A new report finds that paying students to keep their grades up and stay in community college has the biggest effects among four different approaches. My mother would be appalled. I couldn’t even convince her to give me an allowance let alone pay me for good grades. But, after reading this report, I came away convinced.
Community colleges are the workhorse of the country’s higher education system. They are both a bridge into a four-year college and path into the workforce for millions. Yet far too many community college students never make it to graduation. Two-thirds drop out. That is a huge problem in today’s world.
According to the Center for Education and the Workforce, by 2018, the U.S. economy will create 22 million jobs for workers with at least some education after high school. But if we don’t produce more college grads faster, 3 million jobs will go wanting. That is, we will be 3 million workers short of filling this capacity if we can’t steer the ship back on course.
That is one reason why MDRC, a nonprofit research group working to improve social policy, launched “Opening Doors” in 2003. The effort designed and test-drove several interventions to boost graduation rates at the nation’s community colleges. Seven years later, they have tallied the results of the varied experiments and summarized them in “Opening Doors to Student Success,” a wonderfully concise and cogent synthesis of the short- and long-term results.
But first, the demand: According to the Center’s recent report, “Help Wanted,” by 2018, nearly two-thirds of all jobs (both new and replacement jobs for those retiring) will require at least some college. By “some college,” they mean at least a certificate or an associate’s degree. The other one-third of jobs will require a high school degree.
This demand for more education is not new, of course. We have been on this escalator for some time now. Indeed, since 1973, according to the Center, “the American job machine nearly quadrupled the number of jobs available to people with at least some form of education beyond high school.” Much of this shift was spurred by the decline of manufacturing and the rise of the “knowledge” economy. The iPad is a good illustration of this shift. Today, the iPad is manufactured overseas, taking with it the blue collar jobs that required only a high school degree. But its marketing, design, financing, and dissemination happen here. And all those jobs require more education.
Yet, as MDRC notes in its brief, roughly two-thirds of students entering community college drop out, and at the four-year level, upwards of 40% fail to graduate in six years. We chronicled the same trend in Not Quite Adults. Far too many young people have no clear path through college, they lack good advice on what to take and how to navigate the college landscape, and they have only half-baked notions of what lays ahead as far as jobs go. As a result, they switch majors, take a smattering of coursework, and eventually wander right out the door.
On the community college end of things, too often young people are ill-prepared for college and get stuck in that “remedial” purgatory of “catch-up” courses for no credit. Or, they are attempting to make up for past mistakes and are returning to school. But now they have other demands as well, including a job and kids. We need to do better if we are to increase the numbers of young people who are equipped to step into the jobs of the future.
MDRC took a first step in that quest with Opening Doors. The project helped community colleges design different interventions to keep young people in school: financial incentives, reforms in instructional practices, and two different forms of enhanced student services.
MDRC then evaluated the results using random assignment, and compared students in a control group with those who received the services. This is one of the surest ways to test the effectiveness of a program.
The results show that financial incentives worked the best of the four. In this case, students were given $1,000 a semester to use in any way they wanted if they kept their GPA at the “C” level and enrolled at least half-time. The program ran for two semesters only. The stipend was in addition to any Pell Grants or other financial aid.
It worked. Students–who were all low-income– earned better grades, took more credits, and were more likely to attend full-time than students in the control group. Notably, the positive effects lasted for several more semesters after the stipend ended.
Instructional reforms had less effect than the stipends, and the effects didn’t last as long. The reforms focused on creating a “learning community” for vulnerable students. They took coordinated courses as a group and were offered enhanced counseling and tutoring, as well as a voucher for text books.
While they initially passed more courses, earned more credits, felt more connected to school, and moved through the remedial classes faster than those in the control group, the program didn’t help them stay in school in the long run.
Student services was the third type of intervention. Its intent was to provide more personalized and intensive assistance to prevent students from wandering off course or to help them overcome the inevitable hurdles that spring up in everyday life and interfere with school.
In one case, the students met twice a semester with a counselor, whose student load was reduced to be able to focus more energy on the students. Most of the students in this program were juggling family and jobs on the side. The enhanced counseling again had some early effects, but they tended to fade with time.
The MDRC brief ends on an encouraging note. All the programs tested, they note, had some positive effects on students. They were short-term interventions that targeted students facing the most substantial hurdles, and they had short-term positive effects. It makes one wonder if the services were scaled up and given serious resources how much long-term good they could do.
The most interesting result–and long-lasting–is that financial incentives work, probably no surprise to economists, who regularly argue–and prove– that money matters.
As Rachel Glennerster and Michael Kremer write in their post “Small Changes, Big Results,” the Mexican government in 1997 instituted a “conditional cash transfer” program, which paid poor families if they kept their children in school. “Enrollment of girls in secondary school increased by 14.8 percentage points. Similar programs have been rigorously evaluated in many countries around the world, and school enrollment has risen in every case.”
Or maybe it’s the “nudge” that makes it all just a little easier, not to mention more motivating, to stay on course. As the Richard Thaler and Cass Sustein, both behavioral economists and the authors of the popular book, “Nudge,” put it on their blog: “Financial incentives have a behavioral element to them…The basic point is that the context around the incentive (its size, when it’s delivered, how salient it is made) are all critical to its effectiveness.”
Whatever the incentive or support, it appears from MDRC’s findings that well-designed, intensive programs to help young people stay on course in school can and do work. Unfortunately in these cash-strapped times, it’s likely that these services will be the first cut. That’s disappointing, and short-sighted, given the uphill road we face in meeting the demands of the future workforce.
