Every semester, college students walk the aisles of their school’s bookstore. They wander between shelves of $200 math textbooks and psychology books more expensive than a month’s groceries, searching for copies they may never even open.
From 1977 to 2015, the price of college textbooks skyrocketed 1,041%. Sixty-five percent of students reported not buying all required course reading because it was too expensive, according to a 2014 report for the Public Research Institute Groups.
But when students step into the bookstore at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon, they find many books offered for less than $40. Those books are thanks to the college’s independently run Chemeketa Press.
Since its 2015 launch, the press has printed 33 titles and saved students more than $2.5 million.
In one case, a textbook for an art appreciation course — a class that helps students meet a humanities requirement— used to cost $200.
Today it costs $36.50. Not only are students saving money, but by using a textbook created by the instructor, they gain insight into local artists and a new definition of what art appreciation means.
The school’s administration set out to make sure the cost of a book never deterred someone from taking a class. In 2015, using grant funding and school support, the college opened the press. They collaborate with instructors to write the textbooks, and after students and faculty revise and edit, the final product is sent to print.
At community colleges, where students are more likely to be low-income, the money saved can influence student success and graduation rates.
Brian Mosher, the managing editor of Chemeketa Press, told NationSwell that he loves “the idea of comparing the money a student saves on a textbook with what they could do with that money instead.”
It might mean working fewer hours at a job or taking out smaller loans. For some, the money saved could be put toward taking an extra class, moving that student one step closer to graduation.
While cost savings was what launched Chemeketa Press, faculty and administration also saw it as an opportunity to create more effective books.
Instead of jumping from chapter eight to chapter 23, then back to chapter 14, or using books filled with jargon and confusing syntax, instructors write books that follow their course outline. Classroom testing and evaluation can take years to complete in traditional publishing. For a Chemeketa Press book, it only takes a few months and revisions can be added when there’s a reprint. Instructors are paid for their time and have the chance to become published writers.
“We’re not looking to change the way the class is taught, we’re looking to replace a book and teach the same class,” he said.
But Mosher said the instructors aren’t doing it for the compensation or author credit. They’re doing it to save their students money.
“Most of the faculty who end up with their name on the cover of a book, that’s just a bonus,” Mosher said. “They’re saying they have passion for their students, they want their students to succeed, and they see the hardship of expensive textbooks.”
And the textbooks work. Through institutional research, Chemeketa Press compared the passing percentages of an intermediate algebra class. With the same instructor, one class used the traditional, $140 textbook and another used Chemeketa Press’ $36 book.
Each class had the same passing rate, Mosher said.
“This book can hold water next to [one from] the professional, big time, commercial publisher,” Mosher said.
Professors can connect with Chemeketa Printing Press on its website, where five textbooks are available for purchase through its site. Chemeketa Press is also partnering with other colleges to help students save money by getting these books in their hands.
Mosher said the goal is to create a self-sustaining model that other community colleges across the nation can adopt.
“That’s our long-term, big dream,” Mosher said. “We think any community college across the country can do this.”
More: For Prisoners, Reading Is so Much More Than a Pastime — It’s a Way to Change Their Lives
Tag: community college
The Journey of an Idea: This Entrepreneur Took a Cross-Country Trip to Fine-Tune His Higher Education Gamechanger
Seated in a 1930s Pullman train car, Phillip Ellison carved a broad arc across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit. Ellison had no final endpoint toward which his locomotive was rushing: he was simply riding the rails, as part of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a nonprofit venture with Comcast NBCUniversal, a lead partner of the journey. Along with 25 other young adults, he was making a nine-day, transcontinental trek this August to open himself to new ideas for ULink, his new startup that’s in the works. “[MTP is promoting] American innovation, entrepreneurship and trans-regional understanding of the United States, by allowing people doing social impact to come together,” Ellison says.
In the early stages of developing a tech platform to assist community college students, Ellison wanted to spend the 3,100-mile journey homing in on his product’s capabilities and its growth potential, while discovering what other young people were doing in their hometowns. As the American West rushed by his window, he engaged the other social entrepreneurs and rising nonprofit leaders in conversation: Where were they all headed, and how could they help each other get there?
Onboard MTP, Ellison hammered out ideas for ULink, a website that will help community college students engage with on-campus resources (such as advising sessions to map out the credits that four-year colleges require or counseling to help deal with tough emotional situations) and successfully transfer to a four-year university. Ellison, a one-time dropout wrapping up his bachelor’s degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, wanted to hear what had helped his peers navigate their undergraduate experience and whether community college counselors and transfer advisors, faculty members, students and IT programmers in each of MTP’s five stops would be open to using the platform. Aided by their insights, he’s planning to launch a beta pilot of the website within the next year at a community college in the Boston area.
