Guest Post: Five Questions for Colleges

By Travis Reindl

Every year, colleges and universities send reams of data to the federal government, on subjects ranging from campus crime to research by foreign nationals. Yet, there’s still a lot we don’t know about our system of higher education. Congress and the executive branch bear some responsibility for this state of affairs, continually adding to an already massive and uncoordinated regulatory structure. But some higher education leaders are also on the hook here, having fought efforts over the years to bring more transparency to colleges’ admissions and financial aid practices, as well as their performance in educating and graduating students.

This is no longer acceptable. Higher education is a major enterprise in the U.S., representing three percent of the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employing more than 3.5 million Americans. Taxpayers also play a big part in this enterprise, contributing $21 billion toward federal student grants and billions more for research grants and contracts. Given that, it is troubling that we can’t get better answers about who’s getting into college, what happens to these students, and how much it costs to educate them.

As Congress and the Obama administration prepare to invest billions more in our colleges and universities, they should require colleges to provide better answers to the following five questions:

1. Who’s getting in? At a time when major public universities are capping or cutting enrollment, high-achieving, low-income students are less likely to go to college than lower achieving, high-income students, and nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that qualified students are being shut out of college, we need greater transparency about who is making the cut. Colleges that receive federal student aid and have a selective admissions policy (i.e. anything other than open admissions) should be required to annually disclose the number and percentage of students admitted under special provisions, such as those who get a leg up because of their legacy status, or because of their athletic talent. The recent debacle at the University of Illinois, where admissions slots were traded as political favors, underscores why this is a timely question.

2. Who’s getting institutional aid, and how much? As tuition rises and federal and state grants lose purchasing power, it is important to know how colleges are using their institutional aid dollars. Are they devoting their resources to expanding access by providing need-based aid? Or are they engaging in financial aid leveraging tactics to try to win the competition for the best and brightest, and in many cases, wealthiest students? We have some information about this from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), but a survey can’t tell us what is happening at individual institutions. What NPSAS data do tell us, though, is that nearly one-third of students from families making $100,000 or more per year receive institutional aid, and the average award they receive is significantly larger than the average award for students from families making less than $20,000 per year. More comprehensive research is needed in this area.

3. How many students successfully transfer and/or graduate-on time or at all? Meeting President Obama’s goal of regaining world leadership on the percentage of students who earn college degrees will require a major improvement in completion rates. But to figure out where and by how much we need to improve, we must have better data about what happens to our students. The information the government currently collects from colleges provides an incomplete picture of student success because it tracks only first-time, full-time students and fails to take into account transfer students. The administration has committed a quarter of a billion dollars of stimulus finding to improve postsecondary data, and hopefully some of that money will be used to either link state data systems or develop a federal unit record system so we have a better idea how students are progressing through our higher education system.

4. How much does it cost to produce a college degree? The dramatic price increases of the past decade beg the question of what is going on with respect to college costs. In other words, where is the money colleges are getting going? The Delta Cost Project, a non-profit research organization, is making progress on this front by conducting the first comprehensive analysis of higher education revenues and spending in more than a decade and by developing models for calculating cost per degree. Given the President’s call for colleges to contain their costs as part of his push to improve attainment rates, the federal government should invest in more regular tracking of cost trends and in research on strategies for containing costs. Additionally, Congress needs to include cost, not just price, in its efforts to hold institutions accountable.

5. What are our graduates learning? In our knowledge-driven economy, not knowing our graduates’ abilities in basic areas such as communications and problem solving leaves us ill-equipped to answer questions about the strength of our human capital and identify ways to improve it. Rather than restarting the debate about measuring student learning spawned several years ago by the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education (otherwise known as the Spellings Commission), we can take a smaller but still significant step. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), administered by the Department of Education, provides valuable data about the reasoning and comprehension skills of our adult population. Unfortunately, the most recent data available are from 2002-2003, and not enough information is being gathered to do state-level analyses. Again, if the administration is going to make substantial new investments geared toward improving results, then spending a bit more to measure those results seems like a wise use of money.

In these difficult economic times, it is heartening to see the Obama administration putting its money where its mouth is with respect to investing in higher education. But without some better answers to questions such as the ones raised above, major new investments could be misdirected — leaving the nation well short of the president’s goal and the public more frustrated than ever with their colleges and universities.

Travis Reindl is the state policy and campaigns director at CommunicationWorks, a public affairs firm that specializes in educational improvement. Prior to joining the firm, he had 15 years of experience in higher education policy and advocacy. Most recently, he served as program director at Jobs for the Future, where he led a national initiative focused on increasing productivity in higher education. Before that, he headed the state policy analysis unit at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. He has written extensively on issues of college affordability, accountability, and governance. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New America Foundation.