Still getting ready for school: Supporting students as they prepare for college
HGSE Associate Professor Bridget Terry Long
Text of video 1
So in Ohio while you could take your remedial courses at a four year or a two year institution, in the early 80's Florida made a decision that they were only going to allow developmental and remedial courses to happen at the community colleges. But, they have a wonderful amazing data set there, so we were able to take a look at all kinds of students. Not just the younger, just out of high school traditional A student. So you have a sample of about a 100,000 students.
In Florida also when they changed the law, I believe it was in 1983, they made one policy that all institutions have to follow. One placement test that all the schools have to follow. And because of that we're able to use a regression discontinuity strategy to understand whether or not remedial courses impact student outcomes in any way. And this paper, in particular, since regression discontinuity is—it's not that new anymore, but certainly the literature has been pushing in this direction—we try to take some time to discuss some of the advantages and strengths of using this method particularly in education work, and accept the possibility of... (inaudible) sorting around the policy cutoff, which could be very important for—if you think people are kind of gaming the system right around the cutoff where they might be placed in remediation.
So you can get a sense of what our data look like, this is showing the distribution, or what happens to students based on their score. So if you look at the draft on the left, this is the math remediation placement test score. And if you have a low score, then you have a very high likelihood of being placed into remediation, which is why the line is high. Versus if you have a high score, then you place out of remediation. You don't have to take the courses.
And this is exactly what you would expect to see if you have a nice regression discontinuity set up. So we see that both in reading and math. And in terms of outcomes, looking again at that cutoff member to the left, students have to take remediation. To the right they don't. And looking first at whether or not the student passed their first college level course—well, it looks like there's a negative effect because those who are right to the left of the line, who had to take remedial and developmental courses, were less likely to pass their first college courses as those to the right.
But, when you look at total credits earned, that's where it flips, you see a positive effect. Where over here, to the left of the line, I see students who had to take remedial courses are actually completing more credits over time relative to the students who are just to the right of the line. And you think right around that line, those students probably aren't very different at all. It's just a difference of one point on the text that decided their fate of whether or not they had to take the remedial course or not. And yet you see this difference in their outcomes. So that's what we did in that analysis. And we concluded being assigned to remediation appears to increase persistence to the second year in total credits. There's a “but” as oftentimes there is.
It doesn't increase the completion of college level credits, or eventual degree completion. So these are students who were wracking up credits because they were completing their remedial courses. And they were also persisting which is a good thing. But, it wasn't necessarily the case that they were getting enough credits to get that Bachelor's degree or transfer and get that Bachelor's degree, or get that Associates degree while they were at the community college. So there are two sides to the story.
We interpret that to say they might promote early persistence, but it doesn't necessarily help out long term progress. So together, the Ohio and the Florida study are saying, it looks like there's some positive effect, but it's not as large as we had hoped, particularly given the amount of money that states and students are spending on this. And so we want to be concerned not only are they persisting, but if what we care about is degree completion, again thinking about all those benefits I told you at the beginning, then we've got to figure out a way to get students all the way past the finish line. We have to be able to identify which programs are actually doing the job versus which ones perhaps are not serving their student.
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Text of video 2
There's something, a growing movement called Early Placement Testing, where you have students, while they're still in high school, take the college remedial placement exam, maybe at their 10th or 11th grade. You then give them a report and say if you were to take a test right now, this is the level you're at, you need to take this class, while you're still in high school to avoid ending up in remediation when you get into college. And so you see a number of cases that have been doing that. I've done a little bit of work looking at them. Ohio has had a program in place for many, many years. It started when the Ohio State Math Department decided to go to local Columbus high schools and start giving the exam. But, North Carolina, Oklahoma, California is starting something, although it doesn't look like it's working up to this date. But, there's potential for these types of things. Early information and it foreshadows something I want to talk about later.
Academic preparation—Part of it is will students need the rigorous courses, but, they need to know that they have to take the rigorous courses. Information is an important part of it.
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Text of video 3
When designing an aid program, information and complicity are vitally important. So I keep coming back to information, information, information. And so to sum up I'm going to talk about one last project that deals with this information problem. And it's related to the Federal Financial Aid Application, or the FAFSA.
To motivate this, 1.7 lower moderate income college students who would have qualified for financial aid didn't even complete the form. So they're in college, didn't complete the FAFSA, would have received financial aid. And of course there are conditional discouragement effects. We don't know how many millions of students didn't end up going to college because they never applied for financial aid. So lost potential there.
