideas such as competency-based learning. In the area of credentials, I think the current system of credentials has served us well historically, but it clearly falls short now. We need to make sure that each credential has meaning—that is, that what students know and are able to do with their credential is clearly understood by the student, by the employer and by the people who are delivering the higher education. We must make sure that high-quality learning is represented in those credentials so that the learning is cumulative and that students can actually take that knowledge and apply and apply it in work and in life.

DiSalvio: You have expressed urgency in higher education reform and have suggested that business-higher education partnership is a natural extension of the investment that private business already makes on education and training. Are there specific forms of partnership you see as especially effective in increasing the nation’s number of college graduates? How can business leadership help colleges meet the needs of students and employers?

Merisotis: This is really important. We’ve spent two decades in a discussion with employers about what employers need and what higher education does. I think there has been some disconnect in that conversation. We’ve got to be clear with employers about how they can actually contribute to increasing educational attainment in this country.

There are three core ways that they can do that. The first is to literally support educational attainment in their companies or organizations. That is, by actually “walking the walk” on increasing educational attainment, by supporting tuition reimbursement, by helping their employees develop learning plans, and by actually supporting the advancing skills and knowledge of their own employees. That’s one way which I think employers need to be better engaged.

The second way is the idea that companies, organizations and employers have to see increasing postsecondary attainment as part of their corporate social responsibility efforts. That is, they have a social investment, a social obligation to support increasing attainment. Finding ways to support community-based efforts, to work in metropolitan areas to actually advance things on a community level is really important.

And the last way is that employers need to engage in public policy advocacy. We’ve seen employers have a measurable impact on the K-12 debate and efforts in increasing educational attainment at the K-12 level. They have to weigh in on a public policy level around the issues of financing higher education, about student learning outcomes, and about productivity of higher education. In all of these ways, they can actually add value and be more than just a bystander to this conversation. They can truly be advocates for systemic change that will lead to increasing educational attainment for a much larger number of Americans.

DiSalvio: As trustees and campus leaders, what specific steps can be taken to help mobilize those who must act to implement that change?

Merisotis: I think it’s vital for campus leaders and trustees and policymakers to be actively engaged. The engagement is important because changes in higher education are occurring rapidly, and we want higher education leading the charge, not playing defense. So I want to see higher education institutions and their leaders focus on such issues as increasing innovation to deliver more high-quality learning to larger numbers of students. I want to see campus leaders focus on mission reinvention and find ways to either focus more tightly on an existing mission or consider a new mission focus. I want to see campus leaders focus on improving equity and making sure that there is equity of opportunity for low-income students, for first-generation students, for students of color and for the large numbers of adults needing to be served by higher education. And the focus on equity should include both creating more opportunity and helping more of those students actually succeed in our higher education institutions. Those kinds of things, I think, are really important in terms of trustee and institutional leaders to better articulate the attainment agenda for the nation.

America’s largest producer of PBS content for TV and the web, WGBH hired Vermont Public Radio's Kirk Carapezza as managing editor and lead correspondent of the Higher Ed Desk.

The ...]]>

WGBH Boston is creating a Higher Ed Desk to help enrich its award-winning radio, television and online stories with angles from Boston and New England's famed postsecondary education.

America’s largest producer of PBS content for TV and the web, WGBH hired Vermont Public Radio's Kirk Carapezza as managing editor and lead correspondent of the Higher Ed Desk.

The desk is supported through more than $1 million in grants over the next thee years from the Lumina Foundation and the Davis Educational Foundation.

On Tuesday, Kara Miller of WGBH's "Innovation Hub" hosted a conversation at Suffolk University's Modern Theater about the future of higher education.

The New England Journal of Higher Education, meanwhile, has tried to keep a close eye on how media and higher education relate in an age when both are undergoing revolutionary change.

Last fall, the Boston Globe and its affiliated website Boston.com launched 10 Your Campus sites featuring links to bloggers, campus newspapers, websites, Twitter feeds and Globe staff articles

The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) explored solutions to the problem at a recent forum in Kennebunkport, Maine, called ...]]>

Why is remedial or developmental education such a hot issue? Partly because it costs time and money and casts doubt on the elementary and secondary education systems that we assume will prepare students for college.

The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) explored solutions to the problem at a recent forum in Kennebunkport, Maine, called “Ready for Real: Innovative Strategies for Improving Remedial Education and College Success.”

NEBHE staff briefed the audience of educators, legislators and policymakers on the recent Lumina Foundation for Education grant the regional organization received to support community colleges implementing Khan Academy materials in developmental math courses. NEBHE also released a policy brief outlining college placement policies across the region and models for boosting college readiness.

Rethinking developmental ed

Many colleges use the College Board’s Accuplacer test to determine whether students are ready for credit-bearing college courses or first need to take and pass one or more remedial classes.

