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Courtesy Cuyahoga Community College
Washington Monthly
Higher Ed’s Most Successful Failure
Why a proven reform to boost community college graduation rates can’t get traction.
by Jamaal Abdul-alim
Four years ago, Christine Abate was driving the car she had just bought
with $4,000 in cash to get to and from classes at Cuyahoga Community
College in Cleveland, Ohio, when another driver T-boned her, sending
her car careening front end first into a set of boulders. Her vehicle
was badly banged up, but fortunately she wasn’t. “The doctors were
surprised I walked away from the accident,” Abate recalled.
She was lucky in another way: She had a strong support system at her
college. Unexpected life events, like suddenly being without a car, are
a major reason students drop out of college. At Cuyahoga Community
College, known locally as Tri-C, Abate was part of an experimental
program called Degree in Three that was designed to help students like
her stay on track. In return for agreeing to attend school
full-time—going part-time is another factor linked to increased dropout
rates—students in the program received tuition assistance for any costs
not covered by their other financial aid, essentially making college
free. They were also given $50 monthly gift cards to defray the cost of
gas and groceries, and received more individual attention from academic
advisers—a resource most students at financially strained community
colleges sorely lack.
For Abate, the program made a huge difference. She stayed in school,
finagling various ways to get to campus, at one point renting a car.
She paid for the rental and other living expenses by juggling several
part-time jobs—at a nursing home, a hospital, and in people’s homes as
a health aid. Most of all, she credits her advisers for helping her
stay in school. “Not only were they emotionally supportive and
understanding of how stressful it is to be a college student, they were
also there for personal life and personal struggles,” Abate told me.
Other than her advisers, she said, “I didn’t have anyone tell me,
‘You’re doing a great job. We’re here for you. Good job getting an A on
that test. You’re smart.’ I didn’t have that.” Her advisers became her
personal boosters. When she applied for jobs, she listed one of her
advisers as her reference.
In December 2019, she graduated with an associate’s degree in nursing.
That same month, she took her state nursing certification exam, and in
February of this year started working in a Cleveland-area hospital,
just as the COVID-19 crisis was about to heat up and her skills were
most needed. She has since been accepted at Ohio University, where she
hopes to earn a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing.
Abate’s experience with Degree in Three was no outlier. A carefully
controlled evaluation of the program and similar ones at two other Ohio
community colleges found that participating students were nearly twice
as likely to graduate within three years as other students at those
colleges who were also attempting to attend full-time but were not part
of the program. Participating students were also more likely to
transfer to a four-year college. Though the program costs more per
student up front, it helped so many more students graduate that the
overall cost per degree in the program was lower than it was for
students attending the community colleges normally.
In other industries, a new strategy that creates more products at a
lower per-unit cost would be seen as a wild success. The company that
developed it would quickly become a magnet for investors and a leader
in the field—until their competitors all started copying the strategy.
Not so, apparently, when it comes to American higher education. Despite
rigorous evaluation, widespread acclaim from researchers, praise from
Ohio Governor John Kasich, glowing write-ups in major newspapers, and
powerful boosters in the philanthropic world, Degree in Three isn’t
being rolled out at community colleges across the country, or even in
Ohio. In fact, Tri-C itself discontinued the program in 2018 when its
external funding ran out. A sister program at Cincinnati State
Technical and Community College experienced the same fate. With the
collapse of state revenues brought on by the pandemic, the status of
the program at a third Ohio school, Lorain County Community College,
remains uncertain, and a version in New York City, where the program
originated, barely avoided having its budget slashed earlier this
summer.
In other industries, a new strategy that creates more products at a
lower per-unit cost would be seen as a wild success. Not so,
apparently, when it comes to American higher education.
The failure of America’s community colleges to replicate, or even
maintain, successful programs like Degree in Three illustrates a
profound but underappreciated flaw in the way this country allocates
funds for higher education: Students who need resources the most get
the least. Community college students generally have significantly less
of the social capital—parents who attended college, for instance—that
can help them navigate the college setting. They tend to have less
developed study skills than affluent students who attended well-funded
high schools. They also carry greater personal burdens, such as having
to work multiple jobs. Since some adults enroll in community college
classes without intending to get a degree, and students often transfer
to different institutions, graduation rates for community college can
be difficult to pin down. But reports suggest that just a third of
students who enter these schools receive a degree or certificate within
six years—a rate that would be considered scandalous if it were
happening at elite institutions that more affluent students attend.
