The public conversation about college affordability tends to center on big, scary numbers, like the $50,000 some colleges now charge in tuition, or the $1.5 trillion Americans collectively owe in student loans. But college officials working to improve completion rates know that much smaller sums of money can play an outsize role in student success. The difference between graduating or dropping out could hinge on a student’s ability to come up with just a thousand dollars.
That’s the typical size of the “completion grant” that the University of Central Florida gave each of approximately 80 seniors it identified this fall as being at risk of leaving because of a relatively small financial shortfall. Some of the students — all of whom were on track to graduate within two semesters — had exhausted their financial-aid eligibility, or bumped into a state requirement that students who amass a certain number of credits must pay a surcharge to take additional courses. In any event, officials hope that the completion grants will allow the students to graduate as planned.
If it works, students won’t be the only ones who benefit. Under the state’s performance-based funding system, Central Florida’s appropriation is pegged to its completion rate. And that’s hardly the only reason the university is pushing to get more of its students to complete their degrees.
Across the country, colleges are under pressure to help their students succeed and graduate, even as they’re serving greater numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Increasing the proportion of Americans with college credentials is widely seen as a key way to maintain the country’s global competitiveness — and secure individuals’ financial futures, too. Keeping students enrolled, of course, also brings needed revenue to colleges. Despite all of that, just 57 percent of students complete their degrees within six years of enrolling. Even more troubling, completion rates are lower for low-income students and underrepresented minorities.
Improving completion is a complex, multifaceted problem, and colleges have taken a variety of steps to address it. Some are using data to track students’ progress and proactively intervene when they run into trouble. Programs to support students in and outside of the classroom have proliferated, geared toward entire student bodies or at-risk groups like black or Latino males. Some colleges have made student success the responsibility of a high-profile position on campus, whether as a stand-alone job as chief student success officer or as part of the vice president for enrollment management’s portfolio.
In this environment, a program like completion grants has obvious appeal. No, the grants are not a silver bullet to fix the completion crisis. But students who’ve made it most of the way to a degree are the low-hanging fruit of student-success efforts.
Central Florida modeled its program after one at Georgia State University that has gotten a fair bit of buzz. The two institutions are now part of a broader effort to scale up and study completion grants, with an eye toward developing best practices that could help other colleges adopt such programs.
Colleges are sometimes criticized for failing to collaborate where it really counts. But with so many of them in the same position — they must learn to better serve a diverse student body, or risk becoming obsolete — that may be starting to change.
Georgia State has been working to improve student success for some 15 years now. Efforts like learning communities and peer tutoring kept more students enrolled. But then university officials noticed a worrisome trend: Under state policy, the university had to drop students who couldn’t pay their balance after the first week of classes, and the number of students in that predicament was growing.
Georgia State officials dug into the data to figure out who those students were. They found some surprises. Conventional wisdom suggests that the longer students have been enrolled, the less likely they are to drop out. But in 2010, data revealed that the biggest chunk of students leaving for financial reasons were seniors, says Timothy M. Renick, vice president for enrollment management and student success. Hundreds of them owed less than $1,000. This realization sparked the beginning of Georgia State’s Panther Retention Grant program.
The financial case for the grants is easy to make, Renick says. When Georgia State gives a student on the verge of dropping out $900 to help pay tuition, it gets that $900 right back. It also keeps all the other money the student was going to pay the university that term — and any subsequent ones.
More importantly, the stopgap funding appears to help students graduate. Georgia State found that 78 percent of seniors who got a completion grant in 2016-17 graduated within the next year, Renick says. While there’s no control group — the university doesn’t want to withhold the money from students who qualify — Renick is confident few of them would have finished without it.
Thanks in part to Georgia State’s evangelism, completion grants are spreading. This year the University Innovation Alliance, a coalition of public universities that counts both Georgia State and Central Florida as members, is testing out different versions of the program. The 11 universities in the group are in regular contact during the project. Each is in a different state, and one goal of the project is seeing how completion grants operate in different policy climates. Knowing which grants worked best where will help other colleges that want to give them a try.
The alliance isn’t the only group of colleges collaborating on completion grants. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities has been interested in the grants for years, and released a report examining colleges’ programs a couple of years ago. The association is now participating in a study funded by the U.S. Department of Education. That project will examine whether completion grants boost graduation rates, how giving students money near the end of college compares with alternative approaches, and how to best build such programs, says Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher-education policy and sociology at Temple University and principal investigator for the study.
Some of the universities in the innovation alliance have also been involved in APLU’s efforts, notes Shari Garmise, the association’s vice president for urban initiatives. It’s an indication that some colleges, at least, are serious about collaborating to improve student success.
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