In a session on “Rethinking Developmental Education: State and Institutional Perspectives,” Lara Couturier, program director at Jobs for the Future, offered a national context for remediation. She noted that 60% of community college students were referred into developmental education programs—Dev Ed as she called it. Once there, most never progressed into college-credit-bearing work, and only one-quarter earned a college degree within eight years.

A historian by training, Couturier spoke about different developmental education models, including some involving long sequences of courses with too many exit points where students are tempted to drop out—and too often do. Some call Dev Ed the place where college dreams go to die. Others, Couturier among them, believe it should be looked at in a more holistic way, as an “on-ramp to a structured pathway to graduation.” Virginia has been a leader in a wave of states redesigning developmental education, followed by North Carolina and Florida. Another promising model is the California Acceleration Project, which aims to reduce the number of exit points.

Some models involve partnering with local K-12 districts, so students’ skills can be assessed in their junior year of high school. If at the point, the students are deemed not college-ready, they can take remedial courses while still in high school. Others make developmental education a co-requisite—a formal course taken simultaneously with another as opposed to a prerequisite. The Community College of Baltimore County, for example, places developmental students into college-level English but also supports them with an hour-long companion course.

Couturier noted that the placement tests that have been relied upon historically may not be the good predictors of success we thought they were. She also urged aligning development education with the student’s major and career interest. The spotlight, she suggested, should shift to getting development education students into programs of study, which means more intentional and frequent advising.

Couturier also noted a dearth of efforts to help students who are severely underprepared.

Feed me data

Norwalk Community College President David Levinson, who is also vice president for Community Colleges with the Connecticut Board of Regents for Higher Education, said he was amazed by how little Connecticut relied on data when he came aboard in 2004. Indeed, a self-study for the  New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) had not a single bit of data. Then Achieving the Dream came along and brought to bear the purpose of research, Levinson said.

Norwalk Community College has tried blending college-level courses and developmental courses in "learning communities" but that was with just over a dozen students. The question, said Levinson, is how do you bring that to scale?

Today, such issues are being overshadowed in Connecticut by legislation calling for all remediation to be confined to a one-semester, intensive course—not as a sequence. “We are faced with the really daunting task of not only a new structure that is not even a year old (the state's new Board of Regents for Higher Education) but also this humungous task of trying to implement a piece of legislation that doesn’t have a penny attached to it," said Levinson.

He noted that Connecticut acknowledges enrollment ‘swirling,’ and students starting at one school, taking some courses at another, and going on to get not only an associate degree but perhaps a bachelor’s and master’s. Levinson said that even at his college on Connecticut’s euphemistically named “Gold Coast,” 83% of students from Norwalk and Stamford need at least one precollege course. What politicians see in all this, he said, is the state paying for remedial education twice—in high school and college—and the students still are not succeeding.

Nashua Community College President Lucille Jordan said she was asked by the New Hampshire Legislature to identify which students needed developmental education and which high schools they came from. Problem was, she said, many have been out of high school for a long time.

Besides, what would have been a good enough score in math at one time no longer is. Nashua Community College uses Accuplacer Diagnostics, providing a detailed analysis of a student's strengths and weaknesses, so students can focus on the areas where they are weak. Jordan also called for embedding reading and study skills in 100-level courses. She acknowledged that many students may need tutors to stay with them through college-level coursework.

Community College of Vermont President Joyce Judy said the Vermont Legislature has chosen not to get involved in the developmental skills arena per se, focusing more on dual enrollment and multiple pathways.

“We have one shot with those students and if we’re not successful in helping them engage and feel like it’s relevant to them, we’ve lost them for another 10 or 15 years,” said Judy. Some students need a 15-week basic skills course; others need something different. We’re asking if Accuplacer is nuanced enough to see where strengths and weaknesses are, she said. She noted that the college is asking developmental English students to do a self-assessment, not of their skills, but of their practices, asking for example, if they read newspapers and magazines regularly.

“One size does not fit all,” said Judy. In developmental math, the Community College of Vermont is developing a one-credit, self-paced tutorial, which Judy says, “students could realistically move through in three weeks.” That’s a challenge, she noted, for institutions that like to go with 15-week courses that are easier to manage, but just don’t work for all students.

Several attendees said the Dev Ed conversation should not deal so much with repairing vs. preparing. Many believe the Common Core State Standards will help with preparation, but there will always be adult learners who need some kind of remediation perhaps via new models such as massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Sharing strategies

Developmental education can be improved, but not eradicated, warned Rhode Island College President Nancy Carriuolo. For one thing, Dev Ed is not just remediation, but actually covers a wide range of learning needs exhibited by all learners. Thomas Edison today would have probably been placed in remediation, Carriuolo asserted, because of his deficiencies in reading and writing.

“Policymakers often don’t know firsthand the distractions low-income students have—families to support, drug or alcohol problems, low self-esteem and the cumulative effect that comes from not doing well in school," Carriuolo said, adding: "Notice in that brief list, I didn’t say anything about poor teaching.”

