The University of Phoenix has released its third “Academic Annual Report,” a document that continues to be notable not so much for the depth of information it provides on its students’ academic progress but for its existence at all. Few colleges, for-profit or otherwise, publish such reports.
Matthew Denhart, administrative director at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, an organization that advocates for greater transparency and accountability about student learning in higher education, said the report was “kind of refreshing,” even as he noted the inherent limitations of a report in which the university itself chooses what information it will publish.
He said he especially liked the data Phoenix collected on how students’ salaries (most of them work while attending) rose at a rate higher than the national average while they were enrolled. Data like that are “something you really have to struggle to find anywhere else,” Mr. Denhart said.
The findings for the 2009 academic year did show some warts—most notably, declines from 2008 in program-completion rates. In 2009, the proportion of Phoenix students completing an associate degree within three years of enrolling was 23 percent, down from 26 percent the year before. Among bachelor’s degree students, the six-year completion rate was 34 percent, versus 36 percent the previous year. (You can dig into the numbers from this year’s report, and the two previous ones, here. Read The Chronicle’s coverage of the previous reports here and here.)
University officials said they believed the “current economic conditions” might have contributed to the declines in graduation rates. Many Phoenix students may have faced financial hardships that caused them to interrupt their studies, the officials said—the same explanation many four-year nonprofit colleges recently gave in a recent Chronicle analysis of graduation rates.
In November, Phoenix instituted a free three-week orientation program that is mandatory for all students entering with fewer than 24 credits. In a test of the orientation involving 30,000 students, the university found that 80 percent of the students who started the program completed it, and that retention rates among those students was higher than for those who didn’t take it. Phoenix’s president, William J. Pepicello, said the university hopes the orientation will eventually lead to better completion rates. (Phoenix calculates a completion rate because so few of its students are the first-time freshmen typically counted in the standard “graduation rate” calculations.)
The Phoenix academic report also includes findings on students’ performance relative to hundreds of thousands of students at nearly 400 peer institutions on two standardized tests: the Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills and the ETS Proficiency Profile (formerly called the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress).
For instance, on the Proficiency Profile, 2,428 University of Phoenix seniors slightly underperformed a comparison group of 42,649 seniors at peer institutions in critical thinking, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and moderately underperformed the peer group in reading, writing, and mathematics. In comparisons of seniors versus freshmen within the university, the 2,428 seniors slightly outperformed 4,003 freshmen in all categories except natural sciences, in which they were equivalent.
Experts explore the quality and assessment of higher education.
11 Responses to U. of Phoenix Reports on Students’ Academic Progress
betterschools - December 10, 2010 at 11:02 am
Kudos to the University of Phoenix for this self-inspection and for making it a public document.
One would hope that a scintilla of self-awareness would discourage the usual suspects who show up in these posts to hate the for-profits from making hypocritical remarks. They know that their schools have never engaged in such self-appraisal much less published it. If and when public institutions conduct such studies and publish such data, we will have a better picture of our industry.
Separately, I agree with UOP’s suggestion that the recession has contributed negatively to completion rates. We are seeing about the same contribution in our studies of independent colleges.
nilspeterson - December 10, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Washington State University took a different approach to documenting its accomplishment of student learning outcomes. Rather than a standardized test applied across the institution, WSU developed a federated system. The pilot results are in the university’s portfolio: https://universityportfolio.wsu.edu/2009-2010/Pages/6Goals.aspx The complete 2009-10 university portfolio of its assessment and accomplishments is online https://universityportfolio.wsu.edu/2009-2010/Pages/default.aspx
The key difference in this method is that it asks programs to develop assessment of learning outcomes based on their discipline centric situations and to develop direct measures of student learning that are credible within their communities of practice. The system at a glance, with rubrics and bibliography are described here: http://communitylearning.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/wsu-system-for-student-learning-outcomes-assessement/
czander - December 10, 2010 at 12:04 pm
One cannot accept this type of internal/self assessment as valid. Only an assessment from a commission like middle states or the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment is acceptable. This type of assessment is as valid as a corporate web site.
betterschools - December 10, 2010 at 12:19 pm
nilspeterson – Thanks for sharing WSU’s work. When I visited the links you provided, I was found a great many planning documents and one set of very soft department-level ratings on 4-5 essentially contestable dimensions such as “engaging.” I presume the pilot results you referenced contain studies based on objective data but access appears to require a university password. Also, the site was very slow, perhaps because of your posting, and some of my attempts to access pages timed-out. Perhaps you can tell us. Are the individual departments measuring such variables as time-to-degree, employment (as relevant to the degree), starting salaries vs. national and area norms, etc.?