“Community college is often a head-down experience. Students do not know what’s happening on campus, and they’re not accessing resources until it’s too late,” Ellison explains to NationSwell. On the administrative side, counseling “processes are not quite modernized, digital or up to date. You see the limitations of a human being in terms of resources.” ULink is still in beta development, but once launched, it will help counselors manage their students, see who’s coming in and who’s been out of touch and send text message check-ins through a mobile app — allowing them to reach more students all at once.
[ph]
Ellison knows about the necessity of college advising more acutely than most. He was forced to leave Penn State University prematurely due to a lack of financial aid. “That was one of the darkest times in my life, to be frank,” he says. Like many students arriving at four-year institutions, he says he didn’t fully comprehend higher education’s blockbuster price tag, even at a public school. Looking back, he wishes he had known more about the financial aspects of college. (For instance, public schools charge more to out-of-state residents, and with rare exception, student loans stick with most people even after a declaration of bankruptcy.) Constantly worrying about his bank accounts, Ellison’s grades fell precipitously. He dropped out and returned home to East Harlem.
That’s not to say Ellison was giving up. “I decided to go home and spend some time thinking about what I was going to do, to right the ship basically,” he explains. Almost immediately, he went to work as a manual laborer. Alongside middle-aged underrepresented workers, the teenager manned demolition projects in Brooklyn and moved corporate furniture in Manhattan. No boss seemed to value worker contributions at those temp jobs, he noticed. They didn’t provide healthcare benefits, and they offered no job security — a daily reality for millions of Americans who never obtained a college degree, he saw.
Eventually, Ellison was accepted to serve as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, assisting a green energy startup. (There, he met one of ULink’s current co-founders, Parisa Esmaili.) He leveraged that into a job at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides extra hours of instruction at public middle schools. He also worked on campaigns for Obama’s reelection and a failed primary bid by Reshma Saujani (the founder of Girls Who Code) to be New York City’s public advocate. In retrospect, he says the series of jobs taught him leadership: by watching how a founder made tough decisions, by practicing at the front of a classroom and by trying to elect principled leaders.
In his off-hours, Ellison started attending classes at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, one of the City University of New York schools near the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Once again, working families surrounded him. He saw many of his classmates pulled away from their education by the need to get a job to pay for their kids. Others, closer to him in age, didn’t seem to know how to navigate the school’s bureaucracy. On his second attempt at higher education, Ellison realized that community college students don’t know what four-year universities are looking for in applicants and understaffed counseling departments couldn’t provide all the help needed. “I saw folks stopping sometimes, because they didn’t know what their end goal could be or how to get to that point,” he says. “The mentors were not checking in on them. It’s not a seamless transition.”
After a long hiatus from a four-year college, Ellison returned to school at Tufts last year. At times, he feels out of place, coming from the South Bronx to a bucolic research institution with a billion-dollar endowment that predates the Civil War. There, he lived with Jubril Lawal (a former classmate at Hostos and current co-founder of ULink), and together they translated their own experience negotiating educational barriers into ULink’s platform. ”By merging tech and human interactions in a strategic way,” says Ellison, who regularly folds business school lingo into ULink’s sales pitch, “our premise is that closing some of the advising and engagement gaps will promote completion and persistence and improve the overall student experience.” Where Ellison once felt disconnected, he hopes the app will provide clarity and direction, those touch points that tie a person to a larger institution.
[ph]
Through conversations with other train ride participants and with people at various city stops, Ellison deepened his understanding of the community college system. He asked why certain schools have off-the-charts transfer rates, while others are dropout factories. How can his platform make a student feel at home on a two-year commuter campus, in the same way that a student living in the dorms at a four-year institution participates in the school’s history and traditions? Will a few text messages be enough?
His cross-country sojourn confirmed that he’s asking the right questions. At a City College of San Francisco, he showed the school’s chief technology officer his beta product, and the administrator shared insights about the inadequacies of older education planning software and his decision-making calculus for new technology. Ellison speculated ULink may have just gained “a key adviser.” Back on the train, he discussed his ideas with his mentors and other social entrepreneurs. Fauzia Musa, from the design firm IDEO, reminded him that if students found some real value in the product and used it to solve their challenges, then colleges would quickly fall into line. Those “new understandings and unique opportunities for growth” proved vital to understanding what ULink could be.
Now it’s a matter of Ellison putting his answers into practice. The steaming train may have pulled into the final station, but his real journey is just beginning.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Homepage photo courtesy of Millennial Trains Project.
Community Colleges Have Abysmal Graduation Rates. Here’s How to Change That
Community college improves students’ lives — for those who make it to graduation, that is.