“We need to think carefully about what will happen to the most underprepared students who are turned away from community colleges," Carriuolo reflected. "Will they enter adult basic education to learn the basic skills they need … will they enter a training program someplace else or will they simply go home to their couches, a bag of potato chips and a life sustained by a welfare check?”

Solving the math problem?

At Housatonic Community College, students who went through developmental English passed the gatekeeper college English at a 20% higher rate than those who tested straight into the course without the detour, said President Anita Gliniecki. But math was completely opposite, she said. Even if you got through the developmental math, your potential to succeed was at least 10% lower than those who tested directly in.

Students noted that the developmental math moved too slowly over the topics they already knew and too quickly over those they didn’t know—and still don’t. So Housatonic started self-paced courses, in which students test out of items they know and focus on items they don’t, until they ultimately demonstrate all the competencies. Faculty also embed in the course measures of how much time students spend on the work to keep an eye not only on skills but also on affective behavior.

When Housatonic allowed students to take an online math refresher programs, then retake Accuplacer, 69% of students increased at least one course level.

Speaking more broadly, Gliniecki and Carriuolo both lamented students' failure to "estimate," urging that high school calculus courses have students put away their calculators.

A private option

Deborah Hirsch, vice president for development at the private, four-year Mount Ida College, said one-third of students there are “first-generation,” one-third are Pell Grant-eligible; and half of entering Mount Ida students place into developmental education courses, but are also enrolled in college-level courses.

Mount Ida, she said, has tried to create some linked courses, for example, offering students guided study skills linked with Introductory Psychology.

And because the sequence of developmental math was a Bermuda Triangle for students, Mount Ida decided to combine the two-level sequence of developmental math courses into one course. The college renovated the classroom with chairs and desks that move easily on wheels, laptops and smartboards. The class features three days of mini-lectures and one day of  lab. Mount Ida has also added a "financial literacy" component, so it’s more relevant to students who often don’t want to be taking high school math again.

Finally, Mount Ida formed partnership with Persistence Plus—the “Weight Watchers” of college completion. The system uses smartphones to give students personalized, real-time “nudges” to help them set and reach goals, manage their time, cope with setbacks and connect with campus services. The nudges include personalized motivators—such as "did you know a third of your class is in the library now studying for the exam?"

Janet Sortor, vice president and dean of academic affairs at Southern Maine Community College, where enrollment has quadrupled in 10 years, promoted an advising course called “My Maine Guide.” The program offers a personalized online portal for students, which provides quick access to student’s electronic portfolio, course schedule, important reminders and other tasks. And students are required to take Freshman Interest Groups—theme-based one-credit courses that combine college success skills, goal exploration and setting, and investigation of a topic aimed at capturing the interest of students.

National views

At an evening session, Bruce Vandal, vice president of Complete College America, and William Trueheart, president of Achieving the Dream, addressed a panel on national views on developmental education and improving graduation odds.

Vandal noted the urgency of addressing college readiness, particularly in light of the Common Core State Standards assessments coming online in 2014. A study by ACT suggests that in many states, fewer than half of students who take that test will be deemed “college ready.”

Vandal urged states to focus on developing strategies that effectively transition students from high school to postsecondary institutions, including early assessment in high school, perhaps 10^th grade. He also called for better pathways into academic programs by realizing that not all students need the same skills. Students in social sciences and humanities, for example, may not need the heavy algebra appropriate for STEM students. He suggested diversifying the placement tests used to predict success, including adding high school GPA.

Trueheart described the mission of Achieving the Dream to help students, many of them lower-income and students of color, to be college ready. He held out the example of El Paso Community College in Texas, where 98% of students in 2003-04 needed remedial education, partly because so many students at the border institution did not speak English as their first language. In 10 years, the community college closed achievement gaps in math and English and raised rates of completion significantly.

Legislative view

At a session of legislators and former legislators on the NEBHE board, Maine state Rep. Emily Cain began by citing the recent finding by economist Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University that job growth is occurring for jobs that require a credential beyond high school, but is declining for jobs that require only a high school diploma.

Maine state Sen. Brian Langley, Senate chair of the Education Committee, took time from opening his restaurant in Ellsworth, Maine, to describe his path as a nontraditional learner through vocational school, community college, the University of Southern Maine, Syracuse University, and the online Capella University. But, he assured the audience, he understands the pressures of traditional higher education cost issues, having put his kids through Colby College and the University of Michigan. “I have a picture in my mind of good culinarians who are still working in the industry but left my programs because they didn’t have the math or writing skills to do college-level work.” said Langley. "A few have taken remediation courses and failed them; adult ed can be more supportive," he believes.

Rhode Island state Sen. Hanna M. Gallo, chair of Education Committee and a speech pathologist by training, said she is a big proponent of full-day kindergarten. If that were available, she said, the college readiness problem wouldn’t come down to high school failing or college remediation. We need to remediate not in college, but earlier, she said, adding, that we also need better teacher-training programs at colleges, professional development and accountability for parents and communities.

