Ed Money Watch

At Ed Money Watch, we have written recently about how federal programs that aim to raise the college aspirations of low-income student lack coordination and suffer from significant redundancies. Of all these efforts, GEAR UP and Talent Search (part of the long-standing TRIO programs), have the greatest overlap. While there are significant differences between the two programs, they both provide college outreach services to low-income students at middle schools and high schools. Each works closely with students to prepare for college admissions tests, and helps them fill out college applications forms and obtain financial aid.

They also share something else in common: budget troubles. Since the creation of the GEAR UP program in 1998, these programs have had to compete for resources out of the same pot of funding (the annual Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations legislation) -- and neither program has fared particularly well over the last decade. In fact, the competition between these programs has pretty much left them both at a standstill.

Talent Search is a product of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative, which sought to curb poverty and give all citizens an equal opportunity for success. Established in 1965, as part of the original Higher Education Act, Talent Search identifies disadvantaged middle-school and high-school students with “college potential” and encourages them to pursue a higher education.

In 1998, Congress created GEAR UP largely as an alternative to the TRIO program. The Clinton administration and GEAR UP’s champions in Congress felt that Talent Search was too limited in its scope and reach to make a meaningful difference for most low-income students. The aim of GEAR UP, which is primarily made up of school-college partnerships, is to provide counseling, mentoring, academic support, and college outreach services to entire grades of students, starting in middle school. Unlike Talent Search, GEAR UP aims to make lasting changes in the middle schools and high schools the students attend. For example, the partnering colleges are expected to work with schools to overhaul curricula and provide professional development activities for teachers.

In terms of funding, the GEAR UP program got off to an auspicious start. The program initially received $120 million, and by the time President Clinton left office, it was up to $295 million. But the program’s budget has barely budged over the last decade. Appropriators did provide the program with small bumps up over the last two years, to $323 million in 2010. The final fiscal year 2011 spending bill, however, cut the program’s budget back to $303 million, the level it was funded at from 2005 to 2009.

The Talent Search program has fared even worse. While the program received a boost in the first year of the Bush administration, from $110 million to $143 million, its budget has remained flat ever since. And the final budget deal for 2011 reduced spending on the program even further, although the Department has not yet revealed how the $25-million cut that the TRIO programs sustained has been divided among the programs.

To some extent, the programs’ fiscal woes can be tied to the Pell Grant's budget problems. As the cost of even maintaining the maximum Pell Grant at its current level has exploded, Congress has had little new discretionary money to spend on the other federal higher education programs.

But it hasn’t helped that the two competing college outreach programs generally serve the same purpose. Ever since President Clinton left office, administration officials and lawmakers have been loathe to favor one program over the other, as they both have strong constituencies fighting for them. The uneasy relationship between these programs has, in fact, left policymakers looking for alternative approaches to achieving the same goals.

The Bush administration, for example, repeatedly called on Congress to kill both of these programs, as well as TRIO’s Upward Bound program, and devote the savings to support its efforts to reform high schools. Under President Bush’s proposal, states would have been able to use this money to provide interventions of their choosing to help high school students who were struggling academically. The plan never went anywhere, and the administration eventually dropped it.

In 2007, Congress created an entirely new college outreach effort, the College Access Challenge Grant program. While the program was initially modestly funded, Congress chose to dramatically expand it last year with $750 million in non-discretionary spending over five years. Unlike TRIO and GEAR UP, the challenge grant program allows states to decide how to spend the money for these purposes. The program, however, gives states such wide latitude to choose among a variety of activities that it is unclear whether it will be effective overall. In addition, the dedicated funding stream Congress gave the program expires in 2014, so it’s unclear whether it will continue beyond that time.

As we have said before, the fractured nature of these federal college readiness programs has made it harder for the government to carry out the Higher Education Act’s goals. If policymakers still believe that raising the college aspirations and improving the academic preparation of disadvantaged students serves an important public policy purpose, they not only need to develop a coherent and coordinated strategy, but they also need to provide the funding necessary to carry it out effectively.

Check back with Ed Money Watch in the coming weeks as we take a closer look at the strengths and weakness of each of the federal government's college outreach and early intervention programs.

