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October 19, 2023

Assessing the Effectiveness of Transfer Associate Degrees in Washington

In the state of Washington, 45 percent of bachelor’s degree earners at its public universities transfer from a Washington community and technical college (CTC), similar to the average transfer rate nationally. Considering how many students in Washington take this path to a credential, it is important for the state to understand how various transfer pathways and transfer degrees impact student outcomes.
September 5, 2023

Parental Income, State Funding, and Access to Higher Education

Questions about who gets into America’s most prestigious colleges and why have been at the center of American discourse recently. In June, the Supreme Court struck down the use of race-conscious admissions practices in higher education. And soon after the Court’s decision, a federal civil rights complaint was filed against Harvard University for its use of legacy admissions, which disproportionately benefits white, affluent students. New research by Opportunity Insights adds to the conversation with a robust…
May 16, 2023

Findings from MAAPS: A National Technology-Enhanced Advising Experiment

Postsecondary outcomes for lower-income students have been disproportionately harmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Intensifying and systematizing evidence-based student supports is a promising practice for helping these students. While initially conceived prior to the pandemic, Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS) is one such project that aimed to learn whether and how technology-enhanced advising could better support low-income and first-generation students and promote equity. From 2015 through 2022, the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) and its institutional members tested…
March 23, 2023

Using Data to Uncover Barriers to Student Success and Increase Retention

One of the most significant challenges that higher education institutions are currently facing is shrinking undergraduate enrollment, a trend accelerated by the disruptions of the pandemic. Among four-year institutions, enrollment declines have been particularly acute for those institutions that admit a relatively large percentage of their applicants and are dependent on tuition for a significant share of their revenue.[1] Between fall 2020 and 2022, colleges and universities that admit between 75 and 85 percent of applicants experienced…
August 18, 2022

Diversity, Equity, and the PhD Pipeline

Expanding the Toolkit

The growing mismatch between the profiles of current full-time faculty, 75 percent of whom are white, and the nation’s increasingly diverse undergraduate student bodies, 45 percent of whom are people of color, represents a serious threat to socioeconomic and racial equity and intergenerational mobility. In spite of a generation of comprehensive targeted enrichment interventions from the undergraduate through postdoctoral fellowship stages, public and privately-funded efforts to increase the number of PhDs from historically underserved populations has been painstakingly slow.
March 31, 2022

Understanding the Impacts of Emergency Micro-Grants on Student Success

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, many college students across the country faced challenges in meeting their basic needs, including access to food, housing, childcare, and transportation. These barriers, combined with rising prices relative to income and grant aid, are a key reason that over 36 million former students have left college without earning their degree. The pandemic has exacerbated students’ financial issues, and many more have chosen not…
June 24, 2021

Four Years Later: Findings from a National Technology-Enhanced Advising Experiment

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and in many cases widened socioeconomic and other disparities in higher education, making evidence-based approaches that support underserved students more important than ever before. One project that aimed to promote equity and student success across a set of large, public universities is Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS). In 2016, the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) and its institutional members began testing the effectiveness of MAAPS, an intervention consisting of intensive, proactive, technology-enhanced…
October 22, 2020

Estimating the Impact of COVID-19 on Students’ Academic Outcomes

Note: This blog reflects updates to an earlier version published on September 4, 2020 that described results from preliminary analyses of the first group of 12 institutions. The updated results include 18 institutions, total, and also reflect a minor change in the methodology used to predict scores across all institutions. Both the increase in the number of schools included in the analysis and the methodology change are responsible for changes in the results. The biggest change is that…
September 29, 2020

A Novel Approach to Studying and Measuring a Liberal Education and its Economic Value

In response to growing public skepticism about the value of a liberal education, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded a series of studies investigating the long-term effects of a liberal education on various outcomes such as health, civic engagement, and cognitive development. Ithaka S+R’s first contribution to the series was a study published in 2019 examining the economic benefits and costs of a liberal education, as this…
April 27, 2020

Online Learning During COVID-19

Digital and Educational Divides Have Similar Boundaries

In 2018, nearly 78 percent of households in America had a desktop or laptop computer and 74 percent had a broadband Internet subscription, a significant increase in digital access over the last two decades. Yet, millions of Americans are without access, and the distribution is wildly uneven across geographic regions (as well as demographic subgroups). A digital divide has existed in America for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed it and made it more relevant than ever…
March 13, 2020

Getting Online: Lessons from Liberal Arts Colleges

Many of the colleges and universities that are transitioning away from face-to-face courses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are residential institutions that have not historically provided widespread online instruction. Through multi-year evaluations of the Council of Independent Colleges’ (CIC) Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction and the Teagle Foundation’s Hybrid Learning and the Residential Liberal Arts Experience program, Ithaka S+R has worked with similar…
October 29, 2019

Do Emergency Micro-Grants Help Financially-Disadvantaged Students Succeed?

