When President Obama announced last month that he would spend $9-billion on grants to improve community colleges, campus leaders knew the money would come with strings attached. But the extent of those strings took some college presidents by surprise.
The day after the president’s announcement, the U.S. House of Representatives unveiled a sweeping student-aid bill that laid out a series of benchmarks that colleges and states would have to meet to receive the money. Under the measure, which is awaiting floor action, applicants would have to set goals tied to program completion, work-force preparation, and job placement. Grantees could choose their own benchmarks, but they would have to be approved by the education secretary.
Reaction to the benchmarks has been mixed, but even the billions of dollars in aid in the bill haven’t shielded it from criticism.
Many community-college presidents concede that they should graduate more students, and most campus leaders and analysts say it’s reasonable for the government to expect results in return for the infusion of federal aid.
“With this level of resources, clearly you should have performance expectations,” says Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education.
Still, some college presidents and analysts worry that the bill’s benchmarks could have unintended consequences, rewarding institutions and states that set their sights low or encouraging colleges to tighten their admissions standards to meet graduation goals. Other leaders fear that the bill would shift the balance of power from state and local governing boards to the federal government, setting the stage for federal meddling in curricula.
And still other college leaders wonder whether $9-billion, as substantial a sum as it is, is enough to accomplish the sort of broad change that the president envisions.
Access vs. Success
The bill’s use of benchmarks as an accountability tool represents a significant shift in the way federal aid is awarded to institutions. While many federal programs require colleges to meet general performance standards, none require recipients to negotiate individual goals for improvement, as the House’s community-college plan would.
Applying benchmarks to college performance would also profoundly change the incentive structure for higher education. Most state and local aid to community colleges is based on the number of students enrolled; under the bill, federal grants would be awarded in part based on the number of students who graduate. That shift would give colleges an incentive to focus more on outcomes, analysts say.
In some ways, the benchmarking approach builds on the work of Achieving the Dream, a foundation-financed program that seeks to improve remedial education and raise graduation rates at community colleges. While Achieving the Dream does not make aid conditional on meeting benchmarks, participating colleges use data to set goals and measure their progress over time.
Karen A. Stout, president of Montgomery County Community College, in Pennsylvania, one of more than 100 colleges in the program, says the House bill would “reinforce, on a national level, the work that is happening on individual campuses.”
“The idea of setting goals and benchmarks is exactly what’s required for this country to move forward,” she said. “Where we are is not where we need to be.”
Before joining Achieving the Dream, Ms. Stout said, her institution knew how many students graduated each year but not how they got to that milestone. Now her college tracks students along the way, to see which factors contribute to their success, or failure. Officials have used the data to craft intervention strategies and have seen significant improvements in retention, particularly among black males, she says.
Whether that approach succeeds at a national level will depend in large part on how the institution-by-institution benchmarks are set and how colleges go about meeting them. If the education secretary allows colleges to set modest, easily achievable goals, the results could be disappointing. But if colleges choose—or are encouraged—to set more-ambitious goals, they may be tempted to lower their standards for graduation or tighten admissions, forsaking their open-access missions and the low-income, first-generation students that community colleges have traditionally served.
“If you’re going to be reimbursed based on completion, the needle is shifting from access to success,” says James Rose, chair of the National Council of State Directors of Community Colleges. “Obviously, you want to get students who have the best prospects for success. Then you start to corrupt the access part.”
To prevent that from happening, colleges and the federal government must set meaningful, yet reasonable, benchmarks that take into account differences in institutional demographics, analysts say.
“If you’re enrolling students who face more barriers, you shouldn’t be penalized for that,” says Thomas R. Bailey, an economist and founding director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. At the same time, “you have to have benchmarks that make you stretch to achieve something more than what you’ve done.”
But allowing institutions to set individual goals raises other issues. If each college sets its own benchmarks, the government will have no way of comparing institutions on performance.
Fearing Federal Mandates
Other college leaders say they’re uneasy about the bill’s expansion of federal oversight. Richard G. Carpenter, chancellor of the Lone Star College system, in Texas, says he is “more excited than concerned” about the president’s plan but worries about the potential loss of local control.
“Most decisions are best made from the point of action, not from afar,” he says.
David M. Mathews, president of Southwestern Michigan College, argues that local boards are more responsive to regional economies and work-force needs than the federal government would be.
“My rural community college faces very different challenges than a big urban college,” he says. “So what we do in the southwest corner of Michigan may be very different than what’s done in Miami, Fla.”
“I don’t know anyone who thinks you get much wiser mandates once they come from Washington,” he adds.
Mr. Mathews says the reason there hasn’t been more of an outcry from his peers in response to the president’s plan is because it’s been “sugar-coated with money.” When the money runs out, he says, “we’re going to be left with a lot of federal oversight of our nation’s community colleges.”
Some private-college leaders share those concerns and worry that the benchmarking approach taken with the community-college plan could spill over into other federal programs. In a letter sent to its member colleges last month, David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, wrote that the president’s plans could “encroach upon the independence of all institutions.”
“These plans also raise concerns that the federal government may become involved in college curricula—a step that could seriously erode the academic independence and autonomy that is at the cornerstone of our higher-education system,” he wrote.
Mr. Merisotis, of Lumina, says he supports benchmarking as long as it doesn’t stray into federal curricular control. “It’s an easy thing to say but a hard thing to do,” he says.
The key, he says, will be for colleges to ensure the law and the regulations that deal with it contain safeguards barring the government from dictating what colleges teach.
But Ms. Stout and Mr. Rose say they see no threat to institutional autonomy in the bill, in part because it would allow colleges to choose the benchmarks by which they’re judged.
“I don’t see the heavy hand of a centralized government saying here’s what we want you to teach,” Mr. Rose says.
Meanwhile, some college leaders question whether the money that the plan would provide is enough to achieve the president’s goal of graduating five million more students by 2020. They note that $9-billion, while nothing to sneeze at, represents less than one percent of community colleges’ collective budgets.
“It’s not much money to make a lot happen,” says Robert G. Templin Jr., president of Northern Virginia Community College.
Like many community-college leaders, he worries that the federal funds will be offset by state budget cuts. While the bill would bar legislatures from using the grants to supplant state aid to institutions, it’s not clear whether it would prevent lawmakers from cutting other areas of their higher-education budgets, such as student aid.
Still, some college leaders say the federal infusion could have an effect beyond its dollar amount, by enhancing the reputation of community colleges and raising their profile nationally.
“To have this recognition of what we do is so critically important,” says Jerry Sue Thornton, president of Cuyahoga Community College, in Ohio. “I think it will help many people select community colleges because the president says they’re a great place to go.”
