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March 17, 2008, 09:19 AM ET
Investment in Improved Learning
For too long, discussion of access to higher education has been dominated by a belief that what is required is more public money for student aid. The problem is that we have been there, doing that for a quarter of a century with at best uncertain results.
Despite massive infusions of federal student aid which have clearly helped increase higher education participation rates, what has not increased is the proportion of those who start and then succeed in their studies. My conclusion? In the long term, college success rates will not improve until middle and high schools prove more adept at getting students ready for college. My preference, then, is to spend more money, not on financial aid, but on improved K-12 schooling.
Even if my preference was made policy tomorrow, it would take a decade of sustained effort to improve the college success rate unless something was also done to improve retention rates for those students who are now entering college unprepared to do college-level work. What needs to be improved, both quickly and dramatically, is what today passes for remedial instruction for lower division students who cannot pass the basic placement tests in math and English.
Hence the importance of the news last week from Kingsborough Community College in New York. A multi-year experiment, in which random samples of students requiring remediation were taught in learning communities, reported a substantial increase in the rate at which these students passed their remedial courses and then advanced to college-level work. What is important here is not the specific intervention—Kingsborough’s learning communities were small cohorts of students who took all their remedial courses together—but rather the fact that direct investment in an alternative learning strategy produced replicable results. Could it be that more money spent developing and testing alternative learning strategies might prove a better investment than more money for financial aid? It’s a question worth asking.
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