Topic: Student learning and outcomes
Blog Post
July 5, 2016
Prepare to Travel: Across the U.S. Access to High-Completion-Rate Colleges Uneven
The American Council on Education (ACE) recently published a report on “education deserts” that identified the geographical areas in the United States where there is limited access to higher education institutions. Across the country, the authors identify 295 education deserts, areas where there are either zero colleges and universities or one community college that serves as the only “broad-access” public option. Students in the Midwest and Great Plains states face more deserts than students in other regions. The…
Blog Post
June 15, 2016
Reacting to Reacting to the Past
Last week, I had an opportunity to visit a few sessions at the Reacting to the Past conference held on the Barnard campus. Faculty from many different disciplines gathered to rehearse the games they have developed to engage their students in past events and times. All of the games are set in the past, and students, after reading classic texts and doing their own research, are assigned roles. The students are responsible for conducting class sessions that will illuminate…
Blog Post
June 14, 2016
The Perfect Demographic Storm
This month, some 3.3 million teenagers will graduate from American high schools. If recent history is any guide, around 65 percent of them will go directly on to college this fall. While many more campuses are being filled with nontraditional students—working adults, part-timers, and international students—the traditional 18-to-22-year-old market remains the lifeblood of many institutions and is also the most predictable segment to forecast. For much of the past decade, demographers have been talking about not only a…
Blog Post
June 9, 2016
Optimizing for the Adult Learner
Roughly 70 percent of today’s college students are “nontraditional students,” meaning that they are over the age of 24, commute to campus, work part or full-time, are financially independent, or have children. Some enter college with only a GED, while others are reentry students with previously earned credits from multiple institutions. Many of these students are low-income, the first in their families to attend college, or come from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Despite this new majority, most institutions…
Case Study
June 9, 2016
Serving the Adult Student at University of Maryland University College
Conventional conceptualizations of the “typical” college student as an eighteen-year old, full-time, residential student poorly match reality. Roughly 70 percent of today’s college students are “nontraditional students,” meaning that they are over the age of 24, commute to campus, work part or full-time, are financially independent, or have children. Some enter college with only a GED, while others are reentry students with an assemblage of credits from various institutions. Many of these students are low-income, the first in their families…
Blog Post
May 24, 2016
Higher Creducation
Do Students Go to College to Get Educated or to Get a Degree?
It is that time of year when higher education recognizes accomplishment through the awarding of degrees and commencement celebrations. That has me thinking about what it means to be educated and/or to earn a credential. Earlier this year, Ithaka S+R released a report entitled Higher Ed Insights: Results of the Fall 2015 Survey. That report highlighted a potential tension between two approaches to improving rates of degree completion: 1) guided pathways; and 2) unbundling college credits and services. The…
Blog Post
May 18, 2016
A “How To” Guide to Effective Transfer Pathways
While a large majority of community college students aspire to a bachelor’s degree, only 14 percent will earn one within six years. But that deeply disappointing overall statistic hides a lot of variation: in some contexts, the pathway through two-year and four-year colleges to a bachelor’s degree is a much easier one. Often, the difference is not the students themselves or the resources, but how institutions work with students and one another, and the priorities to which resources are allocated.
Blog Post
May 18, 2016
Will Easing the Financial Burden of Dual Enrollment Improve College Outcomes for Low-Income Students?
As I’ve noted previously, the percentage of low-income (family income in the bottom 20 percent) high school graduates that have enrolled in two- and four-year institutions declined from 55.9 percent in 2008 to 45.5 percent in 2013. Studies examining dual enrollment programs—in which students take courses for college credit while still in high school—have found that participating in such programs increases the likelihood of college degree attainment, especially for low-income students. Yet low-income students tend to have…
Blog Post
May 17, 2016
The New Transcript and Predictive Analytics
Only a Matter of Time?
As interest in alignment between education and industry increases, higher education institutions are looking for new ways to signal their students’ industry-relevant skills and experiences to employers in ways that are meaningful and practical. A promising example is the “new transcript” that a number of US colleges are developing. The new transcript includes information that is more readily translated into job skills than traditional transcript data, such as specific course learning outcomes and hours spent on extracurricular activities and…
Blog Post
May 13, 2016
How Should Higher Education be Regulated?
