New Democrat Update - March 2009
NEW DEMOCRATS ONLINE
The Colorado DLC has launched “New Democrats Online,” a new series of website-based interviews and discussions. NDO’s premiere is an in-depth discussion with Colorado Senate President Peter Groff. He talks candidly about the historic election of President Barack Obama, this legislative session, the changing nature of African-American politics, where we go from here on race and much, much more.
Get online with the Senate President. Better yet, tell us what you think about the Senator’s views, the “New Democrats Online” series and let us know what people and topics interest you for future programs.
ECONOMIC GROWTH PARTNER
In the face of a worsening economic crisis, the Colorado legislature has gotten off to a fast start on an agenda to jumpstart the state’s economy. The Joint Select Committee on Job Creation and Economic Growth, headed by chair State Senator Gail Schwartz and vice chair State Representative Joe Rice, has created a bundle of initiatives that will help create jobs and get Colorado moving again.
Of course, the work never ends. The state’s budget crisis itself presents an opportunity that lawmakers must not pass up - making Colorado’s higher education system a full-fledged partner in economic development.
As state money for higher education shrinks, college presidents are asking for more managerial and operational autonomy from the Capitol. In a grand bargain, Governor Bill Ritter and the legislature should give it to them in exchange for a new and different regime of accountability measures focused on outcomes that help Colorado’s economy and families.
Increasing the number of college graduates has never been more important. Graduating from college has become essential to a middle-class lifestyle. College graduates now make nearly twice as much as high school graduates (students who attend but do not graduate from college do not do much better than those with a high school diploma). For today's 22-year-old, that translates into a million-dollar bonus over the course of a career.
Just as important, states with the highest percentage of adults with college degrees have the highest growth in income nationwide and the lowest rates of unemployment, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. By promoting innovation and generating more high-value, high-paid jobs, "economic growth is faster in states where the proportion of the population over the age of 25 possesses college degrees," according to a conservative Michigan think tank.
As President Obama indicated on February 24 in his address to a Joint Session of Congress, “Right now, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma. And yet, just over half of our citizens have that level of education. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized nation. And half of the students who begin college never finish.”
State institutions must become more results-oriented and cost-effective. While some higher education outcome information is gathered in Colorado, the current system is far from adequate. Besides, even with a comprehensive reporting system, measurement is only step one. Step two is ensuring that the information that comes from measurement is meaningful. Otherwise, the data will mean far less than it should to the general public and higher education community.
A reporting system, at minimum, should track "value added" learning growth between students' first and final years. For example, the University of Texas administers the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to measure critical thinking, analytical reasoning and communication skills. All public postsecondary institutions in Wyoming use either the CLA or the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) examination to assess learning in writing, mathematics, and critical thinking. South Dakota requires all students attending public four-year schools who have completed 48 credit hours to take the CAAP and compare it with their ACT scores.
Workforce outcomes by institution can be tracked. Florida has knit together its education and employment databases, allowing calculation of a range of student employment outcomes (job placement, starting salaries, etc.) for the graduates of individual colleges and universities. Some states report success rates on professional examinations required for certification or licensure in a particular field.
To make a new comprehensive accountability system meaningful to schools, the legislature should tie a significant percentage of higher education funding to a combination of desired outcomes, especially how many students the institution graduates, rather than the current way - how many it enrolls. One fair way to do that could be modeled after Ohio’s and California’s systems which determine the difference between an institution's actual graduation rate and its statistically expected graduation rate by factoring in student demographics and prior achievement.
Minnesota schools report the percentage of full-time and part-time students who persist in college to their second, third, and fourth year. It also tracks these numbers by family-income brackets. For all students who leave a public institution without completing a degree, North Dakota administers exit surveys that ask why. Virginia schools report time-to-degree as the length of time in years it takes graduates at four-year institutions to reach completion. Other states - California is one example - report credit efficiency, which tracks how many credits it actually takes for students to get a degree.
Given the likelihood of a tight state budget for the next few years, today may seem like an inopportune time to make so-called "base" funding subject to performance. But history shows that tying performance to surplus funds enjoyed in boom times results in weak incentives and ephemeral programs - institutional leaders have fewer incentives to make tough choices if only "bonus" money is at stake, and those funds often disappear when fiscal fortunes turn for the worse. Besides, the fewer resources that are available, the more important it becomes to invest those funds in improving student outcomes.
Funding can also be tied to a variety of measures including student outcome data disaggregated by race/ethnicity, gender, and economic status. Maryland reports how scholarship dollars are distributed among students with different levels of family income, focusing on the percentage of state, federal, and institutional aid dollars provided to students with the greatest financial need. Similarly, Arizona tracks financial aid, average tuition, aid without loans, gift aid, and institutional aid by family income categories.
There is a rich array of other useful information that can be collected and reported. Other possibilities include the percentage of undergraduate courses taught by full-time or tenured/tenure-track professors, class size, classroom usage percentages, the assignable square feet per full-time equivalent student, the ratio of administrative personnel to faculty members, endowment per full-time equivalent student, and annual fund-raising figures compared to public Association of American Universities (AAU) peer institutions.
To make all of this data useful to students and the general public, education officials would have to aggressively interpret the information, contextualize it, publicize it and make it available in a user-friendly way. Minnesota, Kentucky, and Georgia have created websites that show a limited number of key higher education indicators in easy-to-understand graphical fashion.
Robust and meaningful accountability would transform the very nature of Colorado’s higher education system and increase its value to the state’s economy and families. In times like this, we cannot afford to overlook such an important opportunity.