The sad reality for many, however, is that they’ll drop out along the way. Only one out of every five students will receive their associates degree within three years, one year past the expected time. After five years, graduation rates rise only to a paltry 35 percent.
“With graduation rates that low, community colleges can be dead ends rather than gateways for students,” says Susan Dynarski, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “Graduation rates are low in part because community colleges can’t exclude poorly prepared students. Unlike selective schools, they are required to take anyone who walks in the door, and they have to work harder to get those students to graduation.”
A program at the City University of New York (CUNY) is working directly with low-income students to boost their success. Since 2007, Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, has reached more than 6,400 students, providing them streamlined access to all of CUNY’s resources. They’re hooked up with advisors and tutors, have early access to enroll in popular courses and receive funds for a metro pass, textbooks and any additional costs not covered by financial aid.
The costs of the program are steep — $5,400 a year per student, much higher than the $3,300 tuition — but backers say it’s well worth the expense. A randomized study released this year found ASAP nearly doubled graduation rates.
[ph]
7 Reasons Why Community Colleges Are Necessary for America’s Prosperity
In last week’s State of the Union, President Barack Obama laid out a plan to offer a community college education free of charge to every American. These schools, as Obama said back in 2010, are “treated like the stepchild of the higher education system. They’re an afterthought, if they’re thought of at all,” but now he’s hoisted them up as the “centerpiece of [his] education agenda.”
Some question whether his proposal for free tuition is the best use of limited cash, but setting politics aside, there’s no denying that the nation’s 1,130 community colleges play a vital role in higher education. Here’s why they’re essential to our success.
[ph] [ph] [ph] [ph] [ph] [ph] [ph] [ph] [ph] [ph] [ph] [ph]
The Standout Efforts That Are Getting Americans Back to Work
After four years as an assistant branch manager at Hudson Valley Bank in Bridgeport, Conn., Dora Coriano was laid off in August 2013, when the bank left the state.
Coriano, who’s 58, soon discovered that finding a new job wasn’t as easy as it had been the last time she’d been unemployed, 15 years prior. “In 1998, you could literally grab a stack of resumes and pound the pavement,” she says. “You went from door to door … you left your resume, you got called, and you got the job.”
A year after losing her position at the bank, and submitting more than 75 job applications, Coriano still hasn’t found full-time work. Instead, she has joined the ranks of the long-term unemployed.
“It’s been really disheartening,” Coriano says. “That’s how I feel — like I’m stuck.”
Despite a dropping unemployment rate, which hit 5.8 percent in October, 9 million people nationwide are like Coriano — stuck without a job.
Across the country, people are working to determine the best way to help those jobseekers find employment. Economists, analysts, policy-makers and not-for-profits are all seeking the antidote to unemployment, so they’re trying out different programs that train or retrain the jobless, help them achieve certifications or land internships.
Several approaches are showing promise. From paid apprenticeships to beefed-up community college programs and public-private partnerships, here’s a look at some of the ways people are getting back to work — including Coriano.
Placing Workers in Apprenticeships
Organizations looking to bridge the gap between job training and job placement are increasingly turning to the apprenticeship model. One of the most successful of these is Apprenticeship Carolina, an initiative of the South Carolina technical college system.
While Apprenticeship Carolina’s main focus is to help businesses that want to expand, says Brad Neese, program director, “a really positive byproduct is that these companies are going to hire South Carolinians.”
Funded by the state, Neese and his crew of consultants help companies to establish apprenticeship programs by connecting them with technical colleges around the state. “We meet with them and discuss the needs of the company,” says Neese. “We personalize the process, and it’s all free.”
So far, it’s working. Apprenticeship Carolina started with 90 companies in 2007. Today, it’s working with more than 700 businesses and over the past seven years has placed almost 11,000 apprentices (in fields ranging from manufacturing to health care).
Seeking Out Trained Talent
While training programs are reaching out to potential employers, some successful programs start the other way around.
In St. Louis, the aircraft company Boeing approached the local community college to set up a 10-week program for would-be assembly mechanics. The class is free for students (paid for by Boeing), and the company hires 87 percent of those who complete it, says Becky Epps, program director.
In Newark, N.J., the Ford Motor Co. sponsored an automotive technical program at the New Community Workforce Development Center. In nine months, students are trained and certified and then placed in jobs through established relationships with Ford, Nissan and Toyota, says the program’s director, Rodney Brutton.
“The placement rate is 60 percent, which is great in this line of work,” he says.
The Ford program helped a mechanic named Tom after he was laid off. Although he had 20 years’ experience, he found he couldn’t get another job without new certifications. All he heard was, “Leave your number and we’ll give you a call.” No one called.
