GAO Report Highlights Research Gap on Postsecondary Student Success

Over the past two years, the higher education policy discussion has been chock full of debate over for-profit institutions. Are they high quality? Do students gain valuable skills? Should the students who attend them be eligible for federal grants?

At the request of Congress, this week the GAO released a report that focuses on student outcomes at for-profit institutions compared to their non-profit and public counterparts. The GAO’s findings mostly conform to the criticisms leveled against the industry in recent years – students from for-profit schools tended to have lower bachelor graduation rates, higher unemployment, more student loans, and less success passing licensing exams – and that may well be how the headline gets written in what has become a very polarized debate in Washington.

But there is another headline buried in this latest GAO report.

There is a severe lack of rigorous research available on student outcomes by institution type.

Rather than conduct their own study of higher education outcomes, the GAO conducted a literature review using 11 studies concerning the efficacy of for-profit institutions on a variety of outcomes. But by using pre-existing studies, the GAO faced a series of limitations. For example, while many of the studies controlled for one or two student characteristics, such as race, gender, or socio-economic status, some did not control for all of the characteristics. Because academic outcomes tend to vary widely depending on these characteristics, not including all of them in a statistical model is problematic. Similarly, some studies did not differentiate between whether a school was 2- or 4-year or whether students transferred among programs, providing a limited picture of the context in which students are educated.

Additionally, GAO researchers studied whether students from for-profit institutions are more or less likely pass 10 different types of occupational licensing exams. While this did involve original research, the study still faces several limitations. For example, because it only examines students who enter professions that require licensing exams (nurses, lawyers, cosmetologists, etc…) it does nothing to address the success of students in other fields. Due to data limitations, the study does nothing to control for student characteristics when it considers outcomes. According to the GAO, for-profit institutions tend to attract more minority and low-come students than other types of schools. Though the study concludes that non-profit and public school students do better on all but one licensing exam, an analysis that controlled for student characteristics might show something different.

The lack of solid research on student outcomes by school type is not that surprising. Until recently, research was limited by data availability as most available datasets are old, limited in scope, or small. But this will not always be the case. As states begin to improve their higher education data systems, linking K-12 data with higher education and workforce outcomes, they will open up a world of rich student-level data. In the meantime, Department of Education datasets, like the National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey (NPSAS) and the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) provide ample opportunities for researchers looking to improve the quality of studies on these important questions.

Hopefully researchers will see this GAO report as a call to action. The unknowns surrounding student outcomes at all school types are too great and the costs to taxpayers and students too large to leave these questions unanswered.