Dive Brief:
- Presidential candidates are making college debt a key element of their education platforms, but David Kirp writes for The New York Times a better policy focus would be performance-based funding based on student outcomes.
- Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, says many colleges and universities do not use proven strategies to help students succeed, and there is large variation in graduation rates among comparable schools because of it.
- Higher graduation rates across student demographic groups have come from a focus on academic and financial supports that, in some cases, are considered a moral obligation once students are accepted.
Dive Insight:
More than half of all states now apportion at least some of their higher education funding based on student outcomes. Traditionally, colleges and universities have collected state and federal dollars simply based on how many students they enroll, providing an incentive to recruit as many students as possible. Schools that do not maintain sufficient student support infrastructure to go along with enrollment growth, however, are penalized under these formulas.
With Higher Education Act reauthorization still on the agenda for the next administration, there is room to make federal policy align with performance funding standards. The policy would have to be carefully crafted, however, as a recent study found schools may be motivated to recruit fewer at-risk students if they are more likely to be penalized for their performance.