Experimental Study Finds Vouchers Don't Boost College Attendance

It all started on Twitter, and then on this blog.... now this!

BOULDER, CO (September 13, 2012) – A recent Brookings Institution report that looked at college enrollment rates of students attending voucher schools in New York City acknowledged no overall impacts of the vouchers on college attendance, but its authors trumpeted large, positive impacts for a subgroup of the voucher students: African Americans.

A new review of the report, however, questions the claim of a strong positive impact even for that group.

The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York Citywas written by Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson and published jointly by Brookings and by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard.

It was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by professor Sara Goldrick-Rab of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

The report examines college enrollment rates of students participating in an experimental voucher program in New York City, which in the spring of 1997 offered 3-year scholarships worth up to $1,400 annually to low-income families.

In her review of the Brookings report, Goldrick-Rab observes that the study identifies no overall impacts of the voucher offer, but that the authors “report and emphasize large positive impacts for African American students, including increases in college attendance, full-time enrollment, and attendance at private, selective institutions of higher education.”

This strong focus on positive impacts for a single subgroup of students is not warranted. Goldrick-Rab notes four problems:

• There are no statistically significant differences in the estimated impact for African Americans as compared to other students;
• There is important but unmentioned measurement error in the dependent variables (college attendance outcomes) affecting the precision of those estimates and likely moving at least some of them out of the realm of statistical significance;
• The authors fail to demonstrate any estimated negative effects that could help explain the average null results; and
• There are previously existing differences between the African American treatment and control groups on factors known to matter for college attendance (e.g., parental education).

“Contrary to the report’s claim, the evidence presented suggests that in this New York City program, school vouchers did not improve college enrollment rates among all students or even among a selected subgroup of students,” Goldrick-Rab writes.

Consequently, this new study’s contribution to discussions of education policy is the opposite of what its authors intend. Goldrick-Rab concludes that the report “convincingly demonstrates that in New York City a private voucher program failed to increase the college enrollment rates of students from low-income families.”

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The Invisible Institution

Community colleges have been called many things-"junior," "second chance," "sub-baccalaureate," and one of my personal favorites: places of "continued dependency, unrealistic aspirations, and wasted general education." That last one dates back to 1968, in the heat of their growth period (the author is W.B. Devall, writing in Education Record).

Despite all the disparaging remarks, I have a strong sense that many community college leaders are willing to be called just about anything, as long as they're "not called late for dinner." And this year, at least, they're at the table, and standing to enjoy a nice deal in the form of the American Graduation Initiative (part of legislation pending in the Senate).

But this period of sunshine provides only a modicum of comfort, given the longstanding backdrop of invisibility punctuated by insults. In 2005, Washington Post columnist Jay Matthews wrote a confessional column called "Why I Ignore Community Colleges." A Brookings Institution report released today reveals that Matthews was (and is) far from unique among his colleagues.

Brookings examined mainstream news coverage since 2007 and discovered that only about 1% of national coverage (appearing on TV, newspapers, news websites, and radio-and not including blogs) is devoted to education. That's education of any flavor.

Zoom in on coverage of community colleges and the picture gets even worse. Of all education reporting - of that 1%-- only 2.9% is devoted to community colleges. Public two-year colleges enroll 60% as many students as 4-year colleges and universities, but receive only one-tenth the news coverage. As the Brookings authors conclude, "From the standpoint of national media coverage, community colleges barely exist."

Invisibility is both a cause and a symptom of community colleges' low-status in higher education. The oft-unmentioned "snob factor" contributes to reporters' sense that their readers neither care, nor need to know, much about this sector. Children of journalists are unlikely to attend community colleges, and we all know that parents pay more attention to whatever their kids are doing. The same problem applies to politicians-it's a veritable miracle that President Obama is speaking with pride about institutions of postsecondary education where he's unlikely to send his own children.

Leaving community colleges out of the news means substantially skewing the American image of higher education. Stories about the critical links between the economy and education are missed-after all, it's community colleges who consistently watch enrollment rise along with unemployment. Kids and parents hear repeatedly about competitive admissions and rising tuition, expensive dorms and climbing gyms, even though these are the reality for less than half of all undergraduates. And we hear about, and from, presidents of 4-year colleges and universities, far more often than we hear about their hard-working peers running community colleges.

I think that sadly enough many at community colleges have gotten used to stereotypical representations of those schools-the lack of resistance to NBC's comedy Community may be one indication. But as William DeGenaro points out, it hasn't always been this way. In the 1920s and 1930s, community colleges were praised as essential to public education, getting ink in publications like the New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and Reader's Digest. Enrollment was climbing rapidly, just as it is now, and the media took notice. In fact, DeGenaro's research reveals that "the print media served as a booster, implying that the colleges resulted from common sense." That "rhetoric of inevitability" stands in sharp contrast to today's stance of invisibility. By ignoring an entire sector of higher education, the media helps to de-legitimate it. Simply put, reporters need to catch up--the President, together with many federal and state leaders, philanthropists, and citizens, sees the American community college as essential to the nation's future. What are journalists waiting for?

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Join Us!