Former Massachusetts state Sen. Joan Menard, now vice president at Bristol Community College, said that being all things for all people has become a problem for community colleges. They admit everyone, including adults with 6^th grade educations, and help employers write workforce training grants, but they are judged on graduation rates. Menard argued that community colleges need to bring legislators to campus not only to ask for more money and when parents and students call with complaints, but to tell them the good things that are happening.

Among those good things, New Hampshire state Rep. Ralph Boehm, vice chair of the House Education Committee, told of Nashua Community College's relationships with Honda for car mechanics and Delta Dental's gift of equipment to New Hampshire Technical Institute to help train dental hygienists.

Middlesex Community College President Carole Cowan urged community colleges to partner with vocational-technical and high schools. But, she added, don't dismiss the academic mission" “Those technical workers are going to go for a baccalaureate degree some day because they will want to walk that pathway to greater success.”

From President Obama to private foundations ...]]>

The New England Board of Higher Education released a policy brief that encourages states to tie a portion of higher education appropriations to institutional outcomes. Currently, New England states tend to apportion institutional funding based on enrollment levels—a practice that rewards quantity, but not necessarily student success and degree attainment.

From President Obama to private foundations like Lumina and Gates, higher education stakeholders increasingly stress the significance of college persistence and degree completion to the national education agenda. If the U.S. is to thrive in a knowledge-based economy and remain globally competitive, American institutions must retain and graduate more students.

NEBHE—in its report entitled “Catalyst to Completion: Performance-Based Funding in Higher Education”—suggests that performance-based funding strategies can encourage student success. States should earmark at least 5% of higher education appropriations to reward institutional improvements in areas like: remediation, retention, degrees conferred, research and service dollars, and six-year graduation rate.

To make its case, the report examines performance-based funding strategies at work in three states: Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee. Each state, in consultation with institutional leaders and in light of state-specific goals, overhauled its enrollment-based funding model in favor of a formula inclusive of outcomes.

While not a silver bullet, performance-based funding stands to improve college persistence and completion in New England, especially among low-income students and other “at risk” populations. States should consider such funding strategies alongside college access initiatives, increased aid and financial literacy programs, partnerships between education and industry, and other student success efforts.

NEBHE unveiled this research in a webinar held by its Policy and Research Department late last week.

NEBHE launched the first phase of its college-completion project, New England 2025.

Supported with a Lumina Foundation grant and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, NEBHE's Department of Policy and Research built a series of state-level "dashboards" and models that can examine college completion and various metrics with new levels of sophistication.

These models allow ...]]>

NEBHE launched the first phase of its college-completion project, New England 2025.

Supported with a Lumina Foundation grant and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, NEBHE's Department of Policy and Research built a series of state-level "dashboards" and models that can examine college completion and various metrics with new levels of sophistication.

These models allow decision-makers and users to take otherwise complex sets of data and formulas and test various scenarios to better understand the realities around raising degree attainment in each of the New England states.

Coupled with these models, NEBHE has also developed a college-completion "toolkit," which can produce the models, additional reading and information on college completion, and state-level summaries of college completion that can give the reader an "under two minute" briefing on the state of college attainment in the region.

All the material is available online at http://www.nebhe.org/policy-research/new-england-2025/.

Related Posts: College Attainment: Throwing a Complete Game; SREB Calls for 60% College Completion; Trends & Indicators: College Success; Complete College America Launches State Grants for Innovative Ways to Boost Degrees

In the U.S., postsecondary education has long driven individual social mobility and collective economic prosperity. Nonetheless, the nation’s labor force includes 54 million adults who lack a college degree; of those, nearly 34 million have no college experience at all. In the 21st century, these numbers cannot sustain us.

Returning to learning: Adults’ success ...]]>

In the U.S., postsecondary education has long driven individual social mobility and collective economic prosperity. Nonetheless, the nation’s labor force includes 54 million adults who lack a college degree; of those, nearly 34 million have no college experience at all. In the 21^st century, these numbers cannot sustain us.

Returning to learning: Adults’ success in college is key to America’s future; Lumina Foundation for Education; 2007

This is a growing problem faces higher education and our nation. Retention and graduation rates are deplorable, particularly for disadvantaged students. Far too many who enter the gates of higher education leave before earning a postsecondary degree. And for those who do earn their credential, there is a growing and fair concern over quality of learning—students’ ability to perform in the workforce, to solve problems, to think critically and to communicate effectively across different media and contexts. The reasons are many: pedagogy focused in learning from textbooks and lectures more than doing and designing, a disconnect between real-world needs and industrial-era academies, financial constraints for students and for institutions, and a market guided by rankings based on prestige and not student performance post-graduation. Students setting their own paths and purposes for learning are not often enough a central part of the higher education equation.