After completing the program, Tom ended up getting 10 certifications, updated his resume and “started hearing from the dealerships,” he says.
Now, he says, he’s making over $25 per hour, and he’s no longer one of the country’s 9 million unemployed workers.
Linking Companies and Community Colleges
Community colleges can play a key role in workforce development. Recognizing that fact, the White House in September announced $450 million in grants to the schools, aimed at improving job training programs.
One popular movement in job training programs, according to Lauren Eyster, a researcher at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, is to build strong connections with hiring companies, so that trainees can be channeled right into waiting jobs that need their new skills.
Both of these trends are converging at Cape Cod Community College, in West Barnstable, Mass., which won one of the recent federal grants. The school is creating two 12-month programs to train workers to inspect and repair airplanes and airplane engines, in response to the needs of area employers.
“There’s enormous support for this,” says Michael Gross, director of communication. He says the school has letters of support from JetBlue, Delta and Cape Air, which will be looking to hire the first graduates of the program.
Supporting Struggling Students
While community colleges can set people up for new careers, some students have significant obstacles to overcome first, like lack of transportation, child care or money for books.
“The other piece of this is, once you get them into these programs, how do you get them to complete?” says Eyster. “The latest number I saw was only 40 percent of community college students graduate in six years.”
Eyster says some colleges are starting to employ “navigators” to help guide students through school. At the Accelerating Opportunity: Kansas (AO-K) program at Washburn Tech, in Topeka, Kan., students learn technical skills while earning GEDs, with assistance from a navigator provided along the way.
“These students are under-resourced in every way you can imagine,” says Gillian Gabelman, associate dean at Washburn Tech. The navigator helps connect students to social services like child care and veterans benefits.
“The transformation of the students is extraordinary,” Gabelman says. For example, a woman who dropped out of high school to have a baby has been able to go into medicine, and a reformed drug addict went through technical training and is working for a local manufacturer, she says.
Reversing the Snowball of Unemployment
Now Coriano, the unemployed bank worker, may be on a new path to employment, too.
After a year without work, her savings dwindling, Coriano enrolled in a program in Bridgeport called Platform to Employment, aimed specifically at the long-term unemployed, who often face snowballing challenges.
The longer people are out of work, the less attractive they can be to employers and the more discouraged they get. Platform to Employment tries to address both of those challenges with a two-pronged approach.
The first is a full-time five-week course of job preparation classes. “It’s not a job training program,” says Tom Long, vice president of communications and development. “It’s more about taking someone who’s ready to be back at work and helping them improve their confidence and readiness.”
During the course, Coriano and other participants learn how to present their best selves to employers, to develop their “personal brand” and to “conquer their fear about their own limitations,” Long says. They also meet with a behavioral health specialist and learn how to deal with the stress and psychological struggles that come from long-term unemployment.
The second part of the Platform to Employment approach is to place participants in jobs with local employers for a two-month “tryout,” paid for by the program. The try-before-you-buy system allows employers to take a chance on a new employee with no financial risk, since private foundation funding pays for wages.
After a successful pilot program in Bridgeport in 2011, Platform to Employment recently completed a 10-city nationwide expansion. And, with $3.5 million in funding from the Connecticut Legislature, the program is spreading across that state.
The Math Class That Could Cut the College Dropout Rate
Math has never been a popular subject in school. For every Einstein-like math whiz, there are countless more students who get frustrated with its long list of procedures and rules and wonder why it’s even necessary for everyday life.
This struggle with math can put a pupil at a serious disadvantage as he or she seeks higher education. In fact, a whopping 70 percent of community college students never complete the remedial math courses that are required for a degree. Unfortunately, this prompts many students to quit school because these classes can suck away time, money and drive. And as we previously reported, while 40 percent of the country’s undergrads choose the community college route, their odds of walking away with a degree is low; only a third of of them will graduate.
For those who are trying to climb out of poverty and into the middle class, dropping out of school is a heavy price to pay — those with associates degrees earn about $10,000 more annually than a college dropout.
To help reduce the startling dropout rate, several higher learning institutions are experimenting with a new approach to teaching math — the Pathways Project from the The Carnegie Foundation (a renowned education policy and research center).
The courses, called Quantway and Statway, are designed for students who might struggle with abstract equations and formulas. It’s math for students who might think, “I don’t want to be an engineer, why do I need to know algebra?” Instead, students learn real, practical applications of math — think: filing taxes, interest rates on credit cards, gas prices — to fulfill their college math credits.
