By Anthony Cody.

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker made headlines recently when he tried to change the mission of the state university system there, removing the “search for truth.” In its place, the university’s mission was changed to “meet the state’s workforce needs.” This blatant attack on the higher mission of our universities was turned back. But Scott Walker’s vision may well be achieved in less dramatic fashion through something called “Outcome Based Funding,” now being promoted by the Gates Foundation and the Obama administration.

The Gates Foundation has sponsored a new report that concludes that higher education will improve with a heavy focus on outcomes, and that government funding should be tied to these outcomes, similar to No Child Left Behind. And the colleges that will be hardest hit, just as with NCLB, will be those attended by African Americans and those in poverty.

The report titled “Driving Better Outcomes,” available here, was written by HCM Strategists. I want to describe the substance of the report, but first it is worth noting the way a Gates Foundation insider described their process in supporting reports of this sort. In an interview with researchers Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tomkins-Stange, a Gates informant, said this:

It’s within [a] sort of fairly narrow orbit that you manufacture the [research] reports. You hire somebody to write a report. There’s going to be a commission, there’s going to be a lot of research, there’s going to be a lot of vetting and so forth and so on, but you pretty much know what the report is going to say before you go through the exercise.

Working from what we know about the Gates Foundation framework, we can guess the imperatives at work. Lower costs, increase top down management through standardization and tests, and serve corporate employers. Here are the specific grants HCM Strategists has received:

In 2012 HCM Strategists got a grant for $800,460, “to lead an effort designed to assess the empirical and political feasibility of ways federal student aid investments could incent higher completion and attainment of high-value credentials.” In 2013, they got an additional $461,480 in order to “to identify high leverage strategies for reducing cost to students in higher education institutions”.

Now on to the content of the report.

The report opens with this paragraph, as an overview and background:

Tying funding to successful outcomes is a concept with inherent appeal, particularly so when tight budgets demand heightened efficiency and impact for each dollar. Today’s fiscal climate and economic need for expanded postsecondary access and completion have fueled a resurgence of interest in and state action regarding performance funding policies, which tie a portion of state appropriations to metrics that gauge institutional performance on various indicators.

This sort of boilerplate statement has become the background to assumptions driving educational policy. The essence of this statement is “we have to provide more value to employers at a lower cost.” Before we go any further, let’s pause to question this assumption. Is our economy suffering from a lack of productivity? Do we have less resources than in the past? No, quite the opposite. Our economy is the most productive in the world, and GDP has been rising steadily. If there is less money available to support higher education, it could be due to the ever-shrinking amount of money corporations are paying in taxes. Corporations have figured out one dodge after another – including the practice of parking profits overseas. In 2013, Microsoft was reported to be holding $76 billion in profits overseas to avoid domestic taxes. So let’s take this urgent desire to cut costs with a large grain of salt.

Another dose of reformer boilerplate:

The United States trails 11 countries in educational attainment for 25- to 34-year-olds.i And according to The American Dream 2.0 coalition report, our nation is facing a college completion crisis, with 46 percent of students failing to graduate within six years and an even bleaker outlook for minorities (63 percent of African American students and 58 percent of Hispanic students do not graduate on time).

Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?

But in 2013, the New York Times reported the following:

Last year, 33.5 percent of Americans ages 25 to 29 had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 24.7 percent in 1995, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In 1975, the share was 21.9 percent. The number of two-year college degrees, master’s degrees and doctorates has also risen recently.

Hmmm. Where is that crisis? We are graduating more students from high school than ever, and graduating more from college than ever. It is crucial that we question the supposed rationales for proposed reforms, because we have seen from the track record of K12 education reform, oftentimes crises such as these can be cooked up or exaggerated.

What is the big idea with Outcomes Based Funding?

First, there is a concern that colleges are funded based on “inputs,” largely the number of students they enroll. This leaves the schools lacking incentives to operate efficiently, which is measured in “outputs,” such as the speed with which students graduate. The report states:

States are increasingly adopting outcomes-based funding policies to supplement or replace historic and enrollment-based institutional allocation methods, both to better leverage existing resources and to spur improvements in student outcomes and institutional efficiency.

An evolved form of performance funding, OBF similarly seeks to incent and reward progress toward a set of stated goals, but is distinct from performance funding models in both design
and implementation—primarily because of its more explicit connection with state needs, focus
on student completion, and refined development and modeling approaches. In varying degrees, current OBF models address many of the challenges presented by early performance funding plans and “reflect the needs of the state and citizens, not merely the institution.

Objectives of OBF include:

• •  Align state higher education funding method with the state’s higher education attainment goals and student success priorities;

• •  Align institutional priorities with those of the state and support the scaling of proven student success practices; and

• •  Hold institutions accountable for performance and their role in achieving state attainment goals.

The key outputs on offer are in these three categories:

Student Progression and Momentum

Intermediate outcomes/key milestones important to student progression toward completion

• Remedial education success
• Completion of first college-level mathematics and English courses
• Credit accumulation (e.g., 15, 30 credit hours)

Completion

Promote certificate/degree completion and transfer

• Number or rate of program completers
• Number of transfers
• Licensure pass rates
• Job placement

Productivity and Institution Mission

Promote efficiency, affordability and focusing dollars on core mission functions

• Degrees per 100 FTEs
• Research

 

What this approach requires is that each state collect data on each of these items, and then create a system to rank and sort colleges. The ones that do not transfer or graduate enough students will find their funding cut.

