College Access

Student loan debt was a problem long before Occupy Wall Street protesters added it to their list of grievances. The recession hit the younger end of the workforce particularly hard: the combination of a jobless recovery, rising tuition bills and mounting debt have become a crushing burden. Total student debt today is approaching one trillion dollars — exceeding the balance due on credit cards — and is second only to mortgage debt in American households. In fact, it's the only class of debt in which defaults are increasing.

It's that time of the year again: high-school seniors around the country are anxiously awaiting the news that will change their lives -- early admission to the university of their choice. But while junior checks his email and the school's website 15 times an hour, parents are checking their savings account statements. As the recession bites into American families' incomes and makes the job search for recent graduates that much trickier, an increasing number of people are beginning to question the cost of attending colleges and universities in the United States.

The third report in the Creating a Financial Stake in College series is being released today. In “We Save, We Go to College,” William Elliott looks at the factors contributing to a child being “on course” (enrolled in or have graduated from a two- or four-year college by age 23) or experiencing “wilt,” a phenomenon that describes children who had aspirations to attend college when in high school but are not enrolled after graduating from high school.

“Creating a Financial Stake in College” is a four-part series of reports that focuses on the relationship between children’s savings and improving college success. This series examines: (1) why policymakers should care about savings, (2) the relationship between inequality and bank account ownership, (3) the connections between savings and college attendance, and (4) recommendations to refine children’s savings account proposals.

As we announced last week, the Asset Building Program and the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis are co-releasing a series of reports, Creating a Financial Stake in College, by William Elliott III on the importance of children's savings and college outcomes. The second report in the series is being released today and is available for download here. The press release from last week is also available here.

“Creating a Financial Stake in College” is a four-part series of reports that focuses on the relationship between children’s savings and improving college success. This series examines: (1) why policymakers should care about savings, (2) the relationship between inequality and bank account ownership, (3) the connections between savings and college attendance, and (4) recommendations to refine children’s savings account proposals.

The Asset Building Program and the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis (CSD) are pleased to publish a series of reports collectively titled "Creating a Financial Stake in College." Authored by William Elliott III, professor at University of Kansas School of Social Welfare, the four-part series focuses on the relationship between children's savings and improving college success.

Two businessmen walk into an auditorium full of fifth grade students and announce to the children, most from poor families, that they will all have their college educations paid for. For fans of The Office, this scene might conjurer up memories of Scott's Tots, the group of Scranton, PA students sponsored by Dunder Mifflin's regional manager Michael Scott.

Over the past two years, the higher education policy discussion has been chock full of debate over for-profit institutions. Are they high quality? Do students gain valuable skills? Should the students who attend them be eligible for federal grants?

At the request of Congress, this week the GAO released a report that focuses on student outcomes at for-profit institutions compared to their non-profit and public counterparts. The GAO’s findings mostly conform to the criticisms leveled against the industry in recent years – students from for-profit schools tended to have lower bachelor graduation rates, higher unemployment, more student loans, and less success passing licensing exams – and that may well be how the headline gets written in what has become a very polarized debate in Washington.

But there is another headline buried in this latest GAO report.

There is a severe lack of rigorous research available on student outcomes by institution type.

Rather than conduct their own study of higher education outcomes, the GAO conducted a literature review using 11 studies concerning the efficacy of for-profit institutions on a variety of outcomes. But by using pre-existing studies, the GAO faced a series of limitations. For example, while many of the studies controlled for one or two student characteristics, such as race, gender, or socio-economic status, some did not control for all of the characteristics. Because academic outcomes tend to vary widely depending on these characteristics, not including all of them in a statistical model is problematic. Similarly, some studies did not differentiate between whether a school was 2- or 4-year or whether students transferred among programs, providing a limited picture of the context in which students are educated.

Additionally, GAO researchers studied whether students from for-profit institutions are more or less likely pass 10 different types of occupational licensing exams. While this did involve original research, the study still faces several limitations. For example, because it only examines students who enter professions that require licensing exams (nurses, lawyers, cosmetologists, etc…) it does nothing to address the success of students in other fields. Due to data limitations, the study does nothing to control for student characteristics when it considers outcomes. According to the GAO, for-profit institutions tend to attract more minority and low-come students than other types of schools. Though the study concludes that non-profit and public school students do better on all but one licensing exam, an analysis that controlled for student characteristics might show something different.

The lack of solid research on student outcomes by school type is not that surprising. Until recently, research was limited by data availability as most available datasets are old, limited in scope, or small. But this will not always be the case. As states begin to improve their higher education data systems, linking K-12 data with higher education and workforce outcomes, they will open up a world of rich student-level data. In the meantime, Department of Education datasets, like the National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey (NPSAS) and the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS) provide ample opportunities for researchers looking to improve the quality of studies on these important questions.

Hopefully researchers will see this GAO report as a call to action. The unknowns surrounding student outcomes at all school types are too great and the costs to taxpayers and students too large to leave these questions unanswered.