MORE: Big Bets: Working With Schools to Reduce Dropout Rates of Low-Income College Students
Remarkably, more than 50 percent of Pathways students achieved their math credits within a single year, whereas only 15 percent of students in the traditional sequence complete their math credits (and that’s in two years), NPR reports. Since the Pathways Project kicked off in Fall 2011, there are now 49 institutions are teaching the courses, including the California State University system and community colleges in 14 states.
What makes these Pathways classes different is that students learn how to use math to better understand the world around them. In a Quantway class, as Pathways Project director Karen Klipple illustrates in this video, students are asked if it makes sense for them to buy a hybrid car. They answer questions like, “How much money will you save in gas over a period of time?” or “What will the interest be if you take out a loan?”
If you watch the clip below, it looks like the Pathways model is not only helping students pass their math classes and put a college degree within reach, it’s also generating a real love for math.
There might be more Einsteins out there than we think.
[ph]
DON’T MISS: The Surprising Secret to Improving Math Skills
The State That’s Making Higher Ed Accessible to Even More Students
Even with tuition skyrocketing, more and more employers are demanding that recruits have at least a bachelor’s degree, meaning that college (for the most part) is a smart investment.
Still, four years of college can be unaffordable for many. According to the College Board, it now costs $22,826 on average for an in-state public college for the 2013–2014 school year, and $44,750 at a private college.
Community college is a much less costly alternative for those seeking higher education or job training, but unless a student later transfers to a four-year institution, graduating with a two-year associates’ degree from a community college might not be enough in a tough job market.
But now, Californian community college students will soon have a massive leg up. A new bill (SB 850) recently signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown allows up to 15 community colleges in the state to offer bachelor’s degrees.
MORE: How One Community College Works to Get Transfer Students More Education
As U.S. News & World Report writes, the degrees will be offered in areas such as dental hygiene, industrial technology, allied health technology, emergency medical technicians and other fields that now require bachelor’s degrees. The best part? Community college students who take this route can potentially complete their bachelor’s degrees for around $10,000 total.
“This is landmark legislation that is a game-changer for California’s higher education system and our workforce preparedness,” state senator Marty Block, who authored the bill, says in a statement. “SB 850 boosts the focus of our community colleges on job training and increasing the accessibility and affordability of our state’s higher education system.”
There are currently 20 other states that offer bachelor’s degrees at the community college level, but California has the largest community college system in the whole country, so this new law is bound to benefit a vast number of students.
The pilot program will kicks off by the 2017-18 school year and runs through 2022-23. But hopefully, that won’t be the end of this smart move.
DON’T MISS: Inside the Movement for Free Community College
Ask the Experts: How Can We Keep From Drowning in College Debt?
Have you paid off your student loan yet? If not, you’ve got lots of company. In 2012, total student debt in the United States reached $966 billion, a tripling over the previous eight years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Current estimates put the figure even higher — more than $1 trillion. Over the past 35 years or so, the cost of college has also ballooned by a staggering 1,120 percent, so it’s no wonder that people are questioning whether higher education is really worth it.
The consensus, however, is yes. Going to college is still a good investment. You’ll earn more: On average, college graduates aged 25 to 34, who are employed full time, year round, make 50 percent more than their high-school-educated peers. Over a lifetime, that college diploma will earn you about $500,000 more on average, even after factoring in the cost of school.
And yet many graduates are withering under the weight of their student loans — a problem that could potentially negate any economic benefit of going to college in the first place. So, how do we ease the burden for students who need to borrow money to pay for their education? NationSwell convened a panel of experts to talk about how to fix the student loan system, as well as ways to help families spend their education dollars more wisely.
Read on for our experts’ thought-provoking ideas, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box.
Beth Akers
Fellow, Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution
NationSwell: What can be done to fix our broken college loan system?
Beth Akers: I’m not sure it’s entirely broken, but there are two areas where we can make some improvements. First is on the front end. Students are going into college and blindly taking on debt without a lot of information about the investment they’re making or the amount they’re taking on. The [Obama] administration has taken the first step toward solving that problem with the college-ratings system, and [once they] incorporate earnings information into the data available to prospective students, that will help families make wiser decisions on the front end.
Second, on the back end, a lot of these debts are actually affordable. For the most part, students are making good investments in higher education that do pay off over the long run. In theory, it shouldn’t be problematic for the majority of students to repay these debts, if their repayment period is over a sufficient period. So, what we need to do is focus on creating a repayment program for federal loans that makes the process more painless for borrowers. One way is through income-based repayment. Right now, this program is available only to a certain set of students [with low incomes]. I don’t think it’s crazy to expand eligibility for that program to people with larger earnings so that on average, people are repaying their debts over a longer period of time.
