Design a Rigorous Postsecondary Learning Agenda

Authored by Clare McCann, New America

A well-designed learning agenda can help to drive policy throughout an agency, promote the development and use of evidence by agency officials, and ensure the research and policy arms of the agency are rowing in the same direction. The Education Department’s learning agenda should reflect Department priorities, identify major gaps in existing research that can be filled by the Department, and inform policy iteration within the agency.

Learning agendas are also required under the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (the Evidence Act), legislation designed to act on some of the foundational recommendations of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking and led in the Senate by Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Ranking Member Patty Murray. Along with the assignment of key personnel to implement evidence-driven policies (e.g., a Chief Data Officer) and the creation of evaluation and open data plans, it is the first stage of implementation of the Evidence Act. Agencies are already underway in designing their learning agendas. Higher education must be a key part of the Education Department’s agenda.

Postsecondary education is facing critical problems. The postsecondary learning agenda proposed below seeks to identify key areas where new research could help drive important improvements and inform the basis of future policymaking. It highlights existing deficiencies and gaps in available data, insufficient research and evidence about how best to help students, and unanswered questions that—with more and better research behind them—could drive greater student success. In particular, it seeks to identify where additional evidence can inform an agenda of an accessible, affordable, and equitable postsecondary education that places a premium on student success.

This proposed learning agenda addresses some of the biggest challenges and problems the U.S. faces in postsecondary education: access to higher education is inequitable; college is increasingly unaffordable, particularly for low-income students; students (particularly students of color) often struggle to succeed in higher education; and institutions too often fail to meet their students’ needs or leave students without credentials of value. Already, we know that students of color are drastically less likely to go to college at all, or to go to a college that gives them a good chance of success. Low-income students face significant challenges—financial and otherwise—in completing college, or completing on time. Black students are particularly burdened by student loan debt, as are students who leave school with debt and no degree. Outcomes and return on investment vary drastically across institutions and programs, and across student subgroups within those programs.

Yet past attempts to solve these problems, including through grants that seed innovation and accountability measures that raise expectations for institutions, have often been disjointed and short-lived, falling short of what is needed to ameliorate these urgent national problems. A well-designed learning agenda can help identify workable solutions, addressing different perspectives when answering questions, and inform how best to use resources.

To begin developing the postsecondary agenda, first and foremost, the Department should seek to tap the expertise of researchers in the evidence and higher education communities, as well as determine the types of evidence that the Department will seek to build (including tapping the most-rigorous randomized control trials, but also allowing for different types of research to contribute to answering these questions). The Department should marshal the evidence that is already available with respect to each of these research areas and assess where the research is deficient or insufficiently nuanced to inform policy and practice. Outreach to engaged stakeholders like philanthropic foundations that are invested in building evidence and improving outcomes can help to invite informed input, align the field around these critical issues, and marshal the resources necessary to bring it to fruition, even in the absence of sufficient federal resources. Finally, the Department should identify a strategy for investing in evidence-building for each of these areas through its own work, both at IES and within the agency more broadly.

This learning agenda is divided into nine separate research questions across those four categories: access, affordability, student success, and institutional outcomes. The research questions are designed to answer critical questions about postsecondary success, including through access to data held by the U.S. Department of Education that have not been published or extensively mined for insights, as well as by inviting creative thinking about outside sources of data that can help to fill other gaps in existing research, with a particular emphasis on equity. Research areas like these will help the Department to understand the extent and nature of the problem, identify the evidence that exists and that is missing, identify opportunities for improvement, establish best practices for institutions seeking to improve their students’ odds of success, drive future policy change, and improve the management of taxpayer-funded student financial aid programs.

• Access to higher education is inequitable. Access to higher education has improved significantly over the decades, with nearly 70 percent of recent high school graduates now enrolling in college (compared with 45 percent in 1960), and millions of working adults returning to postsecondary education. Yet that access is far from evenly spread. Students of color are less likely to attend institutions and enroll in programs that offer them the greatest returns. For instance, while 35 percent of white adults had completed a bachelor’s degree in 2016, far fewer Black (21 percent) and Hispanic (15 percent) adults had.
  • What does the evidence indicate are the characteristics of effective college-access programs, particularly for people of color and low-income people?
• College is increasingly unaffordable, particularly for low-income students. In the decades since the federal government began awarding aid to help students attend college, the average tuition and fees of institutions have increased substantially, growing at well beyond the rate of inflation, while federal student aid has not kept pace. At the same time, many states have failed to invest adequately in public higher education; costs have been shifted onto students and their families; and much of the gap in costs has been borne through student debt.
  • How do student financial grants, particularly federal need-based grants—including the knowledge of those grants’ existence—affect indebtedness, access, attendance patterns (such as sector, intensity, and stop-out periods), retention, and completion?
  • To what extent are student loan impacts on access, retention, completion, repayment, and household financial stability different across student financial circumstances, race/ethnicity, gender, and repayment plans?
  • What strategies are effective in helping students to avoid unaffordable debt and avoid default on their loans, and to resolve delinquencies and defaults quickly with minimal negative impact on borrowers’ finances?
  • To what extent do long-standing disparities in family wealth and income relate to college debt, including intergenerational debt and private education loans?
• Students (particularly students of color) often struggle to succeed in higher education. Millions of students who pursue higher education never pursue a degree; many leave school with debt anyway. At community colleges, which disproportionately serve low-income students and students of color, only a third of students earn a two-year degree within three years. At four-year universities, only half of low-income students graduate within six years. While there is some evidence about the types of programs that are most effective in helping students with financial issues, academic challenges (like developmental education programs), and other non-academic supports (like advising), greater research is needed into how to knit effective reforms together into a holistic approach to supporting students and expanding those reforms to more institutions and student populations.
  • What strategies (including non-financial interventions) does the evidence indicate are effective, and in what contexts, in supporting college completion, particularly for low-income students, students of color, and academically underprepared students?
  • What are distinguishing characteristics of institutions and programs that have successfully promoted improvement in student outcomes, particularly in closing gaps in performance across student subgroups?
  • To what extent are different types of credentials and programs, including similar programs across different institutions, associated with positive labor market outcomes, including employment, earnings, and improvements in institutional earnings?
• Institutions too often fail to meet their students’ needs or leave students without credentials of value. Taxpayers fund more than 5,000 institutions of higher education across the nation, spanning a substantial diversity of size, program offerings, effectiveness, modality, and more. Yet many of those colleges leave students with poor outcomes, where a significant percentage of students drop out and/or wind up in low-wage jobs, no better off than if they had not enrolled in college in the first place. Some colleges wind up wasting taxpayer dollars; and in recent years, hundreds of campuses have closed down, often without notice to students. Department policies provide too little incentive for institutions to meet a minimum bar of quality or to improve.
  • How effectively do various metrics of financial viability, student outcomes, and other elements of risk identify institutions at risk of closure, low-value education, and/or other liabilities for taxpayers?