Public Education

With the economy stuck in neutral, tuition prices and student loan debt skyrocketing, and parents and students increasingly questioning the value of a college degree, our public institutions urgently need a different approach to the challenge or educating an increasingly diverse mix of students at a reasonable cost. Today, New America's Education Policy Program released The Next Generation University, a policy report about the future of public higher education. The report comes at a time when too many public universities are failing to respond to the nation's higher education crisis. Rather than expanding enrollment and focusing limited dollars on the neediest of students, many institutions are instead restricting enrollments and encouraging the use of student-aid dollars on merit awards. But, according to the report, some schools are breaking the mold by boldly restructuring operating costs and creating clear, accelerated pathways for students.

The report focuses on six public research universities: Arizona State University, University at Buffalo, University of California at Riverside, University of Central Florida, Georgia State University, and the University of Texas at Arlington. These universities are continuing their commitment to world class research while increasing enrollment and graduation rates, even as the investments from their states have declined. 

The report includes case studies on each of the six universities, which were selected after an analysis of federal education data, site visits, and interviews. Based on similarities in their approaches to reform, the report's recommendations include:  

At the Institutional Level

1. Increase size to ensure broad access, test new ideas from pedagogy to student services, and serve growing populations.
2. Create direct connections between two- and four-year colleges to ease access for transfer students.

At the State Level

1. Guarantee a low net-price for low-income students.
2. Adopt performance-based funding.
3. Create transfer policies that encourage completion.
4. Ensure students in the K-12 pipeline are prepared.

At the National Level

1. Develop Next Generation Leaders for Next Generation Universities.
2. Acknowledge that external recognition remains important in higher education, and provide recognition for increasing access and student success.
3. Create a demonstration program that challenges four-year public higher education institutions to innovate.

These recommendation and lessons will be featured at an event held at the New America Foundation from 10am to 3pm. You can learn more about the event and watch a livestream here. Follow the conversation on twitter using #NextGenU.

Download the full report here.

In addition to the report, New America has released two related issue briefs:

In "Technology and the Next Generation University," New America's Rachel Fishman explores the barriers to technology-enhanced education and presents promising practices Next Generation Universities employ to overcome them.

In "Formation of the Next Generation University: Role of State and System Policy," HCM Strategists' Iris Palmer, Kristin Conklin, and Nate Johnson explore how transfer policy, financial aid, net price, performance funding and the K-12 pipeline affect Next Generation Universities within their state context. It makes recommendations for state and higher-education system policymakers on how to ensure public institutions are meeting the needs of the state.

HCM Strategists, in conjunction with the release of The Next Generation University has developed a new interactive tool:

Next Generation Universities: Select Dimensions of Research University Output, Productivity and Efficiency 2006-2011

This dashboard, created by HCM Strategists and Postsecondary Analytics, includes a selection of measures of public research university performance through the great recession, showing how they have fared over time and in comparison to the sector as a whole. It helps illustrate the very different ways research universities have experienced and responded to the challenges of the last several years, and which institutions have been able to sustain or grow the number of students served in spite of the financial challenges they faced.

Please note that the dashboard is a large file (2.5 mb) and may take up to a minute to load. It requires Adobe Flash, which is already installed in most browsers.

Also released at the event are two conference papers from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University: 1) More Students, More Degrees, More Dollars: How Universities Can Close Budget Gaps while Benefiting Students; and 2) The High Price of Excess Credits: How New Approaches Could Help Students and Schools.

As the nation struggles to find new ways to increase college access and completion rates while lowering costs, a handful of "Next Generation Universities" are embracing key strategies that make them models for national reform.

Guest post by Danielle Kehl and Benjamin Lennett from New America's Open Technology Institute.

For a kid growing up in rural northern Wisconsin, attending the state university offers a key avenue to broaden career opportunities or gain skills to better run the family farm. In recent years, as public institutions like the University of Wisconsin (UW) have increasingly embraced online courses and flexible degree options, the university’s resources may seem more accessible than ever—but only if you live in a part of the state that has adequate and affordable broadband.

UW has long been devoted to serving the public interest, cultivating one of the biggest and most ambitious extension programs in the country over the last century. “The Wisconsin Idea,” first articulated by Governer Robert LaFollette and University President Charles Van Hise, was a vision for the university in which its academic activities were connected to every local community. Van Hise declared in 1904: “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state.” It suggests that “the boundaries of campus are the boundaries of the state.”

This post originally appeared in New America's blog In the Tank

When I was an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took approximately 8-10 large lecture classes. I remember walking into my first lecture as a freshman—Introduction to International Relations—and choosing between a seat on the first floor or in the balcony. I chose the first floor, somewhere in the middle. The “classroom” that day was brimming with more than 500 students. As the professor went over the syllabus, it became evident that attendance at lecture was “strongly encouraged” as there would be no way to quickly take attendance. By the second lecture, there were many empty seats.

Many freshmen and sophomores who attend public universities find themselves stuck in these large, introductory courses. With no one to check up on them or give them personal attention, many fall through the cracks—they may stop attending class and then do poorly on exams, or they may fall behind and withdraw from the course.

With this in mind, when I began to research online courses and credentials at public universities for a policy report, I assumed I would find the same problems endemic to large lectures—high attrition and low success rates.  Instead, I found something that surprised me:  While some online courses may suffer the same problems as lectures, several universities have discovered simple ways to keep students engaged once they start exhibiting drop-out warning signs, like neglecting assignments or lectures. In many instances, the data collected about online students by some institutions create a safety net to prevent drop outs where none exists in a face-to-face lecture-hall setting.

Guest post by Mandy Zatynski

Officials at eCore, the University System of Georgia’s online curriculum, collect heaps of student data every year: individual course completion rates, withdrawal rates, and even the number of those identified as at-risk each semester.

