The Nellie Mae Foundation's press release about Project Compass is available here.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/31/remedial

From Inside Higher Education, July 31, 2008

Questioning the Value of Remedial Education

Remedial education is expensive and controversial — but is it effective?
     

That’s the question that two education researchers have attempted to answer based on an analysis of nearly 100,000 community college students in Florida. The scholars — Juan Carlos Calcagno of the Community College Research Center, at Teachers College of Columbia University, and Bridget Long of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University — have decidedly mixed results to report. There is some positive impact of remedial education, they found, but it is limited. Their study has just been released by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Florida is an ideal site for research on many education questions because the state has uniform requirements for community college students with regard to placement testing and remedial education — and the state also collects considerable data on what happens to students as they progress through higher education.

In looking at the impact of remedial education, the study found that — among those on the edge of needing remediation — being assigned to remedial math and reading courses has the effect on average of increasing the number of credits completed and the odds that students will return for a second year. But while those are important factors, the report finds no evidence that remedial education increases the completion of college-level credits or of degree completion.

“The results suggest that the costs of remediation should be given careful consideration in light of the limited benefits,” the authors write.

At the same time, however, they note that there are benefits to students and society of having people experience even one year of college, some of it remedial. Further, they note that if remedial education encourages early persistence, colleges may have the “opportunity to reach students with other types of programming and skill development” beyond that offered now. In terms of figuring out whether the trade-offs favor remedial programs, the authors say that there still isn’t enough evidence in, but that their study points to the need for more detailed analysis.

“More work is needed on the effects of remediation relative to its costs,” the authors say. The authors open their paper by noting that conservative estimates hold that public colleges spend $1 billion to $2 billion annually on remedial education — and that level of cost is sure to attract more scrutiny.

— Scott Jaschik

http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/sub.asp?key=245&subkey=2626

A different way to think about student success

Vincent Tinto

Over the past several years, the Carnegie Foundation has had the privilege of working with community colleges in California. That work has brought home both the great strength of these institutions and the challenges they face. It has also created occasions for us to interact with others working in this arena, including Vincent Tinto, distinguished university professor and chair of the Higher Education Program at Syracuse University, and a visiting scholar here at the Foundation last year.

In this piece, Vincent shares insights informed by his long interest in student success, especially student retention, and by his recently completed four-year study of basic skills learning communities on 19 campuses across the country, including 13 two-year institutions.

Pat Hutchings
August 2008



When Access is Not Enough

While many observers applaud the fact that the access to higher education for low-income students has increased over the past two decades and the gap in access between them and higher income students decreased, few have pointed out that the gap in the completion of four-year degrees has not decreased. Indeed, it appears to have increased somewhat. That this is the case reflects a range of issues not the least of which is the well-documented lack of academic preparation which disproportionately impacts low-income students. The result is that while more low-income students are entering college, fewer are able to successfully complete their programs of study and obtain a four-year degree. For too many low-income students the open door to American higher education has become a revolving door.

What is to be done? Clearly there is no simple answer to this important question. Yet it is apparent that unless colleges are able to more effectively address the academic needs of low-income students in ways that are consistent with their participation in higher education, little progress is possible. But doing so will be not achieved by practice as usual, by add-ons that do little to change the experience of low-income students and the ways academic support is provided. Too many colleges adopt what Parker Palmer calls the "add a course" strategy in addressing the issues that face them. Need to address the issue of student success, in particular that of new students? Add a course, such as a Freshman Seminar, but do little to reshape the prevailing educational experiences of students during the first year. Need to address the needs of academically underprepared students? Add several basic skills courses, typically taught by part-time instructors, but do nothing to reshape how academic support is provided to students or how those courses are taught. Therefore, while it is true that there are more than a few programs for academically underprepared students, few institutions have done anything to change the prevailing character of their educational experience and therefore little to address the deeper roots of their continuing lack of success.

Fortunately, there are currently some who have, and their efforts could point the way for other colleges to follow. These are efforts that take seriously the task of reforming existing practice. Among these is the use of supplemental instruction that connects academic support to the classrooms in which students are trying to learn. For example at El Camino College in California, where students—particularly low-income students—approach college one course at a time, supplemental instruction is aligned with a specific class and its goal is to help students succeed in that one course. In other instances academic support is embedded in a course as is the case in the iBest initiative at Highline Community College in the State of Washington.