Minnesota judge orders most services to go dark

California Governor Jerry Brown signs ‘honest but painful’ budget

Georgia committee begins to scrutinize public school funding

South Carolina legislature overrides school spending vetoes

Minnesota judge orders most services to go dark
Minnesota’s ongoing budget negotiations collapsed last night before the state’s midnight deadline to reach an agreement. Without a budget deal between Democratic Governor Mark Dayton and Republican leaders in the legislature, the state shut down on July 1, 2011 – the first day of the 2012 fiscal year. Many government services have been suspended until an agreement is reached. While schools will continue to operate, tens of thousands of state employees will be laid off. Resolving the state’s $5 billion deficit is the main point of contention; Republicans are determined to make up the gap solely with spending cuts, while Governor Dayton would supplement cuts with a tax increase on the wealthiest 2 percent in the state. More here…

California Governor Jerry Brown signs ‘honest but painful’ budget
California Governor Jerry Brown this week signed a balanced budget that includes deep cuts to education, along with other services. Depending on the actual revenue amounts raised by the state, universities could potentially see even deeper cuts, and the K-12 school year could be shortened by as many as seven days. The budget in its current form cuts public universities’ funding by about 23 percent, eliminates a higher education coordinating board called the California Postsecondary Education Commission, and slashes over $2 million in federal funding for the CalTIDES teacher evaluation data system. The budget does maintain funding for the CalPADS longitudinal student data system. The governor and Democrats in the legislature are now working to develop ballot initiative proposals for next year that will raise new revenue for the state. More here…

Georgia committee begins to scrutinize public school funding
Lawmakers and educators in Georgia have formed a committee that will study the state’s public school financing structures over the next several months. The funding formula currently used for public schools has hardly changed since its implementation in 1985, although five other committees have studied it and made recommendations for changes. The committee’s areas of consideration could range from funding for technology to major reforms involving charter schools and other alternative schools. Committee members have been advised by the state’s House Budget Office to utilize the enrollment-based funding formula currently in practice as a starting point for reforms, and to temper their recommendations based on the limited availability of funds for education. More here…

South Carolina legislature overrides school spending vetoes
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley made prolific use of her line-item veto power this week as she slashed $213 million from the legislature’s 2012 budget plan. That total included $76 million for K-12 education and $12.4 million for the purchase of new school buses. Haley argued that even with her vetoes in place, classroom spending would increase by over $100 million from fiscal year 2011 levels. Critics countered that the additional funding is necessary to ensure students will have smaller class sizes and appropriate curriculum materials. The South Carolina House voted 97-8 to override the vetoes and restored $56 million for per-pupil spending and the funds to buy new school buses. The Senate quickly followed suit. More here…

With the United States slipping in international rankings of college degree attainment, policymakers and administrators of institutions of higher education (IHEs) have begun to focus on college completion and student retention—not just student access. To that effect, a new College Board report examines the ongoing efforts by colleges to improve student retention, and evaluates the efficacy of several alternative solutions in use around the country. The report dovetails with President Obama’s own calls for colleges to boost completion rates among their students.

The report, How Four-Year Colleges and Universities Organize Themselves to Promote Student Persistence: the Emerging National Picture, says colleges and universities have not put forward the effort necessary to increase currently-stagnant college completion rates in their efforts to support students’ academic success. Although schools are beginning to address the issue, their attempts have been plagued with problems.

Specifically, the report cites several major setbacks: Schools aren’t giving student retention the priority it needs; the internal analyses that colleges conduct are insufficient; and students, even those who receive early intervention contacts from their colleges to promote their academic achievement, do not receive follow-up contacts from counselors, advisors, or other faculty.

IHEs may soon find good reason to step up their outreach efforts, though. And the authors of the report agree, stating that the “federal and state focus on retention and graduation rates will pressure institutions to improve” in the coming years.

For example, President Obama has proposed a new series of incentives that—if enacted—would reward schools that have adopted proven methods of increasing student completion rates. The president’s 2012 budget request includes several new incentive programs to support schools with increasing college completion rates.

The central proposal would provide $123 million for a “First in the World” competition. Modeled on the Investing in Innovation (i3) competition for K-12 education, it would funnel money from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to both results-based programs and new, innovative proposals with college access, completion, and/or institutional productivity as their central goals. Currently, FIPSE includes a competitive grant program for innovative reforms to higher education. While $27 million was available for new awards in 2010, no new awards will be made in 2011 due to funding decreases.  In recent years, Congress has also used FIPSE to provide earmarks for member-requested projects for IHEs; although these earmarks totaled $101 million in 2010, no funds were provided for earmarks in 2011.

