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New IPEDS Enrollment, Price of Attendance & Completions Data Released

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Today, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) published a report summarizing enrollment, price of attendance, and completions data submitted by all Title IV institutions to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) in fall 2011.

Here are some of the findings:

  • Between 2009-10 and 2011-12, the average undergraduate tuition and required fees at 4-year public institutions nationwide (after adjusting for inflation) increased more for in-state students (9 percent increase) than for out-of-state students (6 percent increase). This is consistent with the UW’s experience, where the tuition increase (after adjusting for inflation) was 31.1% ($2,509.05) for residents and 9.8% ($2,509.55) for non-residents over that period.
  • In 2010-11, of the 25,645,985 undergraduate students enrolled in Title IV institutions in the nation, 50.9% attended 4-year institutions – of these, 59.7% attended public institutions. The public share of the 3,876,611 graduate students enrolled in Title IV institutions was 47.6%.
  • Females constitute 57.0% of the undergraduate and 60.2% of the graduate students in the nation. They also account for 58% of the degrees granted by all 4-year institutions.

More on College Affordability

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The Institute for Higher Education Policy recently published a brief addressing the complexity and confusion surrounding the issue of college affordability. Written by Sandy Baum and Saul Schwartz, Is College Affordable? In Seach of a Meaningful Definition succinctly addresses several familiar issues:

  • The conflation of increased or high prices with low affordability (where the former is dealt with by all, the latter is dependent on a family’s resources).
  • Misperceptions about cost/affordability created by the hard to discern difference between sticker prices and net prices for any given family.
  • Difficulties shifting from perceiving public higher education as a service heavily subsidized for all to a service that parents and students are primarily reponsible for funding.
  • Lack of framing affordability of higher educaiton within the context of a long-term investment that you pay for over time with an expectation that the long-term return warrants the cost.

The authors provide some general policy recommendations, including simplifying financial aid and pricing processes, communicating more clearly the monetary and non-monetary payoffs associated with higher education,  strengthening protections in cases where higher education does not pay off for some students, and increasing investment in public subsidies aimed at lowering the price for low-income students.

This brief is a quick and valuable read. For more information, check out coverage of the brief at Inside Higher Ed as well.

Federal Report Makes Economic Case for Higher Ed

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The US Departments of Treasury and Education teamed up to analyze higher education and economic data, and released a short report that highlights the following familiar points:

  • Education is correlated with higher earnings: median weekly earnings for a worker with a BA degree are now 64% higher than for a worker with only a high school degree.
  • Education is key to socio-economic mobility: almost half of children born into the bottom income quintile remain there as adults compared to only 20% of those who receive a degree.
  • Funding cuts result in higher tuition: Public funding for institutions has, on average, declined from 60% of revenue to less than 40% over two decades while tuition revenue has increased by almost the same amount of the decline.

As a result of the above, federal financial aid has become an increasingly important contributor to college affordability, comprising over half of all grants and loans awarded to students. While protecting and increasing federal funding for aid is imperative, the report makes clear that states and institutions will have to make changes as these trends continue or broad access to higher education in the US will be at serious risk.

Department of Education Ranks Colleges by Cost

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The US Department of Education released their second annual ranking of universities by cost. Users can rank institutions by tuition rate (sticker price) or by a net cost of attendance measure. Institutions are also ranked by annual percentage increases in these measures. The Department presents these data as a tool to help students and families find good educational and financial fits when selecting an institution, and also aims to publically identify and shame institutions that increase tuition the most.

While any attempt to centralize and simplify higher education data to facilitate easier consumer evaluation and comparison is an important effort, there are many potential unintended consequences relating to both the measures used and in aggregating this type of information across such a large, varied set of institutions. Economists Robert Archibald and David Feldman address some of these problems in an Inside Higher Ed piece published today.

Research Universities and the Future of America: New NRC Report

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In 2009, the National Research Council received a request from Congress for a “report that examines the health and competitiveness of America’s research universities vis-à-vis their counterparts elsewhere in the world”.

Responding to the request, the NRC assembled a 22-member panel of university and business leaders and mandated them to identify the “top ten actions that Congress, the federal government, state governments, research universities, and others could take to assure the ability of the American research university to maintain the excellence in research and doctoral education needed to help the United States compete, prosper, and achieve national goals for health, energy, the environment, and security in the global community of the 21st century”.

