MOOCs and beyond.
A holistic program of financial, academic and personal supports targeting community college students would provide a bigger payoff than one-time debt relief.
What if instead of debt relief the White House had instead decided to scale a holistic approach to student success for low-income students at community colleges? The political payoff would be less, but the impact would be far greater.
The single biggest problem facing students from low-income backgrounds is that the return on investment from higher education is too uncertain.
A number of recent Inside Higher Ed pieces detail the ROI crisis. While over all the payoff from a college degree far exceeds the cost, for undergraduates from low-income backgrounds, the benefits are far less certain.
We’re all familiar with the facts:
The results: wasted time, effort and money. Sunk opportunity costs. And, in many instances, demoralization, disappointment and disillusionment.
As Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce reported:
“Thirty-one percent of workers with no more than a high school diploma earn more than half of workers with an associate’s degree. Likewise, 28 percent of workers with an associate’s degree earn more than half of workers with a bachelor’s degree and 36 percent of workers with a bachelor’s degree earn more than half of workers with a master’s degree.”
Completion and postgraduation earnings outcomes hinge to a very high degree on a student’s major and the institution attended—and correlate closely with high school GPA, standardized test scores, parental income, remediation requirements, declared major and college credits attempted in the first semester.
Yet we know what to do. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
The solution involves:
It’s not rocket science.
Independent, external evaluations of the City University of New York’s ASAP program by MDRC using randomized controlled trials found that ASAP almost doubled graduation rates, from 22 percent to 40 percent, after three years. Replication at community colleges in Ohio showed similar results
The secrets of academic success aren’t an enigma. The 10 pillars of student success are straightforward:
Other steps that can raise graduation rates and promote postcollege success include completion grants, access to graduation concierges (to expedite completion), mandatory advising, tutoring and career counseling, scholarships to cover the cost of enrolling in courses offered during the summer or semester breaks, seamless credit transfer, co-enrollment in two- and four-year institutions, and expanded access to workforce credentialing programs.
What works successfully at community colleges can also work at broad-access four-year institutions.
Currently, much of the discussion of innovation focuses on faster, cheaper alternatives to traditional degrees, including apprenticeships, stackable nondegree certificates and competency-based and individualized, self-paced, self-directed programs.
For some students, these may well be desirable options. But lower cost, in and of itself, ought not be our goal. Most students, I am convinced, need something more:
A recent report by the Community College Resource Center sums up its most recent findings. It recommends:
Expensive? Yes. But the cost is much lower than the perhaps $1 trillion of one-time debt relief that the Biden administration recently proposed. It’s also forward-facing: ensuring that future students will be more likely to achieve the benefits of a college degree.
Programs like ASAP offer evidence-based, cost-efficient solutions to a host of challenges: the completion challenge, the time-to-degree challenge, the transfer challenge and the postgraduation ROI challenge. These programs should serve as our lodestar.
If we are truly serious about equity and closing attainment gaps, we know what to do. Let’s just do it.
Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
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