You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
I had to read the blurb in Inside Higher Ed twice to make sure I got it right. There’s bipartisan support in Congress for something that might actually help.
That’s … refreshing.
Republican senators Cassidy of Louisiana and Scott of South Carolina have teamed up with Democratic senators Warren of Massachusetts and Whitehouse of Rhode Island to reintroduce the College Transparency Act, which would lift the ban on a federal student-level data system.
That may sound nerdy and inside baseball, and in a sense, it is. But it could go a long way toward dispelling some destructive myths.
Right now some states track the educational pathways of college students, but when the students cross state lines, they drop out of the data. That leads to serious underestimates of continued enrollment and success for colleges in states in which it’s commonplace for students to cross state lines. Here, for example, it’s not unusual for students to cross into New York City, at which point they vanish from the statistics. At Holyoke, the Connecticut state line was only about 15 minutes away; if a student followed an opportunity more than 15 minutes south, then as far as the feds were concerned, the student vanished.
Connecticut has its challenges, but treating it as an existential void seems a bit harsh.
The lack of student records has led to a weird but persistent gap in national data. Nationally we get a community college graduation rate in the 20s, leading to all sorts of rhetoric about dropout factories and pipelines. Yet nearly half of the bachelor’s degree graduates in America -- slightly more than the proportion of undergraduates enrolled in community colleges in total -- have significant community college credits.
In other words, there is -- and has long been -- a glaring difference between completing a degree at the institution at which someone started, and completing a degree at all. But we’re measured only on the former, even though many students fully intend (and succeed at) the latter. The Voluntary Framework of Accountability is supposed to help compensate for that, but something official could be much more effective. It would be particularly helpful in disaggregating data, to get at variations in outcomes among different groups of students, such as breaking them out by race, sex or Pell status.
Granted, even a national system won’t capture students who leave the country. But for my sector, that’s a small group. As far as data systems go, I refuse to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
So far, the private college lobby has pushed against a national student data record system. It has cited student privacy concerns, although to my reading, that’s a bit disingenuous. The same distortions that artificially devalue community colleges work to prop up the places that compete with them. There’s certainly nothing objectionable about building privacy safeguards into the national data; I don’t see that as a deal breaker.
Setting up a data system is a far cry from guaranteeing that its findings will be read in helpful, or even accurate, ways. But without the data, we’re left to guess.
Our politics have been a bit polarized of late, but it’s nice to see that the parties can come together in support of a genuinely good idea. More of that, please …