In a society that reaches for silver-bullet solutions, higher education is not immune from widespread attempts to raise graduation rates through scaling one-size-fits-all models at lower and lower costs. Yet we at Big Picture Learning believe any true, long-term solution that will produce more graduates with high-quality degrees must be one-learner-at-a-time and competency-based, and not applied in broad brushstrokes to produce quick results. The same terms we use, such as “student-centered” and “performance-based,” are often employed in circumstances we feel are merely tweaking around the edges one reform at a time. In contrast, we have spent the past two years piloting a model that is drastically different: College Unbound.

College Unbound brings to higher education the Big Picture Learning philosophy, which has grown over 15 years to a network of more than 70 U.S. schools and almost 60 schools internationally. With initial funding from Lumina Foundation for Education, Nellie Mae Education Foundation, Staples Foundation for Learning and individual donors, College Unbound launched its first program, College Unbound @ Roger Williams University, in fall 2009, accepting a cohort of students that will graduate in May 2012. Southern New Hampshire University will welcome its first group of College Unbound @ SNHU students in fall 2011. The word “unbound” in our title does not mean that our students do not attend college—in fact, all are thriving on their path to a degree. Instead, we hope with this name to sum up our work in “unbundling” traditional notions of higher education and creating a new paradigm for 21^st-century college.

College Unbound’s design: student retention with high quality of learning

Traditional curricula are typically text-to-life: students first encounter facts and skills from books, lectures and other academic resources, and are usually only later—if ever—asked to apply this learning in the way that those actually working in the field do on a daily basis. Not only does such a model of learning miss the opportunity to motivate and engage students in real-world work, but it is also no wonder that 63% of employers surveyed by the American Association of Schools and Universities said that too many recent college graduates enter the workforce without the necessary tools for success.

As a key both to student retention and quality of learning, we see College Unbound as a “life-to-text” model, a design that puts students in the driver’s seat of their educational journey. Students begin their studies focused not on which course they need to take, but instead on questions and ideas that are important to them. They then ground these purposes for learning within the actual problems and questions facing their community and career or interest. The internship projects that our College Unbound students spend two days building and executing with a professional advisor are just as, if not more, important than the learning students do off-site. The other three days a week are spent broadening and deepening their theoretical knowledge to support of their projects and their individualized plans for developing all required competencies for graduation.

Our communities of College Unbound learners excel because this program offers:

• real-world skill and knowledge acquisition as students tackle workplace and community problems with professional advisors;

• integrated seminars where students engage in interdisciplinary studies to gain the required broad as well as field-based skills and knowledge;

• individual learning plans that start with each student’s needs, interests, and modes of inquiry; and

• all remedial and enrichment education embedded into students’ learning planning and interest-based projects.

Throughout these program features, students’ work is highly collaborative as a means of building a professional and academic network and providing the necessary support they need. They meet on a weekly basis with faculty, professional advisors, mentors, writing coaches, tutors and their peers. The experience of working carefully and closely with faculty mentors on significant projects is profound and deeply rewarding, increasing student engagement and motivation and ensuring that their degrees will be grounded in real-world practice.

College Unbound’s student-centered evaluation and assessment designs

Evaluation and assessment are critical components of ensuring College Unbound’s effectiveness and student growth. All assessments are used to offer real-time feedback and lead to any necessary programmatic and student-level adjustments. To that end, students have an active voice in their own—and the program’s—growth and progress. For example, students participate in board meetings, funding meetings and evaluations of program components. In addition to program evaluation done by an outside program documenter, students are a central part of assessing College Unbound’s success through surveys, student interviews, student evaluations and documentation of student work.

Central to our program’s effectiveness are clear measures of student learning. Therefore, we also use a variety of formative and summative assessments to gauge student thinking and application of the skills demarcated in our detailed learning goals. Students are assessed in four categories of learning:

• Broad Knowledge—Making Interdisciplinary Connections;
• Critical Methods of Inquiry, Personal Growth and Development;
• Demonstrated Valued Added; and
• Applied Knowledge and Skills/Civic Engagement.

The outcomes we have adopted take into account all of the Essential Learning Outcomes published by the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise, as well as additional outcomes based on our own research and experience. Our learning goals are in alignment with students’ ability to show competency in these rigorous goals and is a prerequisite to what we believe is a truly performance-based degree.

To monitor students’ competency development, they are evaluated using learning goal rubrics by their faculty and professional advisors through weekly meetings and varied assignments and projects. Student internship project work, seminar assignments, journals, reflective and critical writing, surveys and interviews all provide formative opportunities for those working closely with the students to provide feedback and assist students in documenting their growth.

In addition, students do weekly self-reflections and engage in self-evaluation to help them track their own progress. We seek to use portfolios and public exhibitions in innovative ways to do accurate summative assessments of what students have learned at each mid-semester and final point. Instead of exams, our students speak about, demonstrate, and are challenged on their work during public exhibitions in front of faculty, professional advisors, field experts, community members and peers. Portfolios and exhibitions allow students to document, share, and self-evaluate their work, creating a perfect opportunity for faculty and students to collaboratively assess their learning plan progress to revise them before the next semester’s work.

