How to Drive More Students to Programs With “Value” (column)

Higher education’s access era ran from the 1960s through the ’90s, as the Higher Education Act and Pell Grant encouraged colleges and universities to better live up to their promise to open doors to opportunity for all. The focus shifted to completion in the 2000s and early 2010s, driven by Lumina Foundation’s “big goal” and the Obama administration’s belief that postsecondary learning was valuable and that college without a credential could have disastrous consequences.

Over the last decade-plus, we embraced an emphasis on student success, defined by a broader definition of well-being and more focus on colleges’ own responsibility to help individual learners reach their goals in and outside the classroom.

The last few years have seen another pivot, to the era of value, as a powerful combination of higher education’s continuing unaffordability and a drastically changing workplace drove deeper questions about whether college was “worth it.” These doubts have been reinforced by better federal and state data to measure the economic payoff of individual programs and credentials.

Let’s put aside for the moment very legitimate questions (which I’ve raised before) about whether it’s wise to measure the value of any academic experience exclusively based on what those who’ve been through it earn financially a few years later. (My short answer is no: As I wrote in January, “overdependence on postcollege economic outcomes to judge higher education’s success and value ignores the full range of benefits that colleges and universities purport to deliver for individuals and for society collectively.” It also shortchanges the value of programs like social work and theology and the arts that tend to produce graduates for historically low-paying fields.)

But if inadequate on their own, economic outcomes are an absolutely appropriate way to judge a postsecondary experience, and now that governments and others are using postcollege earnings as a metric, colleges and universities have to get with the program.

But how? What can and should institutions do to better ensure that their learners are prepared for, get and succeed in jobs or experiences they enter after college? Isn’t that heavily dependent on the kinds of students they serve, the (good and bad) choices those learners make, the shape of their local economies, and other factors outside their control?

To some extent yes—but, really, tough beans. While we can work to improve accountability systems based on earnings and develop alternative ones using additional factors, some of our focus right now has to be on figuring out how to better meet the requirements (and, let’s be real, to better serve students).

I’ll focus in this column on one such effort: the Unlocking Opportunity project from the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program and the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Aspen and CCRC are far from alone in working in this space (see complementary work from places like the Urban Institute and HCM Strategists, among others), but their strategy is notable in several ways.

First, it brought a cohort of institutions together in 2022, comparatively early in the march toward embedding value measures into accountability regimes, so the initiative has several years’ worth of results and data to work with.

Second, the effort focuses on community colleges, extremely important institutions that can struggle to meet accountability metrics because they open their doors to virtually all comers and many learners don’t seek credentials. Some community college leaders, for instance, have been frustrated by the fact that about a fifth of two-year institutions have been labeled as “low earnings” colleges by the new Carnegie Classification on Student Access and Outcomes.

Accountability measures like the new federal Do No Harm standard are unlikely to be a sufficient motivator for colleges to get serious about increasing the value of their programs because they set such a low floor; fewer than 2 percent of bachelor’s degree programs and about 7 percent of associate degree programs would fail to meet the new federal threshold if it were in effect now.

“But if we in higher education are in the business of continuous improvement, there’s no excuse for not doing something to improve value,” says Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of Aspen’s College Excellence Program. “It’s the right thing to do for students and society.”

More than a third of community college credentials, including certificates, are unlikely to lead directly to good jobs or bachelor’s degrees that open doors to good jobs, the Unlocking Opportunity report notes.

The goal of the consortium, which began with a pilot group of 10 community colleges and now has 54 more, is to have more students enroll in and complete high-value programs and fewer enter programs unlikely to lead to postgraduation success. The vision is that institutions do this not once, to meet an accountability threshold, but open-endedly.

The first step was developing a definition of value that doesn’t strive for perfection but is “close enough to drive institutional reform behavior in a positive way,” Wyner says. To judge the value of programs that are designed to lead to a job directly after community college, Aspen and CCRC use postcompletion earnings. For programs designed to lead to a job only after transfer to a four-year institution and attainment of a bachelor’s degree, the initiative defines value by a mix of transfer rates, bachelor’s completion rates and “individualized program mapping between community colleges and their four-year counterparts.”

The 10 colleges in the pilot then divided all of their programs into categories (high, medium or low-value workforce programs, high or low-value transfer programs, etc.) and developed strategies for increasing enrollments in high-value programs and reducing enrollments in lower-value ones.

In the first three years of work, the 10 colleges collectively increased the number of students in high-value programs or pathways by 27 percent (roughly 20,000 students) and decreased enrollment in low-value courses of study by 25 percent (about 7,500).

The institutions used two major tactics to achieve these results: strengthening the labor market value of workforce programs and improving advising for potential transfer students. But the tactics varied by institution.

Southwest Wisconsin Technical College required leaders of 11 workforce programs that typically paid graduates less than a living wage to figure out how raise that level. The college changed the curriculum for its agronomy program, for example, to include drone certification and a course in pesticide application after employers said they’d pay $2.50 more an hour to workers with those skills. The college closed two culinary programs and an automotive-collision course that couldn’t successfully adapt or local employers wouldn’t cooperate. The result: an 84 percent decrease in enrollments in low-value programs and a 32 percent increase in high- or medium-value programs.

St. Petersburg College found that too many of its students were in a general associate of arts program that did not require focused advising. It embedded career advising and earlier and more structured conversations about transfer pathways and over three years produced a 37 percent increase in the number of students in high-value transfer programs and a 47 percent decrease in those in low-value transfer programs.

Aspen and CCRC plan to expand the lessons and strategies from the pilot to dozens of additional community colleges and, potentially, to four-year institutions as well.

But all the strategies and good practices in the world won’t matter unless institutional leaders—and the faculty and staff members who will have to do the heavy lifting—embrace the idea that they have a responsibility to do what they can to improve the postcollege outcomes of their learners. Public policy and accountability requirements won’t necessarily force them to do it, because the bars they set are so low. Recognizing that we’ve entered a new era—that this is what learners need from us in this moment—is the first step.