The adaptation of learning communities for underprepared students in which basic skills courses are linked to other courses in a coherent fashion is another effort that seems to pay off. At LaGuardia Community College in New York, what is being learned is that basic skills courses can be applied to the task of learning in the other course(s) to which those courses are linked. Students participating in LaGuardia’s learning communities support one another, while faculty also work with each other and the students, ensuring that assignments across courses are related. The result? Students are more likely to improve in both performance and persistence.

Other efforts that focus on the teaching of basic skills courses are also bearing fruit. In California and in several other states, faculty are coming to together to explore how they can restructure the teaching of basic skills to better promote the success of their students. An initiative by the Carnegie Foundation and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC), is one of these. At the SPECC institutions, collaborative faculty inquiry groups are exploring different approaches to classroom instruction, curriculum, and academic support. Their inquiry into the effects of these approaches engages a wide range of data, including examples of student work, classroom observations, and quantitative campus data.

What these and other efforts have in common is the recognition of the centrality of the classroom to student success and the need to restructure our efforts and the support students receive in those places of learning which, for most low-income students, may be the only place on campus where they meet each other and the faculty and engage in learning. Least we forget, most academically underprepared low-income students do not think of success as being framed by the first year experience, the second year experience and so on as do many academic researchers. Rather it is, in their view, constructed one course at a time. You succeed in one course, then move on to the second course, and so on. If our efforts to promote the success of low-income students, especially those who enter college academically underprepared, are to succeed, our efforts must be directed to those courses and the classrooms in which they take place, one course at a time.

What these and other initiatives also demonstrate is that the success of academically underprepared students does not arise by chance. It does not arise from practice as usual, but is the result of intentional, structured, and proactive efforts on their behalf that change the way we go about the task of providing students the support they need to succeed in college. Without such support, the access to college we provide them does not provide meaningful opportunity for success.

from Inside Higher Education, June 16, 2008

‘Double Whammy of Disadvantage’

Much has been made of the need to improve access to higher education for students from low-income backgrounds and those who are part of the first generation in their families to attend college. But the many recent initiatives by colleges to increase their recruitment of and financial aid for such students will only truly succeed if the traditionally underrepresented students thrive academically once they’re there.
   
New data compiled by the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education suggest that on that count, the picture is not good.

From Inside Higher Education, July 18, 2008

A Federal Idea ... Well-Received?!

In the days leading up to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’s final higher education summit, which began Thursday in Chicago, the big question was: Would they or wouldn’t they? Would the Education Department’s leaders use the occasion to do something big — undertake a major new policy initiative, take another whack on a contentious issue like accreditation, or pick a new fight?

Or would they seek simply to wrap a bow around their higher education efforts, satisfying themselves with having generated an important conversation and raising the public profile of key issues in higher education?

A somewhat similar conversation was taking place within the department itself in recent weeks, it turns out. Spellings and her aides, Under Secretary of Education Sara Martinez Tucker said in an interview, “knew we were going to do something” at the meeting about the issue of simplying the federal financial aid system, which is widely seen as overly complex and generally viewed as flawed.

Tucker’s own pragmatic side, she said before Thursday’s summit began, made her inclined to suggest “something that’s doable in the next six months” before the Bush administration leaves office, like reworking the (10-page, 100-question) Free Application for Federal Student Aid to make it less daunting for students and parents. But her “idealistic” side, Tucker said, suggested that that wouldn’t be enough, that she’d be shortchanging students and taxpayers to aim low. The summit probably presented the administration with its last chance to share a “big idea,” she added.

So Thursday, Tucker opened the two-day summit of 150 college leaders, state officials, policy experts and others not with a low-key tinker but with a sweeping proposal to restructure the system for awarding federal financial aid, with the chief goals of greatly simplifying the financial application process and administrative structure; informing students much earlier exactly how much financial aid they would receive; and, ultimately, greatly increasing the number of Americans who enter and complete college, an underlying goal of Thursday’s summit and most of the Bush administration’s work on higher education.

“I don’t know that there’s anyone who disagrees that the student aid system is too complex, duplicative, maybe inefficient,” Tucker said, a theme that has been gaining currency in higher education. Fixing federal aid was a chief recommendation of Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, and though it has been at the top of Tucker’s personal list of projects from her very first days in office in 2006, it has constantly been deferred by more-pressing matters, usually various student loan crises.