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

You are invited to the Jam on the American Graduation Initiative for community college leaders; an online discussion with you and others from around the country about President Obama’s recent announcement to invest $12 billion in America’s community colleges. Convened by the Brookings Institute, The Education Commission of the States, and Jobs for the Future, the Jam will be held on September 16, 2009 from 8:00 am to 12:00 Midnight EST.

Sponsored by Knowledge in the Public Interest, with LaGuardia Community College as the lead college, the Jam will solicit your ideas about:

1) WHAT we should know—the benefits and consequences--about what the administration is proposing

2) HOW we can organize ourselves to make a difference for every community college in the US

Join a diverse group of individuals—community college presidents, faculty and staff; public officials; policy researchers and advocates--to influence the discussion on this groundbreaking proposal. The result will be a tool kit for action that will be available within two weeks of the Jam.

You can RSVP for the Jam until Sunday, September 13 by:
1) Going to http://polilogue.net and complete the sign up form.

2) Receive a confirmation email from “Polilogue Admin” with a link back to the site.

3) Click on the American Graduation Initiative community to enter the Jam site.

4) The passkey is: register

Please join in shaping the community college response to the most important national higher education initiative since the GI Bill. Come and go as your time permits, post as often as you like, and move between conversation threads.

See you online.

Sincerely,

Sara Goldrick-Rab
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Lead Author, "Transforming Community Colleges,"(Brookings Institution, 2009)

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Bloomberg Takes a Cue from Obama

When my colleagues and I crafted our Brookings blueprint on community college reform earlier this year, one of our greatest hopes was that federal leadership would spur real changes at the state and local level. More specifically, we hoped that if President Obama spoke out on the important role played by community colleges, and came forward with a proposal to substantially ramp up their resources, he wouldn't be alone. The message-- and the money-- would travel.

At least that was our hope. Call us naive, but really that's the best way to scale up change.

So we were all incredibly psyched to read in August 14's New York Times that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has pledged $50 million to that city's community colleges-- provided he's there to give out the money during a 3rd term of course.

According to the Times, "Mr. Bloomberg’s four-year proposal calls for graduating 120,000 students by 2020 from the city’s six community colleges, a 43 percent increase over the 84,000 students that are currently expected to graduate by that time, his campaign said. Nationally, President Obama has allocated $12 billion aimed at getting 5 million more Americans to graduate from the nation’s 1,200 community colleges by 2020."

This is a welcome shift in attitude from Bloomberg, whom (at least as I understand it) hasn't exactly made life easy for community colleges so far. I'll be in New York several times this fall, and look forward to learning more about exactly how that city's community colleges feel about his intentions. Stay tuned...

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America Must Put Community Colleges First

Sara's op-ed ("America Must Put Community Colleges First" ) is published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In it, she argues that community colleges -- given the much larger number of students they serve as compared with four-year institutions -- need a renewed government commitment to their support and leadership.

Faced with high tuition, a weak economy, and substantial competition for admission to four-year colleges, today's students are more likely than ever to attend one of the nation's 1,045 community colleges. According to Department of Education statistics, enrollment at community colleges grew by 741 percent from 1963 to 2006, compared with 197 percent at public four-year institutions and 170 percent at private four-year colleges. It increased from about two million in 2000 to 6.2 million in the first half of this decade alone. Yet, based on data from the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, community colleges receive less than one-third the level of federal support per full-time-equivalent student ($790) that public four-year colleges do ($2,600), and have correspondingly poorer outcomes.

The op-ed offers four recommendations included in a report [policy brief] authored for the Brookings Institution by Sara, Doug Harris at UW-Madison, Chris Mazzeo at the Consortium for Chicago School Research, and Greg Kienzl at the Institute for Higher Education Policy.

The four recommendations are:

1. Development of national goals and a performance-measurement system. The overarching goal of national higher-education policy should be to effectively educate students at the postsecondary level. While colleges should focus on the needs of their students, it is important that they also have clearly defined goals along those lines, with incentives to match. Success in a new system should be measured by progress. Right now appropriations to community colleges are primarily based on enrollment, without regard to whether their students earn degrees or get good jobs. That gears incentives toward inputs and process, rather than outcomes.

The federal government should invest resources specifically to promote greater success for students. Colleges that receive more money should be required to track and report student results, consistent with the many community-college missions, such as whether they completed a minimum number of credits, transferred, or earned a degree. Over time, a majority of federal dollars would be awarded based not on enrollment but on colleges' performance on such crucial measures.

2. Expanded federal support. To bring community colleges to the table and convey its strong support for their work, the federal government should double its current level of direct support, from $2-billion to $4-billion. Resource needs are significant and pressing. Since 1974, the net number of new community colleges has been just 149, a growth rate of only 17 percent. The result: Many campuses today are bursting at the seams, and increasing numbers of students must be turned away. In the short-term, federal spending would support infrastructure upgrades that truly stimulate the economy. Over the longer term, that investment would add modestly to higher-education expenditures but more than pay off by increasing the number of students who can enroll, graduate, and contribute to the nation's economy.

