Growing concerns about student loan debt and college costs in recent years have generated no shortage of federal reform proposals to improve the status quo in American higher education. Holding institutions accountable for student defaults, reforming the antiquated accreditation system that oversees access to federal funds and providing access to free or debt-free college are just a few examples of ideas, but the list could obviously go on for a while.
These proposals deserve significant attention and debate, particularly given the substantial role the federal government plays in higher education financing. But it would be a mistake for reform-minded policymakers to ignore another set of actors – states – that also play a substantial role in shaping the higher education marketplace – and not just through their support for public institutions.
In particular, states are the primary authorizers of educational institutions, a process that not only dictates which schools may operate but is also a prerequisite to accessing federal aid. Despite this fact, few researchers have taken the time to study how states actually make these decisions, in particular whether they’re helping or hampering the goal of ensuring students have access to affordable, high-quality education.
Two colleagues and I undertook this task earlier this year and published the results in a recent paper. The punchline is this: With a few exceptions, state authorization processes seem to include little evaluation of how well institutions actually serve students. Instead, states lay out a wide array of bureaucratic and time-consuming hurdles for institutions which seem only tenuously related to a quality education – requirements that likely increase the prices students have to pay.
Consider first the question of how states assess whether an institution is adequately serving its students. The best opportunity to do this would be when an institution attempts to renew its authorization – in most cases, the school will have already served students for several years, and thus there is basic information the authorizer can study to help make a decision.
Yet when we examined the 70 state boards that oversee institutions (some states have multiple boards depending on the type of institution), only 44 of them asked for any type of outcome information at all. Breaking down the results further reveals that an institution’s graduation rate is by far the most common requirement:
- 43 boards require graduation rates,
- 28 require job-placement rates,
- 10 require retention rates,
- 4 require licensure exam passage rates (for programs geared to a licensed occupation),
- 4 require default rates on student loans and
- 3 require wage data.
California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education is the most notable exception to this general trend. The agency requires institutions to produce a “Student Performance Fact Sheet,” which shows each program’s completion rate, placement rate in designated fields, licensure passage rate and wage and salary information of graduates employed in their field.
While most state boards ask little about outcomes, they tend to require exorbitant amounts of paperwork on an institution’s processes, facilities, and faculty or instructors – often without a clear rationale for how such documentation will be indicative of quality.
For example, consider that the North Carolina Office of Proprietary School Services requires for-profit career institutions to submit “school floor plan[s] showing doors, windows, halls, and seating arrangement; also offices, rest rooms, and storage space; … lighting showing kind and intensity shall be indicated for each room; the type of heating and cooling system used.” State boards also frequently require institutions to submit paper copies of each faculty member’s resume. As one community college representative interviewed for our paper indicated, “Some of these regulations were written when distance education was very different that it is today. … For some institutions the number of adjunct faculty ranges in the hundreds, making this highly time intensive.”
It would be one thing if assessing all of these educational inputs helped ensure that institutions offer students a minimum level of educational quality. And to a certain degree, they probably do: Requiring binders of documentation on institutional processes probably deters the worst fly-by-night operations. But this bar is not very high – even the now infamous Corinthian Colleges received approval from state overseers, and other institutions with abysmal student performance continue to operate today.
The good news is that there are constructive paths forward for reform. As we discuss in the paper, states should consider moving to a risk-based model of oversight where they use outcomes information to identify truly troubled institutions. They then can focus their investigative resources on those cases while freeing good actors from the unnecessary bureaucratic hoops through which they’re currently required to jump.
Such reforms could help ensure students truly are getting the high-quality education they deserve, while alleviating a significant cost burden on our nation’s higher education institutions.
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