MORE: Ask the Experts—7 Ways to Improve K-12 Public Education
Like everything in education, there are a lot of barriers to information. It’s a very complex — perhaps unnecessarily complex — system. The result of that is that people underutilize the benefits that are available to them. We see that in a lot of different ways. [For example], students are taking on private student-loan debts, when they’re still eligible for government loans at a much lower interest rate. There’s evidence that people are not utilizing the programs properly and that they don’t have the information necessary to make good choices.
NS: How can students and parents be smarter about spending college money?
BA: You have to make wise decisions about where you spend your money and how much you’re willing to spend. There are a lot of great institutions that provide a good return on investment for students. But there are others that do not. The government is not in the business of telling students where to go, and as a result, the responsibility falls on parents and students.
One thing [prospective students] should look at is if people are actually graduating from the school. Graduation rates across institutions vary widely, and that’s a great indicator to see if the institution is doing at least the minimum of what they should. If students aren’t graduating at a sufficiently high rate, then you might want to be skeptical about spending your money there.
DON’T MISS: In New Mexico, High Schools That Inspire Would-Be Dropouts
In the future, it would be great to have employment information on the college scorecard, and that’s something that the administration is working on. Once it’s there, I would advise strongly that prospective students use this to make sure that they’re going to see a return that will justify taking on debt to go to college.
Choice is good, right? We have all these institutions, and students can pick a place that’s a perfect fit for them. That’s a really great environment to be in. Unfortunately, that also means that you have a lot of homework to do. There are so many options and the consequences are really very great for making the wrong decision.
Jessica Thompson
Senior Policy Analyst, The Institute for College Access & Success
NS: What can be done to fix our broken college loan system?
Jessica Thompson: I think the No. 1 way is to reduce the need for students to borrow on the front end. That’s going to involve two things: First, increasing our investment in grant aid, especially the federal Pell Grant — which now covers the lowest share of costs at a four-year public institution than it has since the program started — as well as state grants and institutional grants. The other piece is to restore state funding to public higher education, which has played a large role in shifting costs of public higher education from the public to the students and families.
If students do need to borrow some money in order to get to and through college, we have made several recommendations for improving the loan system. First, the current system is far too difficult to manage and understand, and can lead to suboptimal decision-making. There are currently four different income-based repayment plans for loans, and several non-income-based plans. It’s difficult to figure out what you qualify for and how. We recommend streamlining the repayment process so there’s only one income-based repayment plan that any student can opt into, and a limited menu of traditional plans, so that it’s easier for students to understand. We are big proponents for income-based repayment. It’s a crucial safeguard for borrowers who end up being unable to manage their loan payments. However, we don’t support making it the automatic or default repayment plan, because it’s not the best plan for all borrowers.
MORE: Bringing It Home: The International Org Now Helping U.S. College Students
Additionally, we need to improve student-loan counseling before, during and after college. This is a great opportunity for us to figure out what actually works to try to empower students to get the information they need in a way they can understand, enabling them to make good choices about borrowing and repayment.
Lastly, we have to educate people about private student loans and make sure that we are reducing the extent to which students and families are relying on them. These loans have variable interest rates, require co-signers, are not dischargeable in bankruptcy as of 2005, and don’t have repayment protection like income-based repayment, deferment and other options that federal student loans have. It’s the riskiest way to pay for college.
We found that over 40 percent of students who take private student loans have not maxed out their federal loan eligibility. Because of this, we support mandatory certification, which would require banks to go through higher ed institutions. In this case, the institution has the ability to counsel the students and tell them whether or not they still have federal student loans available. Currently, institutions don’t automatically package your maximum federal student loan availability in initial financial-aid offers. Many students just look at what the package offers and assume that anything beyond that, they’ll have to find another way to cover. In reality, they may have more federal loan eligibility.
NS: How can students and parents make wiser decisions about college?
JT: I don’t want to leave the impression that students and parents bear the sole responsibility for finding their way through this very complex and confusing process. But I think that actively seeking out as much information as possible to help make the best decisions for students on the front end — what types of schools to apply to and how many schools to apply to — can help maximize the benefits for the student.
Also, taking advantage of consumer tools like the net-price calculators, which all colleges now have on their websites, financial aid shopping sheets, which allow you to compare financial aid offers to one another, and the college scorecards, which give you basic metrics about each institution, can help arm students and families with information they need to make savvier decisions.
Students should also avoid private loans and certain types of institutions that data clearly show leave students worse off than before they started school. Frankly, the for-profit college sector has a poor track record in that regard. But also [families should] look at the repayment options and know that having to borrow some money is not a reason not to go. In the long run we still see that if you complete school and receive a quality education, this is an investment that will pay off. We want to make sure people aren’t scared away from higher education. It’s absolutely still worth it.