Over the last 10 years, tuition and fees at degree-granting institutions have risen by 27 percent, making it more difficult for students, especially those already struggling to cover basic needs like housing and food, to afford to remain in college in the face of unexpected financial trouble. In many cases, unpaid term balances prevent students from continuing in the current term or enrolling in the following one, and as a result, students dropout or are automatically dropped. Unpaid balances…
June 27, 2019

What we’ve learned so far from a national technology-enhanced advising experiment

Many higher education institutions are implementing advising interventions, if not complete redesigns, in an effort to advise their students in a more timely and targeted manner. While the approaches can take various forms, they have increasingly relied on technology to alleviate the burden of large caseloads by helping advisors easily and quickly identify which students need what type of support, and when. In an ambitious experiment, the 11 institutions that form the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) are testing such an…
March 26, 2019

March Madness: Socioeconomic Diversity Edition

At Ithaka S+R, one of our primary missions is to expand educational opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds. Some of our programs, including the American Talent Initiative which aims to increase the number of lower-income students enrolled at the top colleges and universities in the country, focus on increasing socioeconomic diversity at higher education institutions, while others focus on improving outcomes for lower income, first generation, and underrepresented minority students at the colleges and universities where they are already more…
November 15, 2018

What’s the ROI for Instructional Reform?

New Tool Provides Estimates

Last year, Ithaka S+R published Instructional Quality, Student Outcomes, and Institutional Finances, a white paper commissioned by the American Council on Education (ACE) that explored the relationship between institutional finances and instructional quality, asking whether improvements in instructional quality can increase a postsecondary institution’s net revenue. It’s an important question, as many higher education institutions are under strong pressure to improve student learning outcomes as they face increasing financial constraints. The conventional view is that increases in instructional quality…
December 20, 2017

Endowment Tax Provision: Counting Students Is No Easy Feat

After the House of Representatives and Senate passed two versions of a GOP bill to overhaul the tax code, a conference committee released a near-final version last Friday that was passed by the House on Tuesday. The Senate then passed a bill with slight tweaks on Wednesday, necessitating a House re-vote. The House is expected to pass the bill midday Wednesday and the President is expected to sign within the coming days. While some of the controversial measures…
October 24, 2017

New Graduation Data on Pell Recipients Reveals a Gap in Outcomes

In 2015-16, the federal government disbursed more than $28 billion under the Pell Grant program to 7.6 million students, representing almost 40 percent of undergraduates in the United States. Because eligibility for the grant depends largely on financial need, many researchers use it as a proxy for income, although there are limitations. Despite the size and scope of the program and its importance in socioeconomic and higher education research, outcomes of Pell recipients have not been readily available.
August 10, 2017

Lessons Learned in Collecting Student-Level Data from Multiple Higher Education Institutions

Institutions of higher education vary widely in how they define, collect, and store their students’ data, making the collection of student-level data across institutions a challenging task. Since September 2015, Ithaka S+R has served as the independent evaluator of the Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS) study, an intensive proactive and technology-enhanced advisement intervention for first-time low-income and/or first-generation students across the 11 four-year public universities that make up the University Innovation Alliance. We recently completed the…
January 12, 2017

Diverging Application, Admission, and Enrollment Trends between Not-For-Profit and For-Profit Institutions

Whether due to the Common Application, improved marketing efforts on the part of colleges and universities, or greater pressure on high school students, there has been a well-documented increase in the number of college applicants and applications, particularly to the most selective institutions. This phenomenon has increased those colleges’ selectivity, at the same time it has made yield less predictable—leading a number of colleges to lean more heavily on practices such as early decision, demonstrated interest, and legacy…
August 30, 2016

Can Financial Aid for Non-Traditional Education Programs Help Low-Income Students?

Last October, the federal Department of Education announced the launch of Educational Quality through Innovative Partnerships (EQUIP), a pilot program inviting partnerships between non-traditional education providers and accredited institutions of higher education. A key component of the program is its target population: low- and moderate-income students. Under a provision of the Higher Education Act, accredited institutions are ineligible to receive federal financial aid for programs in which 50 percent or more of the content and instruction is provided by…