The College Unbound student experience

For example, Michael Reaves, a student at College Unbound @ Roger Williams University is interested in history, specifically the Civil Rights Movement, community and education. Through his internship at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, Michael explores his questions and purpose to gain the knowledge and skills required to be a community organizer, leader and educator. In his freshman year, Reaves underwent 30 hours of professional training to become a certified trainer of nonviolence. He led a high school partnership program where he and a team of trainers taught an eight-week non-violence workshop to more than 90 high school students. Each group of students was responsible for a community event and a culminating final day of celebration and sharing of project work.

Reaves also participated in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s 50^th-anniversary conference, traveled to China and attends seminars, lectures, and salons offered throughout Providence and Rhode Island. He has listened to and spoken with leaders from the Civil Rights moment and experts in the field. This, year he is spearheading the development of a new community response team for the Institute. His seminars on leadership, grant writing and the social sciences support his project and intellectual growth. Along with a College Unbound student colleagues, Reaves is planning to create a summer community leadership program that brings at-risk students from Providence to Israel to work with and learn with their Israeli counterparts.

Alex Villagomez began his freshman year exploring his broad questions on sustainability through an internship at StackDesignBuild (Stack). Stack is a unique contractor focused on affordable green building, sustainable design, and innovative technologies. In his first year, Villagomez learned how to use RevIt and Sketch Up, how to hand draw sketches, and how to create 3D models. His  main project was to design six options for the interior of Stack's new office space. He met with Stack owners, ran project meetings, and gave a formal presentation of his drawings and models. Villagomez also assisted on three of Stack's other projects: the Box Office, Containers to Clinics, and Barmonde Residence. He spent the summer in Soweto, South Africa, where he learned about leadership/entrepreneurship, urban agriculture and green energy.

After his first year of work at Stack, his seminars, and his summer travel, Villagomez honed his questions around sustainability to focus on passive solar design. This year, he is serving as the project manager and designer for a sustainable tree house classroom project to be built at Driftwood Stables, a leadership camp in New Hampshire. His tree house will use passive solar design and may draw on small-scale green energy technologies including a solar panel system and rainwater catchment system. His work is undergirded by seminar learning, workshops and conferences focused on passive solar design, leadership, project management and grant writing. To maximize learning and application of the theories involved in this project, Villagomez is also taking a class on passive solar design at the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living in Providence.

Finally, Ariel Wilburn began her journey at College Unbound with a focus on psychology and the stated purpose of working with children of domestic violence. Wilburn spent her first year interning at a shelter for women and children of domestic violence. Under the guidance of her professional advisor and the theories learned through her seminar work, she created a curriculum focused on social development of children ages three to six. Wilburn supported her work at the shelter by studying theories of child development—from Jean Piaget’s to Barbara Rogoff’s—by auditing a course at Brown University on social and culture context of learning and development, and by attending state-level child advocacy meetings with her mentor.

Over the summer, Wilburn brought her skills, knowledge, and interests to Salvador Brazil, where she continued working with underserved children. In her sophomore year, she has merged her passion of spoken-word poetry with her purpose of helping children and transitioned to the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence. In this internship, she is creating and then leading a group of spoken-word poets—VENT, Voices Encouraging Nonviolent Thinking. This corps of poets will teach nonviolent principles to local school students. Like Reaves and Villagomez, Wilburn completed 30 hours of professional training. She has become a certified trainer of nonviolence.

Lessons learned

As these experiences show, our two years of experience with the College Unbound pilot are successfully developing learners who are consistently curious, wondering, pondering, uncertain, speculating, questioning, stuck and caught up. We believe such students are clearly more likely to stay in school through their graduation day and, because they are learning for their own purposes and interests, much more likely to develop the rigorous set of competencies required for a high-level college degree.

Although the current trajectory of higher education is toward scaling one-size-fits-all models at a lower cost, our 15 years of raising graduation rates in the Big Picture Learning network argues for sticking with the tried and true about how people learn. No matter our age, no matter our background, we all learn best when allowed to do so in a way we find meaningful and when supported toward high-level goals. College Unbound is a high-touch model without a doubt; as our program continues, we believe adding a greater high-tech component will allow for the efficiencies of scale a higher education does require—without losing the innovations we believe are making a significant difference for our students.

The accompanying videos were filmed and edited by students to demonstrate their work and the College Unbound Program. The videos include footage of second-year student Ariel Wilburn and Alex Villagomez’s work and the College Unbound learning community, and first-year student Mike McCarthy’s work on digital learning and educational design. Click the links below to view the videos ...

• About Big Picture Learning
• College Unbound's Learning Community
• Internship: Voices Encouraging Nonviolent Thinking
• Components of College Unbound

________________________________________________________________________

Jamie E. Scurry is co-director of College Unbound. Ariel Wilburn and Alex Villagomez are sophomores in College Unbound. Mike McCarthy is a freshman.