Melinda Lewis
Policy Director, Assets and Education Initiative; Associate Professor of Practice, School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas
NS: What can be done to fix our broken college loan system?
Melinda Lewis: A lot of the conversation is about how much people pay in interest rates or the sheer amount of debt that students are taking on. Those are valid points, but we don’t think that they’re going to lead us toward the policy changes that are needed. Instead, we start by asking if the current debt-dependent financial-aid system and the rise in borrowing to finance education are eroding the power of higher education to facilitate economic mobility and greater equity in society?
These are large sums that students are borrowing, and when you look at them in comparison to earnings differential between a student who doesn’t go to postsecondary education and one who does, then clearly this is an amount of debt that’s “worth it.” But is the student who goes to college and obtains a degree and finances that education with student debt getting the same return on his or her college education as a student who gets the same degree but is able to finance his or her education without debt? We believe the answer is no. Therefore, there is reason to believe that our reliance on student debt is making it more difficult for an entire generation to use higher education as a platform for greater economic mobility and prosperity. In fact, a study published in November found that households with outstanding student debt had 63 percent less net worth, 40 percent less home equity and 52 percent less retirement savings than those with equivalent education but no outstanding student debt.
ALSO: The Man Behind ‘No Child Left Behind’ Has a Surprising Answer on How to Improve Education
If those are some of the effects of student loan debt, and student borrowing is going to be a part of the financial aid landscape, then what we need to do to fix the system is determine how to help post-college leavers — whether they’re graduates or not and we hope they are — accumulate assets even while they’re dealing with their debt obligations. Otherwise they will be hindered financially potentially decades into the future because of that student debt, particularly because it hits them at a critically important stage of their economic lives, when if they don’t build assets then, they’re going to be at a disadvantage in the future.
You know what every financial planner says, if you put a little bit of money away now, it’s better than trying to save a lot in the future. And that’s what a lot of these college leavers aren’t able to do because they’re diverting so much of their income to their debt maintenance. That means we’ve got to think about ideas like delays in repayment, so that individuals are able to purchase homes. Or maybe looking at more income-based repayment measures, where we divert some of those payments to an escrow account, so they’re simultaneously building assets. Quite honestly, we’re not spending enough time parsing out the different policy mechanisms that could help individuals and households build positive financial assets to compensate for the drain that the outstanding student debts represent.
Evidence about the inadequate accumulation of assets suggests that we could have a far bigger problem in the future. If we know that Americans across the board are not saving enough for retirement, and that’s a pretty well-accepted economic fact, and that households with student debt are saving 52 percent less that those that don’t have student debt, what are we going to see when this generation reaches retirement age? How can we expect this generation that is dealing with the effects of their own student debt to be adequately preparing for their own children’s college education?
NS: How can students and parents better prepare to pay for college?
ML: It’s really quite clear. We have a new paper coming out soon that looks at the ability of parental college savings to reduce student debt. It kind of sounds obvious, right? If your parents are saving for your college, you have to borrow less. But there hadn’t been any research done on it. Our analysis finds that students whose parents were saving for them have around $3,000 less in student debt. In this particular data set, what that suggests is that the way that students and parents need to prepare for higher education in this debt-dependent, financial-aid landscape, is to save.
This is difficult to do, not only because we have relatively low college savings across the board, but also because we don’t have adequate vehicles to facilitate college savings. There are not enough incentives, especially for those who are lower-income and don’t benefit equitably from the tax-based incentives that are a part of things like the state 529 college savings plans. But it’s going to be even more difficult if parents are paying their own student debt at a time when they should be saving for their children’s future education. It becomes very difficult to imagine how, without some significant policy changes, we can expect families to get out of this debt cycle.
That’s why we need to take a step back and look at what the debt effects are on multiple levels. We need to build structures to help families save. How can we link college savings opportunities with employers? How can we make our existing tax credits for higher education refundable so that low-income families can benefit equitably? How might we explore something like what they do in Canada and the United Kingdom, what some states — like Maine, North Dakota, Nevada — are doing, in making deposits in children’s college savings accounts? Governments are structuring this asset-based approach to financing college a little bit differently, but all with the same rationale: We can use the same net resources, timed differently and delivered on the front end, instead of as a guaranteed debt at the point of enrollment and get better outcomes not only in college, but also for those who leave college, therefore enabling higher education to play the role that it’s really designed to in our society and our economy.
MORE: The Next Frontier in Online Education Isn’t What You’d Expect
Can $5 Million Keep Community College Students in School?
The key to most well-paying jobs? A college degree.
For those who do not have the funds or access to a public or private four-year university, community colleges provide an educational alternative. However, while 40 percent of the country’s undergrads choose the community college route, their odds of walking away with a degree is low. In fact, only a third of of them will graduate.
