Colleges Face More Pressure on Student Outcomes, but Success Isn’t Always Easy to Measure

Travis Bell for The Chronicle

By nearly any measure, Latia Harvin is a success story. Ms. Harvin, 18, was the valedictorian of her graduating class at C.E. Murray High School and is one of just 150 students chosen nationally to receive a $20,000 scholarship as a “Coca-Cola Scholar.”

And before fall, she will have earned as many as 36 credits by completing a certificate program at Williamsburg Technical College. All of her credits at Williamsburg Tech are eligible to transfer to the University of South Carolina at Columbia, where Ms. Harvin plans to study biology.

But the successes of students like Ms. Harvin haven’t translated into plaudits for Williamsburg Tech, which has a graduation rate of just 9 percent on the Education Department’s College Scorecard. Dual-enrollment students haven’t been counted toward the federal calculation of the college’s graduation rate. On average, just 6 percent of the nearly 700 students who enroll at the college are the “first-time, full-time” students who have been counted under federal graduation rates. Many other students complete nondegree programs or finish their degrees outside the three-year window to be counted by federal data.

The stakes for relying on poor data are growing. Some experts are calling for accreditors to revoke their approval of colleges that perform poorly on such measures. But there is less discussion about the impact on students who have few or no good options if their local community college were shuttered. The challenges of getting a college credential are already significant for many of Williamsburg Tech’s students, and shutting the college would raise that bar much higher.

“Ultimately, I think if a student is not leaving college with more opportunities, then we should question whether [the college] should continue,” said Michael Itzkowitz, senior policy adviser for higher education at Third Way, a nonpartisan think tank. Mr. Itzkowitz is a former Education Department official who helped design the College Scorecard.

He recently wrote a report calling for accreditors and the government to cut off federal dollars from colleges with low graduation rates, low earnings after graduation, and high rates of students who default on federal student loans.

Williamsburg Tech was not cited by that report, but it falls far below average on two of those measures — the college does not participate in the federal student-loan program. But college officials say they have a different story to tell about accountability, one that goes beyond traditional metrics. For example, about 96 percent of the students who complete their certificate, diploma, or degree programs are in school or working in their fields within a year, according to figures reported to the state.

Those numbers show that the college is providing a good education at a very low cost, said Margaret Chandler, dean of instruction at Williamsburg Tech. The college’s tuition and fees are listed as $2,040 per semester for the 2016-17 academic year.

In a small, rural community like Kingstree, accountability takes on a more personal meaning. Students are “going to run into us in the grocery store,” Ms. Chandler said. “That’s part of credibility on the most basic level,” she said.

Few Options for Students

Kingstree is located about 75 miles north of Charleston, in one of South Carolina’s poorest and least-educated counties — a place where residents have some of the greatest need for higher education and very few options to pursue it.

Williamsburg County’s unemployment rate is about 5.5 percent, but wages remain low: A third of the county’s 32,000 residents live below the poverty line and the median household income is less than $29,000. Per capita annual income averages a little more than $16,000, federal figures show.

Not surprisingly, Williamsburg Tech is the only college in a county where just 11 percent of residents have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with nearly 26 percent statewide. Nearly 60 percent of the college’s students receive federal Pell Grants.

The college itself is tidy but modest: three single-story brick buildings, named A, B and C, on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, about a mile from the town’s main business district.

Its location is convenient for students from Kingstree High School, which is right next door. A growing number of high-school students are taking courses there for vocational training or general college preparation.

The college does get some high-school students who enroll full time after graduation, but they are often caught between the desire to earn a college credential and the necessity of earning money to support themselves and, sometimes, contribute to their household.

Jerrica Nesmith, 21, graduated in 2014 from nearby Hemingway High School and lives at home with her parents and two sisters, who are 15 and 25. Ms. Nesmith wanted to attend Claflin University, in Orangeburg, about 70 miles west of Kingstree. But the price was out of reach, she said. Instead, she enrolled full time at Williamsburg Tech to earn her associate degree while working full time at a local customer-service call center. But her work schedule didn’t allow her to continue classes, so she had to stop for a semester.

Now she is working two jobs — at the local Boys and Girls Club during the week and a gas station on weekends — and plans to finish her degree in the fall. But that will be more than three years after she first enrolled and outside the window that has been used to count toward the federal graduation rate. After that she hopes to attend Coastal Carolina University to study accounting and become a certified public accountant.

‘I Got Tired of Hurting Myself’

Other students who have in the past been missed by federal graduation data are the many working adults taking certificate or degree programs, usually part time over several years, to improve their job opportunities.

Travis Bell for The Chronicle

Josh Porter, 35, worked in his father’s heating and air-conditioning business for 20 years, he said, until it took a toll on his neck and lower back. “I got tired of hurting myself,” he said.

Now he is in his fifth semester in Williamsburg Tech’s machine-tool program and working full time as a machinist. The job may be easier on his back but the schedule has been grueling. Mr. Porter gets up at 5:30 a.m. in order to be at his job at 7 a.m. After a full work day, he goes to class two nights a week, sometimes finishing as late as 10 p.m. before driving the 40 miles home to his wife and a 15-year-old son. The same program is available at Trident Technical College near Charleston, he said, but the drive would be even worse with the traffic around the city, and the tuition is higher there.

Going to Williamsburg Tech is worth it for “the paper,” Mr. Porter said, referring to the credential that will allow him to move up in his field. “This is just the beginning,” he said.

