College Persistence: Does Moola Help?
Posted: December 26th, 2011 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 5 Comments »
In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about college persistence. Not access/admission. Persistence is what happens once a kid has:
a. chosen a college,
b. taken an aid package, and
c. shown up for Semester 1
Specifically, I’m interested in persistence of MATCH School grads and those of similar charter schools. These are generally kids from poor families. College is expensive. One would expect financial barriers to be the key obstacle to persistence.
A few days ago, I blogged about the story of 2 rich guys who’d offered a bunch of middle schoolers that they’d pay full tuition if the kids ever made it to college. I asked you to predict how many of 59 kids ended up with college degrees (Answer: 11).
Today’s question concerns giving grants (not loans) to collegians. They were given:
A $1,750 grant per semester for up to ten semesters (fall and/or spring semesters), making the total maximum award $17,500 per student. Students are first chosen for the award after they begin college (thus it does not affect the decision whether and where to attend) and the grant is transferable among all public colleges and universities in Wisconsin.
How much did this grant bolster college completion rates?
An excellent new study examines this question. The authors write:
Public policy, coupled with demonstrable labor market returns and a corresponding societal emphasis on college attendance, has successfully induced many children from low-income families to attend college—but many who start do not finish degrees.
Agreed. For example, KIPP found that about 90% of its first cohorts of alums entered college but only 33% graduated. KIPP is extraordinary in sharing its data.
Among those students who make the decision to enroll in college, to what degree do financial constraints continue to affect their desire and ability to persist year after year? This is a difficult question to answer since programs that alleviate financial constraints typically allocate aid before college entry, challenging the analyst seeking to identify independent effects on both initial enrollment and continued persistence. Yet the low persistence rates among entrants, and governmental resource constraints make it especially important to know whether financial aid is contributing to completion rates.
Got that? We really don’t know much about the effect of Pell Grants and so forth. It seems like a good idea. Is it?
We use the random assignment of a private Wisconsin need‐based grant to estimate the impacts of financial aid on college persistence among Pell Grant recipients at 13 public universities over three years. For equity and efficiency reasons, governments use conditional cash transfers to reduce the relationship between family income and college attainment, but prior research suggests that financial aid generates only modest positive effects.
This is the first experimental study of a program resembling the longstanding federal Pell Grant program, but with fewer paperwork requirements and an award process that facilitates the identification of effects on college persistence, independent of initial college choice.
I expected to see some nice upticks in college success. But that’s not what happened.
We find that on average the grant increased neither enrollment nor credit attainment; the only notable positive average treatment effect was a 28 percent increase in the proportion of students completing 60 credits over two years but this was offset by a reduction in credits among other students.
An exploratory analysis further suggests that the program’s small average treatment effects mask considerable heterogeneity. In particular, it appears that students with a low (pre‐randomization) propensity to persist in college received sizable positive benefits from the cash transfer, while students who were already more likely to persist in college received no benefit, and some may have been negatively affected.
If you are interested in this topic, the whole study is worth a read.
With all the joking about U-Wisconin and its policy of easy A’s, I figure I should give props to the authors: Sara Goldrick‐Rab, Douglas N. Harris, James Benson and Robert Kelchen.
The funders are: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, Spencer Foundation, Institute for Research on Poverty, and Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education.
I wonder if this small amount of money per term is substantial enough. Or maybe to put it better, maybe there would be better results with more money?
Charter schools are constantly trying to figure out how to do a better job of retaining teachers (one of my pet projects, currently). Some people think that raising salaries would keep people longer. But I’m not sure that really works. In fact, I recently saw a report from a local CMO that was going to tackle retention. They thought that salary was the LEAST likely lever for affecting change in that realm, and yet they were going to tackle that first, since it seemed most manageable.
I guess my point is that you might be able to affect teacher retention (or college student retention) with more money, but it might have to be VERY substantial. For example, for teachers, it might need to be enough money that they can change their lifestyle (more help at home, more schooling options for their kids, etc.).
With college, 1.75K might not be enough to remove the stressor that money can be for first generation college kids. It might need to be $10K.
Or it might be so attributable to other factors that infinite money might not shift things…
Dear Mike,
Thanks for response on NSC data use by Match…fyi KIPP does NOT use NSC yet. They are talking with Chris Broughton of Cristo Rey Network and may have just signed up but I am really interested in the source of their data and validity without using NSC. Also, I will be in Boston at the end of January and would like to visit Match and get more info on graduate school. I visited Match four years ago and it was inspiring! Keep up the amazing work! Peace, Rich
Paul, agree/disagree -
1. I think you’re onto something with teachers. People seem to misunderstand teacher departure in top charters and whether marginal $ increases will matter. Particularly with this very unusual pool of teachers, who have extraordinary alternatives compared to a typical USA teacher.
2. However, I’m not sure if the college persistence issue is the right nail for your “much higher $ amounts” hammer. I’ll blog some more studies and our own case studies and we’ll examine it….
MG – I agree with you that it’s not completely correct.
I think it might be true for the subset of kids who are doing ok in college, academically and socially, but are affected by some change in family circumstance – say an illness, death in family, or are attending one of those schools where first year financial aid is much higher than the next few years. (BTW, I hate that kind of bait and switch).
I’m so glad you are raising this issue because I think until now it’s been mostly overlooked in the mainstream media. Obviously there are a lot of factors that go into college persistence, not just the financial, but I think this is a solid place to start on what I hope will become a larger conversation on this blog as well as at MATCH and urban public schools nationwide.
The financial piece is interesting to me for two reasons. First of all, I think that due to the huge number of students defaulting on loans right now, we’re going to see a big shift from loans to grants among public and private colleges in the coming years. I know my college (albeit a private liberal arts school) has already done this, and I expect others will follow as well.
I also think this study suggests a real need for financial literacy education for all college students. One of the biggest pitfalls for students entering college is not only understanding their aid packages but also their commitment to file and refile for aid each year. A huge number of students lose aid between freshman and sophomore years as a result of not refiling a FAFSA because no one told them to do so.
This study also brings up a need to advise students on how best to spend their financial aid as well. There are a ton of competing financial interests for college students beyond tuition–buying books, buying food, socializing–all of which have utilitarian value in their own ways. But it seems like the sink-or-swim approach of giving financial aid in cash is only working for students with a particularly strong (and, it sounds like, family-backed) commitment to using that money towards educational ends.
Both of these ideas are useful to all students, not just low-income students, but certainly low-income students have more to gain from this type of investment at the institutional level in their financial stability.