11209892 - December 10, 2010 at 1:09 pm
One thing that this report does say is that UOP is making a conscious effort to be transparent in what they offer and what they do. I applaud the administration for doing this. As a faculty member and area chair for the university, I am proud to say that my colleagues and I work very hard so that the students in our classes are a better off then they were when they walked through our doors.
nilspeterson - December 10, 2010 at 2:39 pm
betterschools – The first link goes to a chart of pilot data on the direct assessment of students accomplishing the university’s learning goals: critical and creative thinking, quantitative and symbolic reasoning, communication, etc. The university has other measures such as time to degree, but our interest is on direct measures of student learning, and conducting those measures in ways that can be unpacked by programs into actions that can lead to improvement. A direct measure like a national test may facilitate comparison, but it is not clear to use how it provides the evidence needed for a program to become ever more responsive to the learning outcomes and needs of its students.
Your reference to “engaging” appears to be in the primary trait data that describes the character of the assessment activities each program is undertaking. This is an at a glance view that digests data from the report that each program makes on its assessment work. In addition to the primary trait data, you will find program reports and feedback in a library. Each report is assessed on 4 dimensions: assessment purpose, team and system; goals, student outcomes and measures; evidence, analysis and action plan; and leadership.
You might think of this latter part of the work as a quality assurance mechanism. We are asking programs to demonstrate that they have robust assessment mechanisms aimed at producing actions to improve the student learning success.
The portfolio is intended to be public. I will explore what might be wrong with the authorization settings.
betterschools - December 10, 2010 at 3:20 pm
nilspeterson – Thanks & congratulations to WSU. I can appreciate the effort behind this accomplishment. From experience, you may find the next wave of innovation even more challenging as you coach individuals to value and constructively use the findings to improve learning, the measurement constructs, etc. I have found this phase even more difficult to implement than getting the initial assessments into place.
nilspeterson - December 13, 2010 at 1:13 am
betterschools — I agree, I think WSU’s challenge will be exactly as you say, coaching individuals (and programs) to value and use the findings. Its a large shift in thinking to go from “assessment to prove” to “assessment for improvement”, and also to use assessment as a mirror on the program rather than only as a lens to examine students. In terms of our rubric, it means a program needs to develop a purpose for the assessment that is motivating and then follow that through to action. The purpose may not be to get ever better, rather it may be to be ever more responsive changing students and changing contexts.
betterschools - December 15, 2010 at 12:00 pm
nils – One could argue that adapting well to changing needs is the best kind of CQI. If you examine the many significant problems of today’s higher education, a common denominator is failure to adapt to a changing environment. Among other things, we suffer from a strident minority of the professoriate that wants us to return to the good old days that never were. These problems are too large to yield to a frontal assault. Leverage is required and you are producing it. The conceptual and moral center of this leverage is reasonably complete transparency in products, promises, inputs, processes, outcome, and value-added. I say “reasonably complete” with the view that we are mostly opaque at present. It is logically impossible impossible for a prospective student to make a rational decision as to which school/program/options, etc. represent the best choice in relation to their needs and goals. Ironically, it will soon be more possible for a student to make a rational decision among competing for-profits because they are subject to ever increasing reporting metrics which, next year, will come close to what might be required to support a fully rational consumer decision. Publics and independents, on the other hand, have actively fought against this kind of transparency for more than a decade. Localized, hard fought, gains such as those being achieved at WSU will debunk the fears held by the professoriate and even by some administrators (most such fears are groundless or greatly overblown) and thus facilitate progress on the larger goals. Best of luck!
history_grrrl - December 21, 2010 at 3:40 pm
In the interest of transparency, why don’t the people posting comments on these sorts of blogs identify their affiliations? For example, betterschools, don’t you run some sort of for-profit educational consulting business?
lothlorien - January 19, 2011 at 1:01 am
@history…
Look, I disagree with betterschools’s points on for-profits (I do not like corporations taking money for education and spending a big chunk of it on dividends to investors), but he is not one of those spamming trolls you see after any piece in the media critical of for-profits. His points are reasoned, and stand or fall on their own merits. I think they fall, but I also think ad-hominem attacks on him (by not just you) are unwarranted.