3. Innovation to enhance educational quality. We further call on the Department of Education to focus half of the proposed $2.5-billion college access and completion incentive fund on efforts to create innovative community-college policies and practices and then evaluate them. The two-year sector is not only overutilized and underresourced, but it also has too little information about how to effectively improve student outcomes. That problem can and must be remedied by connecting practitioners with well-trained researchers who share a common goal of helping community colleges succeed in meeting goals and gaining more support in return. For example, practitioners and researchers could collaborate on putting in place and evaluating approaches that accelerate progress in developmental education, integrate occupational and academic content in new curricula, or develop systemwide assessment and placement policies.

4. Accountability through student data systems. Finally, the federal government should support the improvement of student-level data systems to track community-college performance. That is the only way to operationalize real accountability and track progress and improvement. Most states do not have the ability to track individual outcomes throughout the education system and into the labor force. But thanks to the federal stimulus package, more will have that opportunity. Those efforts must be continued, for without the ability to evaluate outcomes based on hard data, student and institutional progress cannot be measured.

Sara is participating in a discussion of the report at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC today.

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Stimulus for America's Community Colleges

The following is my new web-ed, co-authored by Alan Berube:

The Brookings Institution

February 03, 2009 —

Many people in the education sector are rooting for the economic recovery package now working its way through Congress.

That’s because the package’s education component—an estimated $150 billion in the House plan—represents a central part of the Obama administration’s efforts to lay the groundwork for future economic growth. These investments can produce tremendous returns, driving long-run employment and earnings gains, and increasing the chances that future generations will become well-educated.

When it comes to investments in higher education, however, President Obama and congressional leaders should exercise focus. Resources should be targeted in ways that stimulate enhanced educational attainment, and close disparities in degree completion.

To that end, the recovery package—and future federal higher education policy—must do more to help transform America’s community colleges.

Faced with high tuition costs, a weak economy, and increased competition for admission to four-year colleges, students today are more likely than at any other point in history to attend one of the nation’s 1,100 community colleges. Annually, community college enrollment is increasing at more than twice the rate of that at four-year colleges, by 2.3 million students in the first half of this decade alone.

The rise of these institutions reflects their important roles in training workers, especially first-generation college students, for well-paying, high-demand jobs and in providing students a bridge to even higher levels of education.

We need to get more out of the system, however. Columbia University researchers estimate that the community college dropout rate is 50 percent. Despite the fact that community college degree and certificate holders earn considerably more than workers with only a high school diploma, just one-third of students who entered a community college in 1995 completed a degree of any kind by 2001. With many of the fastest-growing occupations requiring some post-secondary education, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree, serious challenges await if community college performance does not improve.

Part of the problem lies in the way we fund community colleges. Owing to their historical role in serving local labor markets, community colleges are hampered by a heavy financial dependence on states and localities, where negative budget outlooks today portend deep funding cuts. Moreover, they are funded primarily based on enrollment, without regard to whether their students earn degrees or get good jobs. This gears community colleges' incentives toward inputs and process, rather than outcomes like student success.

Given the critical function of community colleges for meeting our nation’s future economic needs, the federal government has a responsibility to improve this state of affairs. Its current role is limited; community colleges receive less than 30 percent the level of federal government support provided to four-year colleges.

A forthcoming paper from the Brookings Institution proposes a major shift in this relationship. It calls for four key federal reforms: a new focus on national goals for the two-year sector guided by a first-ever accountability system; expanded federal funding to help community colleges meet these more ambitious goals; stimulating greater innovation in community college policies and practices to enhance educational quality; and developing student data systems that enable crucial tracking of outcomes. As recognized by ambitious initiatives such as the Lumina Foundation’s Achieving the Dream project, a “culture of evidence” focused on student achievement—when coupled with capacity-building efforts to make success possible— can have a rapid and transformative impact.

On funding, the federal government should double its current level of direct support for community colleges, from $6 billion to $12 billion, in order to account for 30 percent of their budgets. Resource needs, especially for infrastructure, technology, and faculty, are significant and pressing.

Since 1974, only 149 new community colleges have been built, and many campuses today are bursting at the seams. While community college students tend to enroll part-time, even these students require space in which to learn. In the first two years, this spending would amount to just 1.4 percent of the proposed costs of the recovery package, and would support infrastructure upgrades that truly stimulate the economy. Over the longer term, it would add modestly to federal higher education expenditures, but would ensure that our nation realizes an economic payoff from increasing enrollments.

The federal government should not simply expand funding, but use these new resources explicitly to promote greater success for community college students. Colleges receiving enhanced funds would be required to track and report student results, such as completion of a minimum number of credits, earning a degree, and landing a good-paying job. Over time, a majority of federal dollars would be awarded based not on enrollment, but on colleges’ performance on these critical measures.

Our community college system, long on the sidelines in funding and policy debates, now needs a seat at the table. Ensuring that American workers are trained to compete in the global marketplace, to earn a place in the middle class, and to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens requires expanding and improving their experience with postsecondary education. By better supporting the affordable and accessible higher educational institutions found within all of our communities, and asking more of them in exchange, we can put our nation and its families back on the path to economic prosperity.

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