The panel released its final report last week under the title Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Nation’s Prosperity and Security. The following were the strongest themes:

  • State and federal governments must increase their investment in research universities, allow these institutions more autonomy and agility, and reduce their regulatory burden: The panel identified the state and federal governments as the key actors in the strategy it proposed; indeed, seven of its ten recommendations were primarily aimed at them. In one of its more ambitious statements, the panel recommended that states should strive to restore and maintain per-student funding for higher education to the mean level for the 15-year period 1987-2002, adjusted for inflation. In Washington, this translates into recommending a per-FTE funding increase of between 70% and 80%. The panel acknowledged that this could be difficult to implement in the near term given current state budget challenges and shifting state priorities, but nevertheless stressed that “any loss of world-class quality for America’s public research institutions seriously damages national prosperity, security, and quality of life.”

  • Strengthen the role of business and industry in the research partnership: The panel recommended that tax incentives be put in place to encourage businesses to invest in partnerships with universities both to produce new research and to define new graduate degree programs. It also encouraged business leaders and philanthropists to help increase the participation and success of women and underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

  • Research universities should strive to increase their cost-effectiveness and productivity: The panel recommended that universities should “strive to contain the cost escalation of all ongoing activities […] to the inflation rate or lower through improved efficiency and productivity”. However, it made no mention of the difficulties raised in the previous NRC report on productivity concerning the impact of cost-reduction measures on quality.

The panel’s recommendations are not novel: they have already been made by multiple parties in the higher education sector over the last few years. However, given the weight of the signatures on the report, this document may prove useful in raising the profile of higher education in upcoming budget battles both at the state and federal level.

NRC Panel Publishes Report on Productivity Measurement in Higher Education

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A few weeks ago, the National Research Council’s Panel on Measuring Higher Education Productivity published its 192-page report on Improving Measurement of Productivity in Higher Education, marking the culmination of a three-year, $900,000 effort funded by the Lumina Foundation and involving 15 higher education policy experts nationwide.

In explaining the need for a new productivity measure, the Panel made several key observations:

  • It’s all about incentives: Institutional behavior is dynamic and directly related to the incentives embedded within measurement systems. As such, policymakers must ensure that the incentives in the measurement system genuinely support the behaviors that society wants from higher education institutions and are structured so that measured performance is the result of authentic success rather than manipulative behaviors.
  • Costs and productivity are two different issues: Focusing on reducing the cost of credit hours or credentials invites the obvious solutions: substitute cheap teachers for expensive ones, increase class sizes, and eliminate departments that serve small numbers of students unless they somehow offset their costs. In contrast, focusing on productivity assesses whether changes in strategy are producing more quality-adjusted output (credit hours or credentials) per quality-adjusted unit of input (faculty, equipment, laboratory space, etc.).
  • Using accountability measures without context is akin to reading a legend without looking at the map: Different types of institutions have different objectives, so the productivity of a research university cannot be compared to that of a liberal arts or community college, not least because they serve very different student populations who have different abilities, goals, and aspirations. The panel notes that, among the most important contextual variables that must be controlled for when comparing productivity measures are institutional selectivity, program mix, size, and student demographics.

The Panel also contributed a thorough documentation of the difficulties involved in defining productivity in higher education. From time to time, it is helpful to remind ourselves that, while it may be “possible to count and assign value to goods such as cars and carrots because they are tangible and sold in markets, it is harder to tabulate abstractions like knowledge and health because they are neither tangible nor sold in markets”. The diversity of outputs produced by the institutions, the myriad inputs used in its activities, quality change over time and quality variation across institutions and systems all contribute to the complexity of the task.

Despite these difficulties, the Panel concluded that the higher education policy arena would be better served if it used a measure of productivity whose limitations were clearly documented than if it used no measure of productivity at all. It proposed a basic productivity metric measuring the instructional activities of a college or university: a simple ratio of outputs over inputs for a given period. Its preferred measure of output was the sum of credit hours produced, adjusted to reflect the added value that credit hours gain when they form a completed degree. Its measure of input was a combination of labor (faculty, staff) and non-labor (buildings and grounds, materials, and supplies) factors of production used for instruction, adjusted to allow for comparability. The Panel was careful to link all components of its formula to readily available data published in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) so that its suggested measure may easily be calculated and used. It also specified how improvements to the IPEDS data structure might help produce more complete productivity measures.

