Views On Cost-Effectiveness

An Inventory of Cost-Effectiveness Ideas

To spur conversation and deliberation across the field, we’ve prepared an inventory of the many proposals and suggestions that emerged in this research and in related conversations conducted as part of the Midwest Higher Education Compact Fourth Annual Policy Summit in Minneapolis in November 2008.

These two sources offer a rich variety of perspectives, including those of state level financial officers, institutional financial officers and faculty at two-year and four-year schools interviewed for Campus Commons, along with the higher education administrators and state legislators who participated in the MHEC summit. Together, these individuals generated a profusion of ideas on how to improve cost-effectiveness in higher education—that is, how to balance the issues of cost, quality and access that lie at the center of today’s higher education challenge.

Some of these ideas were mentioned repeatedly in the interviews and the Minneapolis sessions, and some were being actively pursued in higher education settings. Others are more in the nature of brainstorming. Since the various stakeholders in these conversations are not necessarily of one mind about what works best, some of these ideas conflict with others, or at least they rest somewhat uneasily side by side. Nevertheless, this inventory suggests a breadth of thinking that is, in our view, revealing and thought-provoking.

1. Improving college readiness

Interviewees often reported that their systems or institutions expend resources on remediation and that the presence of poorly prepared students reduces the ability of postsecondary programs to help students obtain degrees as cost-effectively and expeditiously as possible. In the view of many in higher education, a high school diploma does not mean that a student is ready for college. Some of the solutions we heard in interviews and forums were:

Perform better assessments before college in order to help students adjust their expectations.

Offer grants to students willing to take remediation based on assessment tests taken senior year in high school. Partnerships between high schools and universities.

Start remediations earlier in the K–12 experience.

Better counseling at both the K–12 and higher education level.

“The money is saved by not paying for all the people that aren’t ready, or doing remediation, or all the dropped classes. You can invest in getting people up to the place they need to be to really engage in the work.”

“We’ve launched dual enrollment programs, something called Seniors to Sophomores—early college programs so that more students can basically capture a free year of college by finishing that year while they’re still high school students. We’re also going to advocate for more spending for AP courses, free SAT tests, etc., to see if we can get more people qualified.”

2. Improving retention for students already in college

One of the most frequent themes was that it is easier to target students who are already in college than to deal with the broader issues of college readiness in K–12. Many point out that it is more cost-effective for the institution to retain students than to recruit new ones.

Enrich first-year programs.

Better tracking of high-risk students once they enter higher ed.

Deal with cultural issues that impede success for college students.

Help students develop individual mentoring relationships with staff or faculty.

Offer reduced loans or tax credits to families for tuition, when students achieve milestones.

Design remediation to target those specific areas a student is lacking in rather than have the student repeat an entire course.

Design more relevant curricula.

Reduce the amount of time students need to obtain a degree.

Offer additional support for students in bottleneck courses (e.g. college algebra, or U.S. history).

Require students to participate in a last-chance interview before being allowed to actually withdraw from classes.

Provide graduation incentives for students who complete a degree within a certain time frame.

“I also think that there is a potential for better use of sort of best practices in serving low-income students well and getting them to persist well. Within the whole group of public and private institutions, there are some that have better luck on persistence and completion even with low-income students. We should be learning more from what they are doing.”

3. Creating an integrated P-20 education system

Better integration among various levels and systems of education was another frequently mentioned area and one that was often seen as more practical in the short term. Our respondents repeatedly called for efforts that would “break through firewalls” and “overcome barriers,” bringing together higher education and K–12, community colleges and flagship institutions. There were dozens of proposals for ways to do this, including the following:

Dual credit systems, so more students could be taking college-level courses in high school.

Administrative structures that would encompass all state or regional education systems from pre-K to college.

Prevent “mission creep,” for example, when regional colleges seek to upgrade themselves to be research institutions.

Greater coordination between industry and education, for example, align educational goals with workforce development.

Have four-year institutions offer classes on community college campuses.

Strategic location of higher education programs to meet local needs.

Create centers of excellence in different institutions, so not every institution in every corner of the state has to be excellent at everything.

Arrange for institutions catering to similar students to have periodic meetings to discuss best practices and benefit from one another's trials and errors when it comes to cost-effectiveness and degree completion.

4. Offering greater differentiation of programs to match the diversity of college students

Many interviewees pointed out that the current systems of financial aid are designed mostly for “traditional” full-time students, while in fact, many part-time students have an equal or greater need for financial assistance. Consequently, the various conversations produced a variety of proposals for diversifying educational programs to meet the needs of a diverse student population:

Stop using the term nontraditional students.

Make curricula more relevant to the needs of nontraditional students (as one group said: “What we are selling is not what they are buying”).

Enhance technical education, recognizing that not all students need a four-year academic degree.

Grant college credits for existing knowledge and experience.

