Government Defense Proposal to Track College Degree Completion
According to a March 12 article by Clifford Adelman titled, “Making Graduation Rates Matter,” that appeared in Inside Higher Ed, “Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recently wrote a letter to the editor of The Detroit News in defense of her higher education commission’s proposal for a national ‘student unit record’ system to track all college entrants to produce a more accurate picture of degree completion. ‘Currently,’ she said, ‘we can tell you anything about first-time, full time college students who have never transferred–about half of the nation’s undergraduates.’ It took a long time to bring Education Department officials to a public acknowledgment of what its staff always knew: that the so-called ‘Congressional Methodology’ of our national college graduation rate survey doesn’t pass the laugh test. If the Secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education made one truly compelling recommendation, it was for a fuller and better accounting through student unit records.”
Who is Tracked?
Adelman reported, “There are four bins of graduates in this formula, and they account for just about everyone the Secretary justly wants us to count. They count your daughter’s friends who start out as part-time students — who are not counted now. They count your 31-year-old brother-in-law who starts in the winter term — who is not counted now. They count active duty military whose first college courses are delivered by the University of Maryland’s University College at overseas locations — who are not counted now. They count your nephew who transferred from Oklahoma State University to the University of Rhode Island when he became interested in marine biology — and who is not counted now. And so forth.”
Does the Formula Work?
According to Adelman, who worked for 27 years doing research work for the U.S. Department of Education and recently left to become a senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, “So, in rewriting the graduation rate formula in the coming reauthorization of the Higher Education Amendments, Congress should also ask all institutions to make a good faith effort to find the students who left their school and enrolled elsewhere to determine whether these students, too, graduated. The National Student Clearinghouse will help in many of these cases, the Consortium for Student Retention Data Exchange will help in others, state higher education system offices will help in still others, and we might even get the interstate compacts (e.g. the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education) into the act. Require our postsecondary institutions to report the students they find in a fourth bin. They will not be taking credit for credentials, but will be acknowledged as contributing to student progress.
“No, this is not as full an account as we would get under a student unit record system, but it would be darned close — and all it takes is a rewriting of a bad formula.”
It is important to keep up to date on student loan news. What goes on in government and in your state can have a great impact on your student loans and your college education.
For all the information you need about student loans, go to www.nextstudent.com.
Be sure to tune in next Wednesday for my next blog on student loan legislation in the news.
Student Loan Girl