Getting to Graduation: The Completion Agenda in Higher Education

Conclusion

Conclusion andrew p. kelly and mark schneider Two years after President Obama announced his ambitious plans for higher education, a “completion agenda” has taken root in state governments, foundations, and colleges across the country, all of which have made large financial investments in service of increasing the number of adults in the nation with postsecondary credentials. This undertaking presents an unprecedented opportunity to learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of our higher education system and to use that knowledge to reform the system. Because these investments are usually attached to concrete attainment goals—a 60 percent attainment rate, doubling the numbers of low-income degree-holders, and so on—they have also raised the stakes for success. Any verdict as to whether American higher education has met the challenges of the completion agenda will be based largely on how much measurable progress we make on these goals. Say what you will about whether focusing on completion rates is the best strategy—and many of the contributors to this volume voice concerns in this regard—the rhetorical shift from an access agenda to a success agenda has been remarkable. As we stated in the opening of this volume , however, shifting the rhetoric is the easy part. Sought-after results will require significant policy change, a cultural shift in the way institutions think about their work, far better metrics for measuring success, and serious commitment on the part of policymakers to demand more of a system that has rested on its laurels as the world’s best. Even more important , policymakers and institutional leaders must have a “playbook” of strategies that can promote student success and improve institutional performance, as well as a strategy for scaling up reforms that do prove successful. The current fiscal crisis in the states has further complicated matters, as these reform strategies must be not only effective, but also 293 294 getting to graduation cost-effective. We have entered an era where continuing to conduct business as usual will be increasingly difficult, if not impossible. We began this volume with a set of seemingly simple questions: Where does the United States currently stand when it comes to postsecondary attainment, and how much would productivity have to improve in order to make progress on these new higher education goals? Are the goals feasible? What do we know about how to dramatically raise the proportion of Americans who hold a college degree, and which types of programs are likely to provide the most bang for our reform buck? Finally, what might policymakers learn from states and institutions that have embarked on ambitious higher education reforms in the past? We did not set out to deliver a hard and fast verdict on any of these questions—indeed, many of our contributors disagreed on the feasibility and appropriateness of the attainment goals. Instead, in this concluding essay we explore what we see as several recurrent themes that surface throughout the chapters. We begin by assessing the goals themselves vis- à-vis the status quo in higher education, then move on to discuss what we know about strategies to improve productivity and how to measure them. We then turn to examine potential game-changing developments in the sector and offer a few words on how to rethink what success looks like going forward. Assessing the Goals As many of our authors point out, the completion agenda actually consists of a series of distinct goals. The president has promised that by 2020, America will “once again” be the most highly educated nation in the world—a promise that he translated into a call for an additional eight million degrees, including five million at the sub-baccalaureate level. The Gates Foundation’s goal is to double the number of low-income adults who earn a postsecondary credential that has labor market value by age 26. The Lumina Foundation for Education has set its sights on increasing the proportion of American adults with a postsecondary credential to 60 percent by the year 2025. The Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce recently projected that the United States will need an additional 20 million degrees by the year 2025: 15 million bachelor’s degrees, 4 million certificates, and 1 million associate’s degrees. Whether these goals are reasonable depends on how our participation , completion, and attainment rates look today and how they have Conclusion 295 changed over time. It is only...