Develop instructional delivery programs suited to the needs of adult learners (using a variety of locations and times during the day).

Expand distance education suitable for part-time students who are also working.

Move away from one-size-fits-all models of student engagement, to develop new models suitable for older students.

5. Using incentives and models from the business world

Many of those we spoke with pointed out that higher education institutions generally have internal funding models based on student enrollment in courses, as opposed to completion of courses or obtaining a degree. Many believe this doesn’t offer enough incentives for faculty and departments to retain students in courses or push themselves to make sure students work toward completing their degree. A number of MHEC groups called for revised incentive systems that would reward institutions for course and program completion. While this approach makes sense in theory, some individuals were worried that it would erode quality, encouraging colleges to pass students through the system. In general, there was a lack of clarity on how to use incentives. Some favored incentivizing students, others saw incentives coming in at the level of the institution.

A variety of other incentive ideas and productivity ideas were discussed by various groups, including:

Change faculty reward systems to emphasize mentoring and teaching vs. research.

Change institutional incentives to eliminate duplication and reward collaboration.

Provide incentives to school administrations to create programs that improve graduation rates.

Leverage faculty talent by offering professors preferred classes in exchange for their taking on large lectures.

Explaining cost structures to faculty so that they can share in the profits of taking classes that generate more income.

Rethink the business side of all levels of education, especially efficiencies such as textbook purchases.

Outsource noneducational functions such as dorms and meal plans, facility maintenance and custodial services.

Close down TV class offerings and post them online.

Make profitable use of college property by expanding leases to cellular phone companies and transferring ITFS (television broadcast abilities) to broadband providers.

Improve physical plants for greater energy savings.

Institute hiring freezes and require all departments to submit new hire requests to the CFO in order to slow spending.

Reduce the amount of business incubation (university support for business start-ups) provided by universities; not all programs are capable of producing a Crest toothpaste or Sun Microsystems.

Transitioning from hard-copy to digital journals.

Encourage faculty to create and or use digital textbooks to reduce costs to the student.

Be more adaptable to the current job climate.

Increase class availability in in-demand fields and reduce coursework in passing trends, e.g., going from Internet-heavy coursework during the dot-com boom to health care after the bust.

Increase wireless access throughout campus while reducing the amount of computer labs. Labs can then be utilized for classroom space and or office space.

Do away with tenure in fields where there are very few majors.

Some campuses are working with open source software to reduce their technology fees (although the individual who offered this suggestion did not believe that the quality was worth the savings at this point).

“We’re doing some system redesign; we’re consolidating our educational IT programs. Right now we have a proliferation of agencies, we’re consolidating all that into one agency over time to enable us to reduce some slots, but also improve services.”

6. Innovating

Postsecondary institutions need innovation and creativity in meeting their challenges. Many stressed the use of new technology. For example, several people talked about:

Make more creative use of edutainment software to build student engagement.

Emphasize faculty development in new techniques and approaches.

Have students take only one intense course for a few weeks, rather than scheduling several courses
at once.

Encourage innovation from outside, since the “academy” is least creative when it comes to solutions
to its own problems.

Tap into creativity of retirees.

Make more effective use of instructional technology.

Make use of vacated school buildings to serve college students.

Use “hybrid” methodologies, combining distance education, active learning and innovative scheduling to reach older and part-time students.

Take counselors out of high schools and put them in malls and on MySpace and other social-networking spaces.

Establish personalized scholarships. Private donors can provide need-based scholarships for around $50,000.

“You know, on the academic side, there has been a push-back on the online programs—feeling as if
there’s a lack of quality in those types of programs. But from the administrative side, we’re trying to give them insight into it, and we’re bringing them along slowly, but with that initial resistance. I think it’s starting to pick up some speed, and I think there’s some more buy-in from the academic side on that type of thing.”

7. Making greater use of information

Many believed that lack of information and communication is a significant barrier to college participation and success. Many feared that there is a tremendous lack of information about higher education, especially among minority groups and/or students from families without high education levels. The participants also identified a number of other areas where better information could significantly improve the higher education landscape, including:

Better communication about the long-term financial value of obtaining a higher education.

Target information about higher education to younger children and to parents of younger children.

Closer cooperation between colleges and high schools, more “open house programs” where students and families actually visit college campuses.

Broad-based marketing programs to the whole community on advantages and options for college education.

More career awareness programs in K–12 education.

Formal contracts to complete college education within a certain period, to be signed by students
and families.

8. Offering better assessments and productivity measures

We also heard calls for better tools for assessing educational outcomes and using those tools to incentivize more productivity in higher education. One theme was to emulate some of the ideas coming out of health care, such as “best practice information,” which could then be disseminated statewide. At least among the MHEC discussion groups, we often heard more calls for better metrics than we heard specific suggestions for how to actually implement them.