Dive Brief:
- Education reform organization Achieve has found significant limitations to its study of college and career readiness metrics because of wide variation in state reporting requirements.
- According to eCampus News, state mandates differ in requiring information from public and private institutions and about students at both two- and four-year institutions, high school graduates who stay in-state versus go out-of-state, and college students from in-state versus out-of-state.
- States also define enrollment, remediation and persistence differently and range in requiring reporting of none, some or all of the metrics, creating a need to increase consistency for cross-state comparisons.
Dive Insight:
One problem with the United States’ federal system is the massive variation across states on a range of laws. In both the K-12 and higher education space, that makes comparison difficult. The Common Core State Standards initiative at the K-12 level came from a desire by governors and education leaders to develop more consistency across the country in what elementary and secondary students were learning and how they were being tested. Backlash in several states, however, complicated those efforts.
Aligning reporting requirements through a massive coordination across states, or by developing new federal regulations, could offer much more information about higher education institutional performance. Especially as elected officials clamor for more accountability from colleges, changes may be likely.