State Sen. Conrad Appel and
state Rep. Steve
Carter, heads of their respective chambers’ committee on education, have
given notice they plan to file legislation to tie some funding to higher
education to performance of schools. Institutions would be divided into five
tiers depending on mission, then evaluated and compared to regional peer
institutions on a metric such as graduation rate, with funding decisions based
upon relative performance. Carter asserts the necessity of this addition due to
the GRAD Act standards, which are a series of institution-set goals that must
be met to allow an increase of up to 10 percent in tuition without legislative
approval, are too easy manipulable by colleges.
To increase flexibility and incentives, the proposed legislation would
remove that necessity of Legislative tuition increase approval. Louisiana is
the only state where its legislature must otherwise give approval for tuition
increases, and by a two-thirds vote of the body no less. This
and other restrictions on tuition autonomy exercised by universities have
created some perverse incentives to dampen efficiency efforts, but the thinking
to date has been against giving universities free hand with tuition without
assurances of accountability. The intent behind this legislation signals with
this additional accountability measure that there is legislator comfort with
giving up its stranglehold.
The concept is sound. Louisiana continues to suffer from relatively low
completion rates even as the institution of the GRAD Act and its successor has
provided incentive to tick them upwards. This occurs in large part from an
endogenous factor – a funding system that historically encouraged more pumping
up student credit hours enrolled to gain resources than in ensuring a quality,
relevant education – and an exogenous factor – the exceptionally poor quality
of elementary and secondary education that has only begun to be addressed in
the past 15 years (the first cohort of students whose entire pre-higher
education academic career has been in this timeframe only now is entering
college, but keep in mind the large portion of the state’s college population
is nontraditional students who in part or entirely have been unexposed to the
reform environment) that made Louisiana high school graduates/General
Equivalency Diploma recipients disproportionately unprepared for work at the
level of higher education. By dangling this carrot, greater incentive is placed
upon outcomes than on inputs.
It’s the execution that can be tricky. Even as Carter perceives the
GRAD Act system as too easily gamed, the same subversion can occur using a
metric such as graduation rate compared to peers. It’s the easiest thing in the
world in response to this for schools to find surreptitious ways to ease off on
quality and/or inflate grade point averages, thereby flunking fewer students,
and up goes the rate. (Or even overt prodding, as I
and another instructor at another institution learned.) When we speak of
using graduation rate as a metric, it’s not that any old kind of graduation can
be used, but graduation of quality students from quality instruction.
There are two forces that operate on the higher education environment that
can work against a downward draft against standards. Accreditation by regional
organizations is not one of them. This merely looks for a certain set of
considered best practices present and does not attempt to evaluate quality in
terms of things like amount of useful knowledge imparted and level of critical
thinking attained, but more whether there ways to measure these things by institutionally-set
standards, and is more of a bureaucratic marker than anything else.
One is competition. Private schools have provided some, but traditionally
serve a somewhat different marketplace of students. More recently, the advent
of for-profit institutions has provided a serious competition even though they typically
charge
more and graduate at lower rates than public schools, as they have captured
9.5 percent of the total
student market (actually down because of the recession/near-recession faced
over the past five years). More challengingly, they offer the highest-interest
programs, such as in criminal justice or business, that are the most easily
tied to defined career opportunities, which attract the greatest attention from
students and employers. Thus, the more attractive these schools become by demonstrated
placement ability, where employers are motivated to hire quality graduates, the
more pressure is placed upon public institutions to respond and replicate.
The other is licensing. Certain professions such as engineering and
architecture for holders of these degrees to practice must pass a licensing
test. Assuming these professions continue to want to attract competent, if not
quality members, they have incentives to keep up standards on the exams,
forcing schools to follow along. (By contrast, teaching certificates in most
states measure only craft, not subject area knowledge where it is assumed that
comes by virtue of curriculum requirements completed.)
So, in keeping up standards, public institutions face more pressure in
some areas than in others to maintain standards. In some others, the pressures
are reduced but present. For example, in the sciences employers can get a
pretty good idea about graduate quality in their vetting processes for
employment and subsequent performance of those hired, so market pressures should
bear on schools: word gets out among employers and prospective students about
program quality, where lower-quality programs would attract fewer students because
of reduced employer attention or salary offers. But in others, particularly in
the area of arts and humanities, there’s little connection if any to a defined
career path and to a substantive knowledge or skill base evaluable by
prospective employers. While that does not mean that these graduates are less
employable it does mean that it’s more difficult from the outside to assess
their quality and thereby decouples program quality from quality demanded in
the marketplace.
Thus, it becomes more tempting for an institution to set up an
incentive system where weak students get funneled into undemanding programs in
a bid to boost graduation rates. That’s the danger these bill authors face,
and, on the surface, there’s not much that can be done about that.
At the same time, another trend actually may mitigate this possibility
but at the expense of mooting to perhaps a large degree the intent of the law.
The latest budget cuts the state’s appropriation into higher education to an
all-time low; only 10.58
percent of its appropriation is planned to come from the general fund.
While this reduces the pot of money over which gamesmanship may occur, it also
reduces the effect of the incentive. Even if somehow all of the statutorily
dedicated funds also could be tied into this kind of performance measure, which
seems unlikely what they are and from where the money will come, just under 40
percent, this still may not provide much leverage. As the authors say only something
around a third of the state share would be up for grabs under their
formulation, that means at most just 13 percent or so of the budgeted total would
be usable for incentive purposes.
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