Yet community colleges generally have far smaller budgets to spend on
students than four-year schools. Public four-year schools, whose
student bodies tend to be wealthier and whiter, spend on average three
times more per student each year than community colleges. Private
four-year schools generally spend five times as much. As long as these
basic inequities continue, even the most astonishingly successful
innovations to boost community college success rates are likely to
languish.
Over the course of the 2000s, various community colleges and research
groups experimented with interventions designed to help more students
graduate. One effort, with the goal of providing the students a sense
of community, grouped them into cohorts with whom they took all of
their first-year classes. Another attempt involved giving students
increased access to advisers. Yet another effort gave students
scholarships, in addition to whatever financial aid they were
receiving, and conditioned the funds on passing grades and consistent
enrollment. But all of these efforts, and many others, saw relatively
modest effects.
Prompted by a report from a New York City mayoral commission on
alleviating poverty, the City University of New York system began
thinking ambitiously about how to increase graduation rates. CUNY
devised a program that would wrap together all of the interventions
that had shown a modest positive effect on graduation rates. To
alleviate cost stressors, the program would provide free Metro passes,
free books for classes, and waivers for any tuition that remained after
financial aid. It would also assign additional academic advisers, with
lower caseloads, to meet with the students, twice a month in their
first semester and then once a month after that. From focus groups,
researchers had learned that students also drop out when they can’t
reconcile their work schedule and class schedule, so students in the
program got priority enrollment. Lastly, because of the drawbacks of
part-time attendance, students would be required to attend full-time,
with the goal of graduating in three years. The resulting program was
named CUNY Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP.
It worked. Students in the program graduated in three years at nearly
double the rate of other CUNY students attempting to attend
full-time—40 percent compared to 22 percent. Students in the program
also transferred to four-year colleges at a higher rate than students
not in the program. And the program was evaluated with an uncommon
degree of rigor. MDRC, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, ran the
randomized control trial, with 896 students participating, and produced
a 155-page report of the results.
The study made a splash. The New York Times wrote up the findings, and
its editorial board highlighted them, too. The Obama administration
cited the CUNY program’s success, calling on all community colleges to
take similar steps as part of their broader proposal to increase the
number of Americans getting degrees. “I’ve not seen any other
interventions with as large effects as CUNY ASAP,” Thomas Brock,
director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College,
Columbia University, told me. “It really stands alone.” Funds to
continue the program were added to the New York City mayor’s budget.
The question remained, though, could this work elsewhere? Community
colleges across the country, most of whom operate on fine margins,
weren’t rushing to implement it. A bevy of funders, such as Ascendium
Education Group, the ECMC Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Kresge
Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
and the Lumina Foundation (the latter four of which have given grants
to this nonprofit magazine), chipped in funds to replicate the program
elsewhere, for a trial period of three years. Again, it would be
rigorously evaluated by MDRC. In 2014, three Ohio community colleges
signed up to host the program: Lorain County Community College,
Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, and Cuyahoga
Community College.
Christine Abate was at Tri-C during this evaluation period, as was
Kevin Jones. Jones had begun taking courses at the Tri-C Eastern Campus
in 2016 after deciding that his roofing job was taking too much of a
toll on his body. The program connected him with advisers who he says
felt like family. “They were my aunties,” said Jones, now 25 and a
transfer student at Case Western Reserve University, where he is
studying artificial intelligence and cultural history with an eye
toward going to law school to become an attorney in intellectual
property. “When you come from that Black cultural experience, it’s
really nice to have someone you can latch onto and have that familial
type of connection with,” he said. “And [Degree in Three] was the way
they were able to interact with me. I’m appreciative [of] the program
for allowing me to meet them.”