The Case for Management-Based Regulation
For much of the 20th Century, the government relied on a command-and-control form of regulation in their oversight of organizations across many sectors. In other words, the government mandated that these regulated entities undertake specific activities and then monitored their compliance. In the late 20th Century, reaction to the burdens and inefficacy of command and control led to a shift in some areas to performance-based regulation. Under this model, the government determines targets for outcomes and regulated entities choose the…
Blog Post
April 28, 2016
Increasing Retention Across the Spectrum
Florida State University Aims to Graduate Each Student It Enrolls
For the past twenty years, Florida State University (FSU) has focused relentlessly on retaining and supporting every student it enrolls. Its efforts have yielded one of the largest increases in six-year graduation rates in the nation—nearly 16 percentage points, from 63.2 percent in 1994 to 79.1 percent in 2014. In our latest case study, “Broad-Based and Targeted: Florida State University’s Efforts to Retain Every Student,” Daniel Rossman and I detail FSU’s two-pronged strategy for improvement. First, it has sought…
Case Study
April 28, 2016
Broad-Based and Targeted
Florida State University’s Efforts to Retain Every Student
Over the past twenty years, Florida State University (FSU) has recorded one of the largest increases in six-year graduation rates in the nation—increasing from 63.2 percent for the 1988 entering cohort to 79.1 percent for the 2008 entering cohort. This improvement in outcomes has occurred with only a modest increase in students’ entering credentials—for example, the average SAT score of entering students has slightly increased during the time period. Instead of selecting its way to better outcomes, FSU has focused…
Blog Post
April 20, 2016
Responsible Use of Student Data
For several months, my colleagues and I at Ithaka S+R have been working with Mitchell Stevens, a professor at Stanford, on a project addressing the uses, challenges and opportunities for colleges and universities undertaking new forms of research, application, and representation of student administrative and learning data. Students’ increasing interaction with learning management systems, instructional technology, and administrative platforms is creating reams of new data about their learning behaviors and outcomes, and other experiences in school. And rapidly developing…
Blog Post
April 13, 2016
Teaching the US Faculty Survey
The new faculty survey report has arrived! As an LIS faculty member teaching in the areas of Academic Libraries and Sources and Services in the Humanities and Social Sciences, I couldn’t be more excited. Over the past several iterations, I have found the survey reports invaluable in my work as both an educator of future practitioners and a researcher exploring the role of libraries in the 21st Century Academy. The common thread through much of my teaching and research…
Blog Post
April 13, 2016
Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities Facing Higher Education
New Issue Brief from William G. Bowen
Rutgers University is marking its 250th anniversary this year with, among other activities, a series of lectures on the future of higher education. Opening the series on April 7, William G. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon foundation, and now valued advisor to ITHAKA, delivered a lecture on “Issues Facing Major Research Universities at a Time of Stress AND Opportunity.” Drawing from his recently published Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change…
Issue Brief
April 12, 2016
Issues Facing Major Research Universities at a Time of Stress AND Opportunity
This Issue Brief presents the lightly edited text of William G. Bowen’s keynote address at the Rutgers University 250th Anniversary Presidential Symposium on Higher Education, delivered in New Brunswick, NJ, on April 7, 2016. I would like to begin by acknowledging some of my many debts to Rutgers. My wife and I both have Rutgers degrees, hers an earned Master’s Degree and mine one of the “unearned” kind. Beyond that, as a close neighbor of Rutgers for many years, living…
Blog Post
April 4, 2016
Trends in College Net Price for Low-Income Students
Last week, New America’s Stephen Burd published a report showing that low-income students who receive Pell grants still face a substantial financial burden to attend college, especially at private not-for-profit institutions. Looking at the average net price—“the average amount of money that students and their families have to pay after all grant and scholarship aid is deducted from the listed price”—of low-income students attending 1,400 four-year institutions, Burd found that 94 percent of the private not-for-profit institutions he studied…
Blog Post
March 30, 2016
Yes, Higher Education Has Changed More Than We Think
At the recent annual meeting of the American Council on Education, I was asked to moderate a panel on the future of higher education. In preparing for the session, I read a myriad of reports and news articles about how slow higher education is to change at a time when the world around us is rapidly shifting. The truth is that if you step back from the headlines, it becomes obvious that much more has changed in the last…
Blog Post
March 24, 2016
Moving Beyond “Fit”: Industry Engagement in Competency-Based Education Design
Competency-based education (CBE) is an approach to higher education that is based on students mastering specific skills that are aligned to certain competencies. These competencies can be aligned to objective measures of student preparedness or aligned to labor market needs and defined in collaboration with employers. Rather than measuring students’ progress in terms of course completion and “seat time,” a competency-based system measures students’ progress in terms of tangible skills and allows students to progress at their own pace. From…
Blog Post
March 21, 2016
Higher Ed Themes of SXSWedu
Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend SXSWedu, an education conference in Austin, Texas, focused on cutting edge practices and technology. I spent most of my time in Austin attending higher education panels and exhibits, and came away feeling that three major themes dominated this gathering of those at the vanguard of the field. The continually advancing field of student data analytics Several well-attended panels focused on how digital information about students and their behaviors could be used…