The First in the World competition would also be shored up by another program: College Completion Incentive Grants. The grants are funded with $50 million in 2012 through the proposed Pell Grant Protection Act contained in the president’s 2012 budget request. States would be eligible to receive grants for demonstrating their successful efforts to reform higher education systems and improve completion rates, close achievement gaps, and expand academic preparation efforts by coordinating high school graduation requirements with colleges’ entry-level standards. These priorities are very similar to those detailed in the Obama administration’s Blueprint for Reforming ESEA.

To support states as they take on the lofty challenges facing them, the U.S. Department of Education issued guidance to U.S. governors in March 2011, offering suggestions to improve graduation rates. The College Completion Tool Kit defines seven proposals states can consider to raise completion statistics. And the federal government is not alone in pushing the new project; the National Governors Association has designed its own Complete to Compete initiative to compile the ideas and experiences of and make recommendations to state executives from around the country.

College retention has taken the spotlight in recent years, both for the higher education institutions serving students and for federal and state policymakers looking to improve global competitiveness through educational achievement. With pots of money like the ones created in the president’s 2012 budget, and new evidence and guidance such as that in the recently-released College Board report, there may now be enough at stake to persuade schools to redirect their priorities to those students most at risk of slipping through the cracks.

Last week, the Federal Education Budget Project, Ed Money Watch’s parent initiative, announced the launch of a new version of its website. The new site includes four years of higher education data on federal financing, demographics, outcomes, and financial aid use for every state and institution in the country. These data expand upon FEBP’s already rich array of K-12 data. In addition to providing the data in an easy-to-read format, the FEBP site also provides a comparison function that allows users to compare data for states, school districts, and institutions of higher education. Today, we will demonstrate how users can utilize the comparison function in order to better understand postsecondary outcomes.

Users can access the comparison function by rolling over an individual indicator name. Say, for example, that we are interested in comparing graduation rates among successful public, four-year schools using University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) as our school of interest. All we have to do is navigate to the UC Berkeley data page, roll over the graduation rate indicator and click the link that says “Compare University of California, Berkeley to other schools based on Total Graduation Rate.”

This will take us to a page that displays all of the public, four year institutions that have graduation rates within 10 percent of UC Berkeley’s 90 percent graduation rate in 2009. In this case, 23 institutions have similar graduation rates, ranging from 81 percent at University of Wisconsin at Madison to 93 percent at the University of Virginia.

The comparison function also automatically displays each school’s average Pell Grant and the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants at the institution. Interestingly, we learn that though these schools all have similar graduation rates, the make-up of their students varies widely. Only 8 percent of students at James Madison University received Pell Grants in 2009, while 69 percent received them at the Institute of American Indian & Alaska Native Culture & Arts in New Mexico. At UC Berkeley, by comparison, 24 percent of students receive Pell Grants. This suggests that some of these schools are better at attracting and serving low-income students than others.

We can also see how these schools stack up on other indicators by adding additional indicators to the display. Just click the button that says “Change Indicators Displayed” and navigate through the tabs to select other indicators. For example, let’s add net price and total enrollment to the display. Unsurprisingly, we learn that these 23 schools vary widely in both their net prices and in enrollment. The Institute of American Indian & Alaska Native Culture & Arts is by far the least expensive school with a net price of $6,170, and the smallest school with a 2009 enrollment of 350 students. This may explain in part the high percentage of low income students at the school. The Pennsylvania State University, on the other hand, is more than twice as expensive at $16,080; and the University of Texas at Austin is several magnitudes larger with an enrollment of 50,995.

We can also widen our comparison by expanding the types of schools we include. For example, if we want to incorporate two year or less than two year schools into our comparison, we just have to click the button that says “School Level: Four or More Years”. This expands our comparison to include 163 public schools. This creates much more variation in the percent of students receiving Pell Grants, primarily because community colleges tend to have much higher proportions of low-income students.

Similarly, we can expand our comparison to non-public institutions by clicking the button that says “School Type: Public.” The results page now shows that there are 857 schools that have graduation rates within 10 percent of UC Berkeley’s. By including private and for-profit schools, our comparison now includes schools with much higher net prices.

The comparison function allows users to delve deeply into the rich higher education and K-12 data available on the FEBP website. This tool can be used to expose idiosyncrasies in the ways in which federal funds are distributed among institutions, or to highlight schools that are succeeding with particular populations. As Congress continues to discuss changes to the laws that govern federal loans, grants, and other programs that affect higher education, this information should play a powerful role in the debate.