Under Tucker’s plan, students would find out almost immediately after submitting their much shorter federal student aid application — truncated to just 9 questions from the current 102 — exactly how much federal grant, subsidized and unsubsidized loan and tax break funds they would qualify for, based on their adjusted gross income and number of family members. (Right now students find out at that stage, usually in January or February, only how much their family is expected to contribute, which may discourage rather than encourage students to go to college, Tucker said.) The awards would be indexed based on an as-yet-undetermined formula — something like the average cost of attendance at a four-year public institution, for instance — that would essentially set a maximum amount of federal aid for which a student could qualify.

The sources of federal aid would be greatly streamlined. Federal grant aid, which now flows through about a dozen programs (and rising), would be consolidated into just the Pell Grant Program, providing an additional $1.7 billion that would increase the maximum grant by $370, Tucker said. (No Perkins Loans, no Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, no SMART Grants.) What the student loan program would look like is unclear, Tucker said, given the recent turmoil in that sphere. Work study and education tax breaks would continue to be part of aid packages, the latter particularly for upper-income students.

Students, armed far earlier than they are now with information on exactly how much federal aid they will receive, would then be in a position to choose among competing colleges based on how much state, institutional and other aid they can package for the student, and once a student makes that choice, the federal aid would follow the student to that institution.

Much would remain to be figured out, Tucker acknowledges; the department, for instance, has a complex simulation tool designed to assess what overall mix of grants, loans and tax benefits would do the most to increase the college-going and completion rates, and how the funds should be allocated to students from different income levels, backgrounds, etc. But the hope, Tucker told the higher education leaders at Thursday’s session, is that her proposal would be a starting point for a discussion that would involve financial aid experts, advocates for students and others, ultimately resulting in legislative and other proposals aimed at simplifying the aid form, consolidating the grant programs, and revamping the financial aid formulas.

Given the many details that were left unsketched in Tucker’s 20-minute presentation, many of the college leaders and financial aid experts in the audience said they could not fully assess the wisdom or practicality of the department’s proposal. But by and large — reflecting the overall tone of the first day of this week’s summit, which was much more collegial and warmer than most previous encounters between department officials and college leaders — the financial aid plan was well received.

“I was very taken by the description that Sara presented today,” said William E. (Brit) Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. “I would obviously love to know more about it, but in general it seems like something we need to get some energy behind. I think there is strong support for what I heard her speak about today.”

A similar reaction came from Sandy Baum, a Skidmore College economist who as a consultant to the College Board is leading its own effort called “Rethinking Student Aid.” Baum was not at Thursday’s meeting, and the best information she could get was a second-hand briefing from a reporter. But based on that sketchy information, she praised the department’s proposal as an “attempt to simplify both the application process and to get information to students in a timely manner.... Whether they’re going about it in exactly the right way is hard to say,” but that will be clearer with more details, Baum said.

The department’s proposal is largely an amalgam of numerous ideas that have been discussed before, and based on past reactions to some of the concepts, it is likely to run into trouble on several fronts. Among them:

    * Calculating financial aid based on gross income, rather than on a combination of income and family assets, would almost certainly make it easier for families with low incomes but significant wealth to qualify for aid, and might increase the amount of gaming of the system by families to hide wealth.
    * Simplifying the federal financial aid form might result, ironically, in students having to fill out more forms. Nearly a third of the current questions on the FAFSA were placed there to provide information for states that want information about aid applicants, and a simpler form might lead more states and individual colleges to require students to fill out forms for them.
    * Consolidating aid programs would inevitably anger supporters of programs, like Perkins Loans and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, that financial aid officers say give them added flexibility to help students with different financial situations. The Bush Education Department has sought in every recent budget to wipe out funds for Perkins and SEOG and shift them to Pell, prompting screams from college officials and rebuffs from Congress. In recent years, Congress has been adding, not eliminating, grant programs.

Still, Tucker’s proposal, in combination with the ideas that emerge from the College Board review, is likely to serve as a starting point for a discussion that, as Terry W. Hartle of the American Council on Education said at Thursday’s summit, is likely to begin in earnest when Congress finally completes its work on renewing the Higher Education Act some time this year.

“Simplifying the student aid system is like untangling a large plate of spaghetti,” said Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at higher education’s main presidential association. “There is widespread agreement that it is mind-numbingly complex, and there’s an important discussion to be had about ways that it might be simplified. The more ideas the better.”

Tucker and Hartle rarely seem to agree, but in the spirit of Thursday’s event, they did. “I’m sure some people will oppose this, but what would they suggest?” Tucker said in the interview Thursday. “Is this the best idea? Give me something comparable, and let’s have a conversation.”

The summit, and the conversation, continues today, featuring a speech by Spellings herself.