By watching the video above, you’ll learn that a major reason why many students drop out is because they are enrolled in remedial courses which can suck away their time, money and drive. Unfortunately, this prompts many students to quit. (Case in point: Only 28 percent of students who take remedial classes will graduate within 8.5 years.) For those who are trying to climb out of poverty and into the middle class, dropping out of school is a heavy price to pay — those with associates degrees earn about $10,000 more annually than a college dropout.
Now, in a first-of-its-kind effort to stop the community college dropout rate, the Robin Hood foundation is awarding $5 million to anyone who can figure out a workable solution. The Robin Hood College Success Prize is a competition that’s looking for scalable technological solutions such as mobile, computer and web-based apps that will help community college students stay on track and graduate within two to three years. “Let’s go to the brightest minds in the country and invent new ways to get students through to graduation,” Michael Weinstein, the chief program officer for Robin Hood, told Fast Company.
MORE: What If We Could Nearly Double the Graduation Rate of Community College Students With One Simple Idea?
Those interested have until summer to apply. The organization will then select up to 20 semi-finalists who will then receive additional financial and behavioral design support to work out any kinks. Three finalists will then get to see their idea tested over a course of three years on a group of 2,000 City University of New York students. The grand prize winner will be announced in October.
Learn more about the program and download an application for the competition here.
ALSO: How Chicago’s Community Colleges Are Training the Next Generation of Business Leaders
How Chicago’s Community Colleges Are Training the Next Generation of Business Leaders
Undoubtedly, when highly-skilled graduates enter the work force, everyone benefits. And that’s the aim of The City Colleges of Chicago, which are charging themselves with the task of providing companies with, quite simply, the perfect candidates.
To change the face of its curriculum and to better prepare its students to meet employers’ needs, Chicago’s community college system is undergoing a makeover. Gabriel Barrington, an uncertified welder studying at Richard J. Daley College on Chicago’s South Side, is just one of the 115,000 students that hopes to benefit from the system’s “reinvention.”
Barrington enrolled as soon as he read about about the program’s promise to not only teach him complex machining, but also to smooth a transfer to Illinois Institute of Technology, a four-year institution, for a bachelor’s degree. “As a welder, you see the stuff that comes off the machines and think, ‘Wow, I’d rather be a part of that.’” he told Governing. “There’s just such a wealth of materials and possibility.” Barrington, along with all of City Colleges of Chicago’s students, may be part of a wave of Chicago’s most talented job force yet.
Barrington has former mayor Richard M. Daley to thank for the welding education — a subject his college didn’t even teach four years ago. Daley initiated the top-to-bottom curriculum overhaul in 2010, based on the award-winning Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, which graduates nearly half of its full-time students in three years.
Daley tapped investment bank founder Martin Cabrera and City Colleges graduate-cum-ComEd executive Cheryl Hyman to create a blueprint. Their plan reads almost like a job market hack: The City Colleges have formal partnerships with more than 100 corporations, which give input into course sequences and selection. Advisers use this information to help students spin their education forward. They present 10 focus areas including health care and information technology at the start of school, each of which includes a set of certifications and job types. Then, academics advance somewhat on autopilot — students are automatically enrolled in courses of increasing difficulty with each semester. This kind of “stackable credential” system, which City Colleges is unveiling this semester, systematically qualifies a student for a higher pay grade with each course and directs them to a distinct job.
With the groundwork in place and much of it in practice, The City Colleges of Chicago has lofty expectations. It expects to see degrees go up 37 percent a year by 2018, and wants 55 percent of its students to transfer to four-year schools. If achieved, the city-school relationship will become more symbiotic; the job market has a bigger pool of qualified candidates from which to pick, and previously untrained or uneducated Chicagoans will learn a marketable and valuable skill.
The program isn’t without its detractors, though. A student like Barrington will seemingly hit a goldmine when he graduates, receiving a welding degree linked to accrediting organizations so that it will acquire real industrial value, but Complete College America (a non-profit) said in 2010 that it had yet to find evidence that students “actually are stacking short-term certificates and building them into longer-term certificates or degree.” Other critics, including faculty members, are concerned that the program will result in too many qualified applicants for a limited number of higher-level jobs.
Only time will tell if they’re right. In the meantime, the reinvention’s biggest proponents make a good point: That career-based education with a focus on achievement is never a bad thing. The proof is in the short-term results. Since the overhaul began in 2010, the graduation rate has nearly doubled at the seven campuses. “It’s very hard to change entrenched public systems of any kind, to put a stake in the ground and say you’re really committed to it,” says Dr. Larry Goodman, Rush’s CEO told Governing. “But they’ve made it work.”