Related Posts: The Big Picture College: A Model High School Program Graduates (pdf); Interview with Nick Donohue of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation

In line with the priorities set forth by the Obama administration and the Lumina Foundation, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) released a report outlining the goals and policy initiatives needed to propel the 16 Southern states to 60% postsecondary degree and certificate attainment by the year 2025.

In the preface to No Time to Waste, ...]]>

In line with the priorities set forth by the Obama administration and the Lumina Foundation, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) released a report outlining the goals and policy initiatives needed to propel the 16 Southern states to 60% postsecondary degree and certificate attainment by the year 2025.

In the preface to No Time to Waste, SREB President Dave Spence points to the looming gap in America between the need for educated workers and the lagging production rates at the U.S. institutions. “By 2018, the United States will fall far short of the number of new college degrees needed for an emerging economy that increasingly depends on workers with postsecondary education,” Spence wrote.

The report recommends that states develop a clear vision for 60% completion, augment affordability initiatives to allow for increased access to higher education and re-evaluate secondary education outcomes to ensure that high school graduates are ready for postsecondary education and training. No Time to Waste also recommends that states tie budget allocations to the meeting of completion goals. This approach, the report argues, will “hold presidents, chancellors and state higher education agencies responsible” and ultimately enable the effort to be successful.

In addition to highlighting policy priorities for states as they strive for 60% completion, No Time to Waste minces no words in entreating SREB-member states to “make college completion a top priority and create a statewide plan for improvement with detailed goals, roles and responsibilities.”

The U.S. once had the world’s highest percentage of adults with a college degree, but has now dropped to 10th, according to the OECD. In an attempt to reverse this slide, a number of policymakers and foundations have sought to make increased degree attainment a national priority. President Obama has articulated the goal that America ...]]>

The U.S. once had the world’s highest percentage of adults with a college degree, but has now dropped to 10th, according to the OECD. In an attempt to reverse this slide, a number of policymakers and foundations have sought to make increased degree attainment a national priority. President Obama has articulated the goal that America will regain the world’s highest rate of degree attainment and challenged every American to complete at least one year of postsecondary education. The Lumina Foundation for Education, likewise, has set a goal to increase the percentage of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials from the under 40% today to 60% by the year 2025, while the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aims to double the number of low-income adults who earn postsecondary degrees or other credentials by age 26.

Increasing the number and percentage of Americans with postsecondary education will require a number of strategies, including increasing capacity at colleges and universities and providing access to high-quality college education for more Americans.

But these ambitious goals cannot be met without also dramatically increasing the completion rates at our public colleges and universities. College completion rates in the U.S. are troubling: At public, four-year institutions, fewer than 55% of students earn a degree within six years, while at public, two-year institutions, fewer than 30% of students earn a degree within three years, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Overall, only half of the nation’s students will ever receive the degree they sought to earn. These lost students, who have already demonstrated their desire for postsecondary education and made steps toward reaching it, hold significant potential for being among America’s critical next generation of college-educated workers.

States are the key

Almost three quarters (74%) of America’s college students are enrolled in public institutions of higher education, according to the U.S. Education Department. Since states often have statutory control over public higher education and provide the largest single source of funding, state leaders hold critical levers—and are uniquely accountable—for reshaping policies and improving outcomes in public higher education.

While implementing dramatic reforms may seem daunting to state policymakers in the midst of budget crises, focusing on college completion is critical for states, even—and perhaps especially—in these challenging economic times. First, increasing completion rates will allow America to meet the needs of a new economy that rewards knowledge and innovation. In the next 10 years, more than 60% of jobs will require a college education; indeed, the jobs currently growing the fastest require either an associate or bachelor’s degree or a certificate, according to research at Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce. Second, college completion can bring positive outcomes to individual students, including increased wages and benefits, plus non-monetary benefits such as better health and better outcomes for future generations, according to 2007 College Board research by Sandy Baum and Jennifer Ma. The current economic crisis has demonstrated the importance of education for individuals and families: Unemployment rates are more than twice as high for those with just a high school diploma (10.9%) than with those with a bachelor’s degree or higher (4.7%), reports the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Third, these individual benefits translate to significant societal and state benefits, including increased tax revenues and decreased reliance on state services, broader civic participation and increases in the earnings of all workers as overall educational attainment rates rise.[1] College completion is truly a tide that raises all boats.

Joining with other national groups in making college completion a priority, Complete College America (CCA) has set a goal that by 2020, six in 10 young adults in the U.S. will have a degree or certificate, up from the 38% of adults ages 25-34 hold who now hold a college degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2008 American Community Survey.[2] Such a large increase in completion rates and educational attainment will require more than tinkering around the edges; we need major changes in the way public higher education conceives of and delivers postsecondary education to today’s generation of students—we need innovation at scale.