Abate and Jones weren’t the only students who benefited. MDRC released
early data from 2015 and 2016 showing that students in the program were
twice as likely to stay in school. After the three-year period was up
in 2018, researchers crunched the numbers fully. Ohio’s version of ASAP
had been just as effective as CUNY’s: Graduation rates had nearly
doubled for students in the program, and students were 50 percent more
likely to transfer to a four-year college. If CUNY ASAP was strong
proof of concept, this new study of Ohio’s version showed that the
concept could be successfully applied elsewhere—it was, in the argot of
social science, replicable. And while the cost per student enrolled in
the program per year was estimated by researchers to be $3,303, that
amount was partially offset by extra revenue (mostly from Pell Grants)
the colleges received because students in the program stayed in school
longer. With all factors taken into account, MDRC calculated that the
cost per graduate of the Ohio version of ASAP was $49,000 less than for
similar students not in the program.
Few other community colleges, however, seem interested in even trying
to replicate the ASAP model—not because they think it won’t work, but
because the realities of the budgeting process in most states and
municipalities make funding something like this extremely difficult.
One problem, Brock pointed out, is that states budget on a year-to-year
basis—a system that doesn’t take into account longer-term savings. If
you’re a state legislator or college president who pushes for programs
with a longer time frame, you may not get credit for positive outcomes
that happen three or six years down the line, he said. On top of that,
lawmakers are unlikely to take money away from four-year colleges in
order to pay for innovations at community colleges, Robert Kelchen, a
professor at Seton Hall University who studies higher education, said.
(Kelchen is also the data manager of the Monthly’s College Guide.) To
fund a program like this would “take a significant investment of new
money from states to implement this program on a widespread basis. That
looks to be very unlikely in the next several years,” Kelchen said.
The evaluation of the program made a splash. The New York Times wrote
up the findings, and its editorial board highlighted them, too. The
Obama administration cited the program’s success, calling on all
community colleges to take similar steps.
Ohio community colleges were only able to run the program with ample
grant funding from large foundations. (Another recent attempt to
replicate the program in West Virginia is also being funded by Arnold
Ventures.) Once the outside money for Ohio ran out, the state
legislature didn’t allocate funds to continue the program. Without
additional funding, said Miria Batig, who oversaw the program at
Tri-C’s Western Campus, “trying to get that kind of ratio [of advisers
to students] would be near to impossible.” Stephanie Davidson, vice
chancellor of academic affairs at the Ohio Department of Higher
Education, said as attractive and beneficial as the program may be, the
state would be hard pressed to find a way to sustain it. As it stands,
Ohio has no plans to expand the program at the state level, and two of
the three colleges that participated have discontinued their programs.
Tiffany Jones, the senior director of higher education policy at the
Education Trust, a nonprofit that focuses on equity in education, told
me that it’s not hard to figure out “how to help students from
low-income families complete college—that work has been done.” What is
difficult, she said, is finding college leaders and state policymakers
who make student success a top priority not only in their rhetoric but
also in their budgets. “This is really a question of political will.”
The struggle of the Ohio programs to survive, much less spark similar
efforts across the country, tells a larger story about ambitions to
make community college better. No past effort had been tested so
rigorously and seen such success. Community colleges generally operate
on such thin margins that, on their own, it is nearly impossible for
them to come up with the additional cash to pilot new programs. But
without some money to try out new strategies, it’s hard to see how
these schools will ever solve the stubborn problem of low graduation
rates—or really any of the problems they face. State and local
lawmakers could have theoretically provided the funds to bring CUNY
ASAP to their states, but as a practical matter, we now know they won’t.
There’s another large investor, however, that could step in: the
federal government. Jones argued that there should be a federal fund,
either for states or for individual colleges, to scale up strategies
proven to boost student success. Grants should be tiered by institution
type to ensure that under-resourced schools are able to compete for the
funds, and investments should target schools that enroll high
proportions of historically disadvantaged students, Jones said. There
are any number of ways Washington could direct more federal funds to
these schools, which would allow them to adopt programs like ASAP.
(Kevin Carey lays out one such proposal in this issue.) Until then, the
single most promising way to help minority students and students from
low-income families succeed in higher education will remain a promise
unfulfilled.
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