Do “completion grants” actually improve college completion?
Over the past decade, growing numbers of institutions have begun offering microgrants to students with financial need who were close to graduating, hoping that the money would help them finish college. Georgia State University, which pioneered this practice starting in 2011 with its Panther Retention Grants program, is among those that have reported notable success, as have several other members of the University Innovation Alliance. Completion grants are also a key strategy promoted by the year-old National Institute for Student Success, which I featured this past fall.
So what to make of the findings from a newly published large-scale study of the efficacy of completion grants at 11 public universities that found the grants did nothing to improve graduation rates? “Completion grants in this study did not move the needle in a meaningful way, on average or for specific groups of students,” the study’s authors write. “There is also no clear evidence suggesting that program effects varied or promoted equity.”
Honestly, I’m a little confused, too. But after talking with both the lead researcher on the six-person team that did the study, as well as some folks who believe strongly in the merits of such grants, several important lessons are evident. And these lessons apply well beyond completion grants. I get into the details below, but you can probably guess the overarching theme: How programs are carried out matters a lot.
But first some details on the study itself, which was funded with a $4-million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Begun in 2018, the study followed the academic trajectory of more than 14,000 students who were at least three quarters of their way toward their degrees. More than 2,200 of them were awarded grants ranging from $223 to $3,000 (the average was $1,200). The institutions expected most of the students in the study would graduate within a year. The grants “did not substantively improve the odds that near completers would graduate more quickly or at all,” the study found; retention rates for those who got the grants were only about 1 percent higher than for those who didn’t.
Case closed? Kill those grants? Not exactly. While the main findings might appear rather damning, the study itself identifies some factors that could account for the findings. For one, the 11 institutions also awarded a lot of other financial aid and other student support, too. “Results might differ,” the study notes, if the grants are deployed at colleges where there were fewer other resources for students.
The authors also offer several suggestions that could make completion grants more effective, such as using a broader set of sources to determine students’ financial need, since standard financial-aid-office data might not reflect the extent of students’ hardships, and expanding the academic-eligibility requirements rather than restricting access “to students already likely to succeed.”
The paper on the study includes several references to all the attention being paid to completion grants over the past several years. It did make me wonder if there was more to that than just helpful context. Perhaps some bubble-bursting ambitions at play? (Not judging; I’ve been known to enjoy some of that myself.)
“The completion-grant thing was really hot” at the time the researchers began this study, Sara Goldrick-Rab, the lead author, told me. And as she acknowledged, “I came in saying, ‘There’s a lot of hype.’’’ But that doesn’t invalidate the findings. Colleges need to understand if the money they’re spending is paying off, Goldrick-Rab said, “We have to be willing to stop doing, or adjusting” when evidence calls for it.
Timothy Renick, who helped create the Panther grants and now runs the national student-success institute, said the experience has been different at Georgia State, where the university has given out more than 20,000 completion grants and recently found that Panther Grant recipients graduate at higher rates than students who didn’t face financial challenges. “The way you implement the program makes a difference,” Renick said.
For example, he noted that Georgia State doesn’t just use criteria like financial need and number of credits students have earned in selecting its grant recipients, but also factors like students’ past record of academic progress.
To be successful, Renick added, “it means your data has to be great,” and that’s still a challenge for many institutions. But, he said, it’s “not out of reach.”
Georgia State did not participate in the study but some UIA campuses were. The organization’s chief executive, Bridget Burns, noted that institutions have had varying success with completion grants, as well as with other innovations, such as proactive advising, because even when programs are designed to be applied in a common way, “every campus has their own approach.”
Georgia State’s success, Burns said, shows that the grants can work when carefully applied.
College attainment is on the rise.
Nearly 54 percent of adults in the United States now have some postsecondary education, according to the Lumina Foundation’s Stronger Nation website, updated with new data on Tuesday. That figure reflects “solid progress,” toward the foundation’s goal of 60 percent by 2025, said Courtney Brown, the foundation’s vice president for impact and planning.
And for the first time since the foundation has been tracking postsecondary attainment, for the two-year period that concluded in 2021, every state plus Puerto Rico and D.C. achieved gains in the proportion of adults with college degrees. “We’ve never seen that before,” Brown said.
Overall national attainment increased by nearly two percentage points from 2019 to 2021, and while Lumina counts educational credentials besides degrees in tracking progress toward its goal, nearly all of the increase reported for this period was in degrees. Educational attainment for Hispanic adults increased by 2.5 percentage points, but even with that, some wide gaps persist based on race and ethnicity. Nationally, nearly 46 percent of all adults in the United States have a college degree, but for Black adults the figure is about 34 percent, for Hispanic adults it’s almost 28 percent, and for Native American or Alaska Natives adults, it’s about 25 percent.
This is the first time Lumina has fully updated its tracking since 2019 (the U.S. Census data for 2020 wasn’t complete enough to do so), but in September 2021, the foundation did make some upgrades to its Stronger Nation site to allow tracking of attainment by age and by race and ethnicity. At the time, I noted that attainment of adults ages 24 to 34 was higher than attainment of adults over all. That trend continued in 2021, with nearly 56 percent of younger adults now holding some postsecondary credential. Lumina plans to continue tracking this data annually at least until 2025 data become available, most likely after the fall of 2026.
See you in D.C. next week at the community-college summit?
Will you be at the Community College National Legislative Summit next week in Washington, D.C. ? I’ll be around on Monday — including taking part in a panel at 2:15 p.m. If you’ve got some innovation or other news to share, please find me and say hi.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on Twitter (yeah, for now at least, I’m still there), @GoldieStandard is my handle.
