Editor's note: This is an excerpt from an article in the June/July edition of the Community College Journal, the bimonthly magazine of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC).
As the focus on student success and completion intensifies on campus, community college leaders know the only way to stay viable is to change the culture of their institutions. With state and federal coffers in perpetual free fall, that means leveraging existing resources to spur reforms.
Some colleges have attempted to do this through the integration of incentives that disburse money or other benefits to students, faculty, and staff for improved academic performance.
“Gone are the days when the only thing community colleges focused on was bringing in as many students as possible,” says Patty Erjavec, president of
Pueblo Community College (PCC) in Colorado.
Performance-based
PCC is among a number of colleges considering offering scholarships to students who stay with their studies, excel in class and complete.
In Washington, where the
State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) boasts one of the oldest and most publicized incentive programs directed at improving student performance, colleges accrue points and receive funding when more of their students reach any of the following six milestones: Earn basic skills points by making test gains; successfully complete a pre-college math or English course, earn 15 college-level credits, earn 30 college-level credits, complete a college-level math/quantitative reasoning course, or earn a degree or certificate.
The
Student Achievement Initiative is intended to make colleges more accountable, increase student success rates, and help the state transition from a traditional enrollment-based funding approach to one that awards colleges for achieving results, says David Prince, policy research director at SBCTC.
“The initiative provides quarterly data to the colleges on progress and retention of their students,” Prince says. “Colleges can track student progress toward these achievement points each quarter, providing immediate feedback and opportunities for intervention strategies.”
Where incentive programs were once viewed as avant-garde, national policymakers and community college advocates are taking notice, says Davis Jenkins, a senior research associate at the
Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York.
“We’re definitely hearing more about it,” says Jenkins, a leading researcher on ways to improve community college student success and institutional performance. “We’re interested in these kinds of incentive systems because we have argued that looking at behavior economics is something the colleges really need to pay attention to. It’s not just monetary incentives, it’s how you structure programs and how you keep track. We’re encouraging colleges to make sure students have a plan [for academic progress] and to track students’ progress according to the plan,” Jenkins says.
Different approaches
Student-based incentives can include tuition discounts that kick in after a student earns a credential or reaches a predetermined credits-earned threshold, says Peter Ewell, vice president of the
National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), a nonprofit organization in Boulder, Colo., and member of AACC’s 21st-Century Commission. Another option is partial loan forgiveness if these milestones are achieved, he says.
For faculty, bonus pay is one route, Ewell says. But other incentives are also popular. “Some of the best of these ideas are collective rewards—faculty development grants, travel grants—to academic units that achieve higher than predicted success.”
Whatever the structure, experts say the goal of an incentive program should be to encourage students to move quickly and efficiently through the system and to pressure colleges to create clearer, more defined pathways to success.
“The vast majority of community colleges don’t know for any given student how far along they are toward completing a program of study because many colleges don’t track that at all,” says Jenkins.
Such programs are showing results in places like California, where budget cuts have forced colleges to use what little funds they have in more creative ways.
“We’ve seen governments and educational institutions respond very quickly to financial incentives,” says Stuart Drown, executive director of the
Little Hoover Commission, an independent oversight agency for the state of California.