If States Help Colleges Improve Everybody Wins

Texas Southern University, a four-year public university, is clearly struggling. Only 16 percent of its students graduate within six years. It takes them longer to get a degree and they have lower first year earnings than students at the average public Texas university. If Texas Southern was a high school, the state might intervene and provide technical assistance to help the institution improve. But because it is a college, no such help is forthcoming.

States are working to align incentives that encourage low performing institutions to improve. Some states, like Kentucky, have focused on public accountability through tracking institutional performance on a set of metrics such as graduation and progression rates. Another 31 states have implemented some form of performance or outcomes based funding.

These strategies help states identify low performing institutions and provide an incentive for the colleges to improve but then what? Many of the lowest performing lack the organizational capacity to create or improve the programs and support systems necessary to increase student success.  Without state intervention, these institutions, often serving the state’s neediest students, could still fail to improve despite the incentives. When public colleges make up almost half of institutions with six year graduation rates of under 20 percent, it is time for states to act.

How can states support the improvement of their worst performing institutions? A couple of thoughts:

Intuitional needs assessment.  States can provide small grants to hire a consultant to conduct an assessment of what the main student success problems are at the institution. Maybe the assessment will identify a weak institutional research capacity. Maybe it will identify a broken advising system or a lack of strong leadership. This assessment can then lead to more targeted interventions to improve the institution’s performance.

Linking the institution with an external capacity builder. Once the deficiency is identified at the university, states can connect the institution to a nonprofit organization that work with schools to improve student success, such as Complete College America, Achieving the Dream, Educational Delivery Institute, or others. States can even cover any fee to help the institution access the technical assistance.

Institutional SWAT Team. Georgia currently assembles teams from universities around the system to improve the fiscal management of institutions that are struggling financially. States should do similar interventions for institutions that are failing on student success.  They can assemble a group of people from colleges that are performing well to rebuild systems that have been found inadequate through the institutional needs assessment. For instance, if the needs assessment found that a university’s institutional research capacity was lacking, the state can assemble a crack team of institutional researchers from other colleges and pay them stipends to improve the institution’s IR capacity.

State convening.  States can facilitate sharing among institutions so that high performing institutions can explain how they have achieved success. For example, Prairie View A&M University in Texas has a very similar student profile to Texas Southern University and yet exceeds the state average in student outcomes. Prairie View A&M probably has something to teach Texas Southern about supporting student success.

Redirecting funds to implement an improvement plan. Under performance funding, states could designate a set amount of the funds that the institution would lose under the funding formula for carrying out an improvement plan, instead of reallocating the money. This might be done at the end of a phase in when states have given the institutions’ time to adjust to the new funding.

States need to ensure that their higher education systems are performing well, particularly for the neediest students. Monitoring and paying for performance is one thing but states should also play an important role in helping institutions improve."