As part of its goal to increase college-completion rates in the United States, the Lumina Foundation for Education announced on Tuesday that it would provide a total of up to $9.1-million to seven states that are committed to adopting comprehensive policies to improve productivity in their higher-education systems.
Lumina, which has set a goal of increasing the proportion of American adults with college degrees or credentials to 60 percent by 2025 (compared with the current 39 percent), says the grants are designed to stimulate changes in state policy and institutional practices that can be emulated in other states. The states receiving the money are Arizona, Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas.
"This is not about seven states but about building a national agenda on productivity," said Jamie P. Merisotis, president of Lumina. "We really want to provide guides to other states."
The recipient states' efforts to increase productivity involve policies that base state aid on colleges' performance on graduation and other completion-oriented measures, that work to identify cost savings in college operations on a broad scale that can then be used to improve undergraduate education, and that put in place new models for making a college education easier for more students to access and afford.
The money will be given out over four years, and states will receive their full awards only if they demonstrate progress toward project milestones they have agreed to meet. The states made commitments to track and publicly report a common set of metrics, including data on the number of programs completed and degrees awarded per 100 students enrolled, revenue and spending per full-time-equivalent student, and the extent to which shifts in revenue and increases in spending have led to tuition increases.
Productivity Agendas
Mr. Merisotis said Lumina wanted to use the grants to build on what states have already learned and to support innovation by allowing states to take calculated risks with new ideas that they otherwise might not have tried, and that could have applicability nationwide.
Some of the plans on the states' agendas, such as adopting financing formulas based on the numbers of graduates, are practices that have already been tried in some places but that Lumina officials believe are promising and have the potential for gaining momentum. Other ideas are more innovative, such as Montana's plan to create a "virtual community college" by packaging degree programs and work-force training from existing campuses and delivering those courses online statewide.
In Maryland, public and private colleges plan to work together to try to reduce costs and improve student learning by redesigning 24 courses they have identified as "bottleneck courses." Those are typically general-education and other courses in which a large number of students fail to earn a grade of C or higher.
Among the other states' agendas, Arizona officials are planning to provide new, less-expensive options for students seeking bachelor's degrees, among other ways by putting community-college and four-year programs together in new centers in fast-growing areas. Tennessee will work to re-enroll adults who left college without degrees but with a substantial number of credits. And Texas plans to smooth the process of transferring by defining learning outcomes for specific courses and degrees in some programs.
Comments
1. bdelidow - November 24, 2009 at 08:05 am
Maybe it's obvious to others, but what does "productivity" mean in this context?
2. speterfreund - November 24, 2009 at 09:36 am
"Productivity" means more college graduates--defined as holders of at least a two-year degree--both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the adult population. We are currently at 39% and lag behind the world leaders, who are at 60%, by half.
The disingenuous element in the conversation is the failure to perform anything like a comparative analysis of job mix. Nobody to date has said that there are 20 million jobs requiring a college degree that are going begging for lack of suitably trained graduates. When we outsourced the industrial and production jobs that made our blue-collar highschool-educated middle class possible, we did not replace them one for one with high-tech jobs requiring a degree. There were some of these, but there were also a lot of service economy jobs--burger flippers, sales associates, and the like--as well. Potential employers--hot only those in business and industry, but also those in fields such as health care and education, in which the demographics suggest a growing need for new workers in the coming decades--have to be part of the discussion, so that those who go or go back to college can make informed decisions about how much training they will need to succeed in which field(s).
3. speterfreund - November 24, 2009 at 09:39 am
Oops! "hot only" should be "not only."
4. 22011344 - November 24, 2009 at 02:05 pm
Millions of dollars to increase graduation rates will probably increase the rates by further watering down the standards. Why wait until 2025?? Put $5 million down in front of some colleges and the rate could hit 100% by spring 2010. Graduation rates are in the control of the colleges. More pressure on a weakened professoriate to cowtow to the almighty dollar. Worthless degrees will no longer be reserved for the athletes. Why do business leaders think the business model applies to the Academe? Maybe it is the only model they know? This trend is nauseating. I have had college sophomores enrolled in my classes who could not read or write at a 6th grade level. Their inner city high schools had graduation rates of almost 100%. Now some people want the same high productivity at the colleges? Amazing.