Going to college has also been a good example for his son, who wants to be a diesel mechanic. “He sees college as something necessary,” Mr. Porter said.

Odds are good that Ms. Nesmith and Mr. Porter will succeed in their goals, if they persist and finish their programs at Williamsburg Tech.

The college’s placement rate, which measures whether students continue on to another college or get a job in their field of study, has hovered around 95 percent and has been consistently higher than the average rate for the state’s entire technical-college system, which includes 16 institutions.

Williamsburg Tech officials acknowledge that as good as this figure is, it has limitations because it measures outcomes only for those who complete a program. It doesn’t consider the students who don’t finish. To count completions for all of the college’s various certificates and diplomas would require a name-by-name search, said Clifton Elliott, the college’s vice president for academic and student affairs.

The college touts several other numbers to show its successes, such as a “graduate production rate,” retention rates from fall to spring semesters, and pass rates for the exam to become a licensed practical nurse — all of which are at or above the rates compared with the state system as a whole.

Those numbers seem to be good enough for the state, which has approved a pilot program for a tuition-free college at Williamsburg beginning in the fall.

But the question for many is whether the state’s measures make it possible to compare Williamsburg Tech to colleges beyond the borders of South Carolina, and to judge whether it is worth the millions of federal dollars it receives.

The Right Measures?

By the commonly used federal measures, however, Williamsburg Tech still looks like a troubled institution. Those numbers will change as the government begins collecting and reporting a greater level of detail on the students who come and go from colleges, including those who transfer in and out, attend part time and take as long as eight years to complete a degree or certificate.

But it will be several years before the current students are reflected in the figures, and in the meantime, community-college officials question whether they are being tarred by data that paints an unfair picture of their performance.

In addition to a very low graduation rate, the average salary of Williamsburg Tech students who receive Pell Grants is just $22,000 a decade after they first enrolled, according to figures from the College Scorecard. That’s less than the national average earnings of a high-school graduate.

But that amount is $6,000 more than the per-capita income in the county and just $6,000 less than the median income for an entire household, according to census figures, and in an area where unemployment reached nearly 18 percent in 2010.

As the economy has begun to recover, wages are slowly improving, said Jim Moore, executive director of the Williamsburg County Economic Development Board. Starting salaries in a number of industries in the area range from $24,000 to $32,000 a year, he said. And those low figures are attractive to new businesses, he said: “We’re still a bargain compared to Florence, " he said, referring to the higher wages businesses pay in the city about 40 miles away.

So, what measures should students and the public use to determine if a college is successful? And what can the government and accreditors do if a college is failing?

“It’s very hard to figure out what’s the right mix of measures,” said Ben Miller, senior director for postsecondary-education policy at the Center for American Progress.

Mr. Miller said that the federal data is too limited and researchers haven’t figured out which outcomes consistently reflect a college’s quality. For example, if a college has a high rate of student-loan defaults, it doesn’t necessarily mean the education is bad, he said, it might just mean that the program is overpriced.

Another problem is that there is really only one penalty for a low-performing college: Losing access to federal financial aid. “You can’t just close the main two-year college” for a region, he said. “We need some better set of options that can occur,” he said, such as a state forcing changes in the governance.

In fact, South Carolina is doing just that for one of its low-performing institutions, Denmark Technical College. The state system has taken over the college, which is facing financial distress and falling enrollment.

Accreditors, too, should be willing to look at a variety of metrics for performance and then provide a clearer picture of what they’re doing to help the colleges they oversee improve, Mr. Miller said. His center has led a charge to hold accreditors more accountable for their actions and standards, echoing the Obama administration’s actions to link accreditors to the outcomes of the institutions they evaluate.

‘We Would Want to Help Them Improve’

Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, which accredits Williamsburg Tech, said her organization is using information from the National Student Clearinghouse to get a more complete picture, including figures on students who transfer into colleges or attend part-time. Ms. Wheelan said most accreditors don’t have a problem with looking at student outcomes, as long as the numbers are put in context. For instance, graduation rates for community colleges in the southern region double, to about 40 percent, if you look at a six-year window using data from the clearinghouse.

Mr. Itzkowitz, the education researcher at Third Way, said one big factor in Williamsburg Tech’s favor is that students there aren’t taking out federal loans and then being saddled with debt if they don’t finish their degrees. And he agrees that the government should use a wider variety of measures to determine educational quality, ideally a “student-unit record” system that would track all college students and their education and employment outcomes.

But the bottom line is that students should be better off when they finish college than when they started, he said. “We would want to help them improve,” he said, “and if they can’t we should look at whether we should fund these schools with federal dollars.”

Ms. Chandler, dean of students at Williamsburg Tech, said shutting down her institution would leave behind many of the county’s students, who have little or no opportunity for an education aside from their local two-year college.

The message from the local high-school counselors has been to encourage the best students to attend a four-year college, she said. But the rest of the student body is not encouraged to pursue a vocational education.

In addition, internet access is limited in the county, she said, and going to an online, for-profit college comes with its own questions about debt and quality. “If a college is advertising in the afternoon during the Maury Show, be cautious,” she said.

And with no other options, the data that policy makers use to evaluate her college mean nothing for students when they consider their future.

“Our students don’t have any idea what Ipeds is,” she said, referring to the government’s main data system for higher education. “It’s not in their realm of thinking to visit other colleges. It’s too scary, especially if their parents haven’t been to college.”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.