The key limitation in the Panel’s proposal – fully acknowledged in the report – is that it does not account for the quality of inputs or outputs. As the Panel notes, when attention is overwhelmingly focused on quantitative metrics, there is a high risk that a numeric goal will be pursued at the expense of quality. There is also a risk that quantitative metrics will be compared across institutions without paying heed to differences in the quality of input or output. The report summarizes some of the work that has been done to help track quality, but concludes that the state of research is not advanced enough to allow any quality weighting factors to be included in its productivity formula.

While readers may lament the Panel’s relegation of measures of quality to further research, especially given the time and resources invested in its effort, the report remains a very useful tool in understanding the issues involved in assessing productivity in higher education and provides valuable food for thought for policymakers and administrators alike.

Long Recovery Time Anticipated for State Budgets

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The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has updated its ongoing state budget report: States Continue to Feel Recession’s Impact. On average, state tax collections increased 8.3 percent in 2011, but 30 states have so far projected $54 billion worth of budget shortfalls for Fiscal Year 2012, on top of the $530 billion worth of shortfalls closed by states since 2007. Even if revenue continues to increase at the same rate as it did last year, it would take over seven years for state budgets to recover to pre-recession levels.

As states continue to cut funding, including laying off government workers, unemployment remains over 8 percent and more people than ever are in need of government services, including education and social services. The report emphasizes the importance that increased tax revenue will likely have to play in the recovery of state budgets given how much spending has already been cut by states and how unlikely additional federal aid appears to be. Visit the CBPP website and blog often for updates on many state and federal budget issues.

Brookings State Grant Aid Study

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Released last week by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, Beyond Need and Merit: Strengthening State Grant Programs describes the scope and type of state grant programs across the US, and provides recommendations for improvement. Such programs currently provide over $9 billion in aid to students each year and comprise, on average, approximately 12 percent of total state funding for higher education. However, they vary widely in number, complexity, eligibility criteria, grant amounts, and efficacy.

Average annual tuition at a public four-year institution in the US is just over $7,000, and the average state grant disbursed to students ranges from $44 in Alaska to over $1,700 in Sourth Carolina (averaging $627 across all states). While 73 percent of all such aid is disbursed based primarily on financial circumstances, many states have adopted large, merit-based programs in recent years that direct grants to non-needy students. For example, the report notes that in Louisiana, where the average annual household income is $45,000, 45 percent of total state grant funds went to students from households with income above $80,000.

Ultimately, the report focuses on ways to potentially streamline state grant programs and better target their resources to those students who need them most in order to increase the impact on both college access and completion. Major recommendations include:

  • Focus grants on students with financial need, who have been shown by research to be most postively affected by grant aid.
  • Simplify grant programs to the extent possible while still being able to target resources to needy students. Straightforward applications, early knowledge of awards, and effective net-price calculators all have a positive impact on application and enrollment rates for students with financial need.
  • Consolidate multiple programs where possible, including converting state required tuition set-asides to state grants to avoid the appearance that the students are subsidizing needy students instead of the state.
  • Create financial incentives for students while they are enrolled by requiring minimum but attainable grades and steady progress toward completion.
  • Consider targeting resources to non-traditional students, including those who are older, part-time, and placebound.
  • When resources are constrained, ration grant aid in a way that is clear and predictable for students.
  • Consider state grant aid incentives in concert with federal and institutional aid to ensure that programs are not operating at cross purposes.
  • Evaluate existing programs as well as test and evaluate new approaches.

Although not discussed much in the report, Washington State has one of the most generous state grant programs in the nation, even though it currently does not have enough funds to accomodate all qualified students. 98 percent of Washington grant funds are awarded based on student financial need and the average grant per student is nearly $900, compared to the national average of $627. Washington State Need Grant funding and policy has and will continue to be key to maintaining college affordability as scarce resources have necessitated rising tuition while household incomes are stagnant. This report provides some useful guidelines for ensuring that taxpayers receive the best return for each dollar invested in student success.

New OPB Brief on University of Washington Seattle Campus Planning Initiatives

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New OPB Brief on University of Washington Seattle Campus Planning Initiatives.

The Office of Planning and Budgeting (OPB) coordinates and oversees physical campus planning initiatives for the UW’s campuses. OPB is currently engaging partners and experts across the Seattle campus in several new planning initiatives, which are highlighted in this brief. The focus ranges significantly, but current initiatives include projecting future needs (e.g. precinct planning), systems planning (e.g. way finding and signage), master plans for sub-areas and features (e.g. Pend Oreille entrance and North Campus housing), campus-wide plans (e.g. Campus Master Plan), as well as participating in local community planning (e.g. University District planning).