Bold action

The first step to enabling these bold changes is improved data collection, without which policymakers are hampered in their efforts to analyze barriers and identify opportunities for improvement, show progress over time, and hold individuals and institutions accountable. Much of the data collected today (particularly by the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Data Systems, or IPEDS) fail to adequately capture college completion rates for huge numbers of America’s students—especially part-time and transfer students. Nor does IPEDS allow for disaggregation by ethnicity, income or by age groups, all of which are necessary in order to close gaps and ensure that postsecondary success rates are keeping up with the dramatic demographic shifts taking place across the country. Collecting data that are comparable across institutions and states will also help to identify barriers to student achievement and guide actions that might improve student success. In addition to completion, these data should include measures of progress and the intermediate milestones that research has shown predict student success in earning a degree or certificate.

In addition to collecting and analyzing the data, a number of other state policy levers are critical for driving improvements in college completion. States have the opportunity to influence policy by using performance funding, by transforming the delivery of developmental (remedial) education, and restructuring the delivery models of higher education to meet the needs of today’s new generation of students—both young and adult. [See “Putting Money Where the Mouth Is Ways to Build Momentum for College Completion,” The New England Journal of Higher Education, Dennis Jones.]

Performance funding ties institutional appropriations to outcomes, not simply to enrollments, and allows states to align their fiscal policies with their statewide goals for workforce development and economic prosperity. For example, states can provide funding based on the number of courses completed or the number of degrees and credentials earned. While the use of performance funding has been controversial and its implementation uneven, states can emphasize specific goals by providing funding incentives in areas such as the success of low-income or underrepresented students or degrees produced in key industry sectors such as health care, engineering, and technology.[3]

States must also take on remedial education; while evidence on the effectiveness of remedial education is mixed, for far too many students, it represents a dead end. Students who need remediation are required to take courses that do not count toward their degrees, adding time and expense to their studies with dismal results. More than 40% of all students (and 60% of community college students) enter postsecondary education needing remediation, but fewer than 25% of students who enter remedial courses ever earn a degree or certificate, according to research by Thomas Bailey of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Innovative programs in community colleges have shown that remediation can be improved by targeting it through improved diagnosis of student needs, tailoring it to focus only on those skills that students need, and helping move students as quickly as possible into courses that count towards a degree. Specifically, remediation can be embedded within credit-bearing courses, technology can target specific academic deficiencies, and anchor assessments can be performed while students are still in high school to accelerate their progress once they arrive in college (e.g., the California State University “Early Start” program and Tennessee’s community colleges’ implementation of the National Center for Academic Transformation remedial education models).

Finally, public colleges and universities must restructure the delivery of higher education to meet the needs of today’s students. No longer does the majority of students attend full-time, live on campus, and complete a degree within four years; instead, most students are attending school part-time while juggling families and work. Promising models suggest that restructuring the delivery of postsecondary education with a focus on transparency, consistency and structure leads to significantly better outcomes for students. These models use block scheduling, offer degree programs instead of courses, take advantage of the known benefits of cohorts and learning communities and integrate remediation into credit-bearing or career-oriented courses.[4]

Each state faces its own set of demographic and economic challenges, but increasing educational attainment is a common goal for state policymakers as they seek to ensure the future health of their economies. Twenty-two states have joined the Complete College America Alliance of States in order to elevate college completion in their policy agendas and develop plans to make dramatic increases in attainment over the next decade. These and other states have also been leaders in helping their public colleges make improvements in access and completion through participation in national initiatives like Achieving the Dream and Access to Success. These complementary efforts have shown promising results, yet in light of the promise postsecondary education holds for each individual, family, and community—and to meet our goals as a nation—there is much left to do.

Stan Jones is founder and president of Complete College America. David Soo is state policy analyst at Complete College America.

Endnotes

[1] Sandy Baum and Jennifer Ma note in their report Education Pays: “Estimates suggest that controlling for other factors, a 1 percentage point increase in the proportion of the population holding a four-year college degree leads to a 1.9% increase in the wages of workers without a high school diploma and a 1.6% increase in the wages of high school graduates.”

[2] No reliable national data are available on the percentage of adults who hold a postsecondary certificate. The president and other national organizations, including CCA, believe that completion should be defined as a earning a bachelor’s or associate degree, or a certificate of at least one year in length that has demonstrated labor market value (Bosworth, 2010; Carnevale, Strohl & Smith, 2009; Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, 2005; Wheary & Orozco, 2010).

[3] Under its current performance funding system, Indiana rewards increases in the on-time graduation rates at public colleges and universities, increases in transfer rates for community colleges, and increases in the numbers of low-income graduates. Ohio has also phased in a performance funding system that utilizes different formulas for each sector (community colleges, branch campuses, and research universities) and incorporates progress indicators for community colleges.

[4] For examples of successful highly structured and accelerated programs, see the City University of New York (CUNY) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP); Community College of Baltimore County’s Accelerated Learning Program (ALP); and the Tennessee Technology Centers.