Every day, Melanie Clay, dean of eCore, says she looks at the dropout rate and compares it to the rate at the same time last year. “If it’s not going in the direction we want it to be going in, then we … try to analyze why until we figure out why,” she told me when I visited her office at the University of West Georgia last fall. It could be the online platform (Is it user friendly?), the instructor (Is s/he responsive?), or the student success adviser – the person tasked with calling (yes, on the telephone – twice, then regular contacts by email) every student identified as at-risk. The student success adviser has to be caring, but convincing. Dean Clay knows online courses are just as important as face-to-face courses, even though it’s easier to forget about them.

Yesterday, my colleague Rachel Fishman released a new policy paper, entitled State U Online. Besides synthesizing a progression of steps for building and sophisticating a public online education model,the paper provides a compelling look back at distance education in the U.S. as a nearly 300-year-old phenomenon, not a 20-year-old blip. This historic perspective strongly suggests the answer to a question skeptics of online education continue to pose: Is technology-based education yet another passing fad? While State U Online shows technology-based education is here to stay, one reason the question has persisted may be that faculty themselves are reticent to face the pursuant question, which is whether there will be a place for them in the academic workforce of the future. The answer is that it depends on the structure of faculty work and, in public institutions, what the state hopes to gain from it.

Online learning has become a permanent fixture of our system of higher education. Yet, public colleges and universities, which educate the vast majority of college students, have been visibly slow to embrace it.  Many of these institutions were founded with a mission to serve their citizens, including those unable to attend in residence. Yet even as the technological means to achieve this goal reaches new heights, public universities too often shy away from the challenge.

Today the New America Foundation and Education Sector released State U Online, a report that examines the history of distance learning at public colleges dating back to the eighteenth century.  This paper not only reviews the online offerings at many public colleges and universities, but it also identifies consistent patterns that can help institutional and state-system leaders chart a path forward for the online future. The analysis identifies five steps that institutions and states can take to build a coherent system-wide State U Online. Each step builds on those before it, leading toward increasingly integrated systems in which students can move freely among institutions within a state and eventually beyond state lines. The steps are (access the infographic here):

In January, we held an event called Turnaround 2.0 to draw attention to the challenge of turning around elementary schools without improving the early years – including the early grades of elementary school – when children are building their foundational skills for academic success. Now that we have seen the outlines of President Obama's preschool proposal, these questions are hotter than ever. Depending on how and if Obama's plan moves forward, improvements to elementary schools may come more easily (though, no doubt, much work would still be required to improve instruction across the PreK-3rd grades.)

Last week, a district court in Texas ruled in favor of more than 600 Texas school districts, finding that the state’s education finance system is unconstitutional. This is nothing new for Texas – all told, six school finance lawsuits have been tried against the state since 1984, the last in 2005. Each round of lawsuits has prompted the legislature to tinker with the funding formulas. That has added complexity and apparently exacerbated underlying inequities.

Using data and statistics from the New America Foundation’s Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP), we were able to reveal that the inequities across Texas school districts are in fact significant. Worse yet, the inequities have indeed increased over the past several years.

The latest litigation in Texas was brought on by $5.4 billion in cuts that the legislature made to public education in the 2012-13 biennium. The cuts break down into three figures: (1) $2.2 billion from shifting public funds for schools to the 2014-15 biennium; (2) $1.8 billion from assuming no student enrollment growth over the two years; and (3) $1.4 billion from the elimination of programs such as the state pre-kindergarten grant program, as well as reductions in many other public education programs.

While these cuts sparked the latest lawsuit, the districts involved in the suit have indicated that restoring these funds would not be enough to fix the broken system. The court ruled that the state not only provides insufficient funding for education, but that it is unfairly distributed to school districts. In other words, increasing funding through an inequitable formula does not, by definition, make education spending more equitable.

The FEBP data make that abundantly clear. In 2006, per-pupil spending in Texas varied on average 9.3 percent, or $693, from district to district. Three years later in 2009, per-pupil spending varied on average 9.7 percent, or $831, from district to district. And this growing disparity is even more evident at the local level.

Consider Penelope Independent School District. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the Waco-area district is relatively property-poor – it gets only 14 percent of its per-student revenue from local taxes. And overall, it spent just over $9,300 per student in 2009 (slightly above the state average). Meanwhile, Glen Rose Independent School District outside of Dallas received more than 83 percent of its per-pupil revenue from local sources. That district spent more than $11,300 per student in 2009.

But those figures don’t necessarily align with the two districts’ needs. Whereas nearly 75 percent of Penelope ISD’s student body was eligible for free and reduced price lunches (a proxy for student poverty), only about 40 percent of Glen Rose ISD’s students were eligible. Penelope students struggled more in 2009 state achievement tests, too, with only half of fourth-grade students proficient in reading and math, while Glen Rose fourth graders were 88 and 95 percent proficient in reading and math, respectively.

Of course, research has shown that the payoff from spending more money on students is not always improved academic success. But wealthier districts tend to be at an advantage in hiring more experienced teachers and providing extra support services. Fair and equitable funding should be an essential element of state education policies.

The inequalities in Texas’s school finance formulas are mirrored in federal and state funding formulas around the country – and this week’s ruling is just the latest update to a long history of attempts to ensure equal access to quality education.

Click here to search for your state or school district.

For nearly a year, the PreK-3^rd Grade National Work Group has hosted free webinars on how to reduce the achievement gap by focusing on children’s early years: pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, first, second and third grades. The last of these webinars, Scale and Sustainability: Implications for State and District Policy, will be held this Wednesday, Jan. 30, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. EST.