Is college worth it? Higher ed accountability can give students a clearer answer.
The onset of the COVID-19 crisis, and the resulting campus closures, had many students asking an important question: “Is going to college worth it?” Students had long been frustrated with rising costs, inflexible pathways, and lack of student support, but the pandemic brought new urgency to their concerns. The rapid switch to online learning left many students feeling that they were paying the same high tuition for less effective instruction. Even as the country begins to reopen, college enrollment is still down this spring, with over 700,000 fewer undergraduates enrolling compared to last year.
There is little doubt that postsecondary education has the power to transform lives for the better. But not all programs are made equal and students lack the consumer protections necessary to ensure their money — and by extension, taxpayers’ money — is well spent. When potential students see media stories about graduates completing degrees and credentials and then struggling to find high-paying work, or pay off student loan debt, they question the choice to pursue higher learning. Our current accountability structure sometimes fails to provide critical assurance to students.
The federal government attempts to provide accountability for the $120 billion dollars of federal student aid that flows through institutions of higher education annually by requiring institutions to meet certain standards. To gain access to financial aid, institutions must be accredited by an agency approved by the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and must ensure that their dropout rates do not exceed 33 percent. They are also required to comply with a base level of financial and regulatory standards. One of the only outcomes-based measures institutions are held accountable to is their cohort default rate (CDR), which measures how certain segments of an institution’s former students default on their loans when they enter repayment. Higher Learning Advocates has profiled these accountability measures in more detail here.
While these measures are intended to protect students and taxpayers, it is far from enough to provide any sort of consumer protection guarantee. In practice, many of these requirements and metrics are low thresholds that do nothing to differentiate low-performing institutions from those that perform well. Cohort default rate is not a sufficiently comprehensive measure to account for all of the benefits that Americans hope to see after earning a degree or credential. As a result, while over one million students default on their student loans every year, only a handful of colleges with small student populations are faced with even the possibility of losing access to federal financial aid.
What does a better accountability system look like? It has to, at a minimum, guarantee that a higher education program will leave students better off after leaving school than when entering; help them gain access to professions that reward having a college credential; and lead to earnings that are appropriate for their field and level of experience.
Building back from the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity for us to reform postsecondary accountability. While cohort default rates are still an important measure to focus on, as loan default can have serious consequences for student borrowers, the measure needs to be updated to actually differentiate high-performing and low-performing programs. The current pause on student loan payments, instituted as a part of COVID-19 relief, may result in a wave of student loan defaults, even if it will be a few years before this is shown in institutions’ cohort default rates. A better and more robust accountability metric could look at program-level repayment rates and close existing loopholes (such as excluding students who are in loan forbearance), which keep many of the most vulnerable students from being included in the metric calculations.
In addition to revisiting cohort default rates, more accountability metrics that are based on actual student outcomes are necessary. In 2014, ED created the “gainful employment” rule, requiring schools to provide their students with an education adequate enough for them to pay their college loans back. This meant meeting minimum thresholds with respect to graduates’ debt-to-income rates of their graduates. While this rule was quickly repealed by the Trump administration, we now have the opportunity to establish a new version of the gainful employment rule and consider additional ways to use earnings metrics for accountability informed by research and successful state-level approaches.
Online learning will also be at the forefront of post-COVID accountability conversations. The rapid shift to online learning was necessary to protect the health and safety of students. Half of colleges still offer an online or hybrid model as of Spring 2021; we need rededicated resources and guidance from accreditors and the Department of Education about what constitutes high-quality distance education that demonstrates value for students in tangible ways.
The COVID-19 pandemic paused a lot of higher education conversations, while also starting many new ones. We had to quickly figure out how to make sure that students could continue learning while staying safe, healthy, and financially solvent. But conversations about accountability should not pause for too long because they are ultimately conversations about what’s best for today’s students. Among all the other uncertainties of life, students shouldn’t have to wonder whether higher learning is worth it, and a strong, outcomes-based accountability system could provide them with that guarantee.
