Can community colleges improve graduation rates without marginalizing disadvantaged students?
Should community colleges with higher graduation rates get rewarded with more state funding? Or would such a plan unfairly hurt schools that serve large populations of disadvantaged students? How can we balance efficiency — moving students speedily and successfully through their education goals — with equity — making sure all students are given the support they need to succeed in their educational endeavors?
According to a new report published today by The Century Foundation, we don’t have to choose between better graduation rates and greater access to all students.
“Equity and efficiency can be conceived of, at least in part, as complementary rather than competing goals,” according to the two authors, Tatiana Melguizo, associate professor in the USC Rossier School of Education and researcher at the Pullias Center, and Keith Witham, deputy director of the College Excellence Program at The Aspen Institute.
Titled “Funding Community Colleges for Equity, Efficiency, and Student Success: An Examination of Evidence in California,” the report comes at a crucial time for the Golden State. California’s lawmakers reached an agreement on education funding last Friday, and a key part of the deal is a plan to tie the state funding community colleges receive to measures of student success.
Can such a funding model work? The report’s authors say yes, but with caveats. “Outcomes-based funding models can work to advance equity and efficiency,” they write, if those models “are finely tuned to ensure the adequacy of funding for institutions that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students and to protect access for those students.”
That means that funding models need to take into account not just student outcomes data like graduation and transfer rates, but other factors such as the socioeconomic profile of the students at individual institutions. “If the main goal of the higher education system is to increase productivity, with particular attention to increasing student achievement among vulnerable or disadvantaged populations, funding formulas should be designed so that institutions compete against their own past performance rather than against other institutions or sectors,” explain the authors.
To buttress their claims, the authors model four different funding scenarios using institutional data from the California Community Colleges. The scenarios vary from those focusing primarily on student outcomes to others that prioritize extra resources for serving disadvantaged students.
Using these models, the authors point out that focusing too heavily on student outcomes can have many unintended results — ranging from accentuating educational inequalities to creating shortages in the job market. For example, “implementing broad productivity incentives without consideration of the differential per-student costs across programs may result in institutions choosing to reduce investment in high-cost programs (for example, nursing) despite the strong need for graduates from those programs in local and regional labor markets,” the authors point out.
This report is based on a recently published paper in Journal of Education Finance, authored by Melguizo and Witham, along with Kristen Fong, a former research assistant at the Pullias Center, and current Pullias research assistant W. Edward Chi.