The overriding imperative for these changes is to serve employers by providing job preparation at a minimum expense.

The Obama administration has announced plans to create a college ratings system aligned with this outcome-based approach – and it is coming this year. This White House Fact Sheet explains:

New College Ratings before 2015. Before the 2015 school year, the Department of Education will develop a new ratings system to help students compare the value offered by colleges and encourage colleges to improve. These ratings will compare colleges with similar missions and identify colleges that do the most to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds as well as colleges that are improving their performance. The results will be published on the College Scorecard. The Department will develop these ratings through public hearings around the country to gather the input of students and parents, state leaders, college presidents, and others with ideas on how to publish excellent ratings that put a fundamental premium on measuring value and ensure that access for those with economic or other disadvantages are encouraged, not discouraged.  The ratings will be based upon such measures as:

• Access, such as percentage of students receiving Pell grants;
• Affordability, such as average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt; and
• Outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates, graduate earnings, and advanced degrees of college graduates

There are already indications that this will hurt institutions that serve students from poor backgrounds. Two weeks ago, President Obama spoke to the Congressional Black Caucus and used the occasion to criticize Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). A report on the Crew of 42 blog shared these reactions:

He said there were some HBCUs that were not good at graduating students and if they did not improve they’d have to go by the wayside,” said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA).

In other words he didn’t show much empathy for struggling HBCUs.  It was like show me the numbers and if the numbers aren’t where they need to be, that’s it. It was a somewhat callous view of the unique niche HBCUs fill,” Rep. Johnson, a graduate of Clark Atlanta University, said.

Research shows that students from lower income high schools tend to have lower rates of college completion, even once they have been admitted to college. This means that schools with higher proportions of such students are likely to get lower ratings. The plan to rate colleges based on the earnings of graduates will hurt institutions that produce people interested in working as teachers, doing social work or working in the arts.

I asked Renee Moore, who teaches at a community college in the Mississippi delta, her thoughts about this, and she provided this perspective:

Gates is actually a latecomer to this party in higher education, but the fact that they are weighing in is just more fuel for a train well on its way down the track. The push and the  mechanisms for “outcomes-based reform” in colleges and universities (including community colleges and HBCUs) started simultaneously with NCLB [see this 2001 report: EwellSLO_Sept2001]. The primary vehicle for this has been the regional accreditation agencies (listed here.)

Accreditation is of much greater importance to colleges and universities than it is to K12 schools. It is required in order for the school to receive Federal funds, eligibility for student loans, Pell Grants, and other programs. Since 2001, more and more colleges have shifted to the use of standardized tests to meet their accreditation requirements. Many test graduating seniors somewhere in their last semester; some schools test all the grads; others do a sampling. Up to this point, colleges have resisted making these tests mandatory for graduation, at least to my knowledge. The increased use of the tests has spawned its own wing of the testing industry…for example our college and others use the ACT Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency.

For well over a decade now, college and university administrators have heard at their respective regional accreditation conferences about the need to use test data in their accreditation processes;  which testing programs work best, how to best present test data; of course, the vendors are out in force in the exhibit halls. Linking test data to funding at the state levels has been bubbling up in various state legislatures around the country for several years now as well. Some states have put the infamous “report card” systems into place for IHEs, and require public reporting of various criteria (number and percentage of graduates, pass rates and graduation rates of students in remedial programs, etc.) President Obama’s call for a college ranking system actually borrows from what several states are already doing and give it federal leverage.

HBCUs, smaller regional state universities, and community colleges are the most vulnerable to where this trend is clearly heading for the same reasons K12 schools that serve poor students are: They rely more heavily on Federal funding to exist and have less clout to get exempted from state and federal policies. It’s taken a little longer to build up the “crisis” scenario for higher ed that has been so successfully concocted around American K12 education, partially because much of the world still send its children to American IHEs to get their education. Again, though, it’s the schools that serve the poor students that are most easily targeted for doing poorly….

 

The flip side of that argument is that some of these schools have, in fact, not been doing right by their students for a variety of reasons, but that is now going to be used as an excuse to do some broad damage to all schools.

The Community College of San Francisco (CCSF) has been involved in an extended battle over accreditation related to these issues. And the proposed guidelines for schools of education likewise apply “outcome based measures,” including the use of VAM systems that measure the test scores of students taught by teachers that have graduated from those schools.

The key goals of this “reform” project are to cut costs and deliver efficiently that which serves the direct needs of employers. In any consideration of such demands, we need to remember that the GDP of our nation has never been higher, and our society as a whole is wealthier than ever. Sadly, however, the amount of funding directed to education is being diminished, as the wealthiest have become less and less willing to pay their share of taxes. Our universities do contribute to our economic strength, but beyond that, have an important role that transcends dollars. There must be room for the pursuit of truth, and the development of individuals who contribute through the arts, or to our understanding of society. Our colleges and universities are PUBLIC institutions, with a mission to serve the common good, not corporations and their bottom lines.

And in a manner similar to the way NCLB hit hardest at K12 schools serving poor, African American, Latino and immigrant students, these measurement systems are likely to have the greatest impact at colleges and universities where these same students are concentrated.

The technocrats are running amok. They are so busy insisting that we base all decisions on measurable outcomes, they fail to see the many facets of life and learning that are not captured by their measuring sticks. Leaders in higher education have been rather quiet in response to this threat. Will we see our colleges and universities realigned and repurposed to purely mercenary goals? Will the pursuit of truth become a quaint relic of a bygone era?

What do you think?