Community Colleges

For more than 100 years, the time-based credit hour has been the currency of higher education. Originally created to calculate eligibility for Andrew Carnegie’s free faculty pension system, the credit hour evolved to become much more. Entire systems have been built around and upon the time-based credit hour, including the economic lifeblood of many colleges and universities—federal financial aid. But today, the U.S. Department of Education approved Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) College for America (CfA) to be the first program in the country to receive federal financial aid based on “direct assessment” of student learning, rather than the credit hour. This move from the federal government could signal a new era for higher education—one in which we value and pay for learning rather than time.

Southern New Hampshire University, a small, private liberal arts institution, is familiar with pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Over a decade ago, it added a three-year competency-based bachelor’s degree to its regular course offerings. Rather than squeeze four years of “time” into three years through summer and weekend classes, the faculty identified the core competencies students should have upon graduation and then wove those competencies into every course and assignment. By looking at the program holistically, rather than just as a combination of courses, the school was able to eliminate redundancies in the curriculum and focus on what students were expected to learn and do.

California is currently home to two of the most important things happening in higher education, one good, one bad. The good thing is the rapid advancement of cheap and free online courses offered by companies like Udacity and Coursera. The bad thing is the catastrophic failure of California lawmakers to provide enough money to support basic access to foundational courses at community colleges. Tomorrow, California Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg will announce a plan that essentially tries to use the one to fix the other. This groundbreaking initiative has broad implications for the nature, financing, and regulation of higher learning.

As of today nearly half a million students are on waiting lists for basic courses in California’s public higher education system, increasing the cost and duration of college and reducing the number of students who ultimately earn degrees. This is a human tragedy and a policy failure on a massive scale. Under the plan, waitlisted students would be able to take online classes that have been approved by California’s Open Education Resources Council, a faculty-led body that was created by recent Steinberg-sponsored legislation creating free open textbooks. ACE certification would be a point in course's favor. Students would have to take in-person proctored exams to pass the courses. Public colleges and universities in California would be required to accept those courses for credit.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include the household balance sheet, cash and payments, higher education, housing, and public benefits.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The federal financial aid system is no longer up to today’s demands. Built in a different era, its haphazard evolution over the decades has made it inefficient, poorly targeted, and overly complicated. With the need for higher education never greater and college growing increasingly unaffordable, students deserve a streamlined aid system that is more understandable, effective, and fair.

Syllabus: Week of January 20

Welcome to the Syllabus, a weekly guide that provides insight into what’s happening in higher education.

Read:

The Curious Birth and Harmful Legacy of the Credit Hour, Amy Laitinen
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Almost all colleges and universities use the credit hour to measure student progression. But these time-based units were never intended to be a measure of student learning. They were developed and widely adopted so that colleges and universities could participate in a free professor pension program administered by the Carnegie Foundation.  New America’s Amy Laitinen explains that the nation can no longer afford to use time to measure learning and instead should move toward assessing competencies. “Measuring time is easy, but measuring learning is hard,” writes Laitinen, “However, that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done.” There are already some promising practices, like the Lumina Foundation’s Degree Qualifications Profile and Tuning process, but changes to federal policy are needed to encourage wide adoption of these efforts by leveraging the government’s ability to use financial aid to pay for learning, not time.

With the presidential election fast approaching, we are taking a closer look at President Obama’s higher education record. Yesterday, we highlighted the administration’s most significant accomplishments in this area. Today, we are examining the administration’s most significant blunders and missed opportunities.

So without further ado, here are the Obama administration’s biggest higher ed misses:

1. Fighting to Keep the 3.4% Interest Rate: Eager to woo the youth vote and tap into America’s anxiety about student debt, the Obama administration launched an all-out “don’t double my rate” PR campaign earlier this year aimed at stopping Congress from allowing the temporary 3.4 percent fixed interest rate on federally-subsidized Stafford loans to revert to 6.8 percent. Not wanting to be on the wrong side of this popular issue during an election year, Republicans and Democrats lawmakers made national headlines for their bipartisan efforts to maintain the lower rate. Largely left out of this debate, however, was any acknowledgement of how small the benefits of this fix would be: after all, it only extended the 3.4 rate for another year, only applied to a subset of new borrowers (those who qualify for subsidized Stafford loans), and only would save eligible borrowers about $9 a month. And it cost the government $6 billion. With the Pell Grant program facing a multi-billion dollar funding cliff, it’s a shame that the administration spent so much political and financial capital on a one-year gimmick that provided neither meaningful relief to financially-distressed borrowers in the short term nor to the Pell Grant program over the long haul.