The Spellings Commission came out with a major leadership report in September 2006. And they said, “Students don't enter college because of inadequate information, and rising costs combined with confusing financial aid systems.” So even though again they're doing everything they're supposed to do academically, how do they make it through this really complicated system?
And so started something called The Financial Aid Project, which is in partnership with H&R Block. You see Eric's name again along with Phillip Oreopoulos who is our co-author. We've been working on this for the last two and a half years. It started as a proposal to the Brookings Institution who is working with H&R Block to have policies geared towards low and moderately income families. So in the past they've done things where they helped families sign up for food stamps, make sure they got the earned income tax credit. We submitted a grant to this competitive process to help families fill out the financial aid form.
The last two and a half years we've been developing piloting implementing this major initiative. We've had probably two or three hours of conference calls every week just to get this thing up and running. It's a pretty intensive project. But, it's designed to try to increase awareness and simplify the process for everyone. It's been greeted quite favorably by a number of institutions—IAS, the Gate Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation. And for the first time in its history, the U.S. Department of Education has agreed to partner with a for-profit entity and recognize H&R Block and accept the financial aid form electronically.
So after we fill out all these forms in the offices, we just shoot them directly to the Department of Ed and get them all processed. And that is the first time they've done that with any organization that's not an educational school or university. In fact, it actually got a lot of people upset because non-profit said why are you doing this for them? And they said, “Well, they're doing research. They're trying to understand how to make the process better.”
How does it work? We're talking families that make less than $45,000 dollars. They have a member in the family, age 15 to 30, that does not have a Bachelor's degree. What happens is the family comes into H&R Block, they fill out their taxes. At the end if they meet these criteria we say, “Would you like to be part of the College Enrollment Project? We'll pay you $20 dollars to sit here and let us ask you a few questions for ten minutes. The tax professional then takes all their tax information that they just filled out, the 1040. We created software that dumped this information into the financial aid form. And then we developed a protocol which average took eight minutes to ask them the additional questions that are on the financial aid form.
So in eight minutes, you completely finished your financial aid form. We then, on the back side, did something that the Department of Ed doesn't do, which is we instantly told you, “You are eligible for this much of a Pell Grant, this much of Ohio grant, this much of loans. And if you go to anyone of these colleges, these four colleges that are in your neighborhood, they also offer this much aid so your net price, after all this financial aid, is X, which is oftentimes much lower than what they expect.
For the students who are still in high school, the sophomores and juniors, we take all the information and say, “If your information remains the same, this is how much you could expect if you decide to go to college.” So this is our test of giving early information along with what we're doing for the older students. So we're dealing with the misinformation problem, the fact that students always over-estimate how much college costs, the fact they don't know financial aid exists. The fact that there are complicated forms with 108 questions. And Secretary Spellings, when she was here last month, mentioned this briefly. She's actually been settling down into her administration pushing to change the FAFSA. It's certainly something that is gaining traction on both side of the aisle. Instead of a non-partisan thing, how they're going to be able to push it through I'm not sure. But, we're hoping that this study is actually informing them that it can be done.
It's also the case that many of these students aren't filling out their financial aid forms until the summer, which means they're missing the deadlines that they need to reach for state financial aid programs. You need to have these filled out by February, March in order to be able to receive the state aid.
And then lack of early information. The way we do financial aid now, it's so cumbersome that you have almost no way of figuring out how much financial aid you might be able to receive. Now, they've started to change that in recent years by putting something called the FAFSA Forecaster on line. But, if you're truly a low income student, and you don't have high speed access at your home, imagine—and students have talked about this—trying to fill out the forecaster at the Boston Public Library with other people waiting trying to get on the computer, and you're sharing private information.
It's not really working for the low income students that we really are trying to reach. And that's what we're trying to do with this. And understand, could early information about financial aid actually cycle back and help academic preparation.
So the pilot was in Cleveland, 3,200 families. Last year we did 26,000 families in Ohio and North Carolina. We have approval to do it one more time during tax season 2009 in Ohio. Some quotes: “So H&R Block has done programs like this for awhile.” This tax professional said that he thought it was the best program they had done. The fact the program is simple, uncomplicated, unobtrusive to the clients, but it offers an incredible benefit.
And then second we got some feedback from a local guidance counselor. This was completely unsolicited. Eric was in the area talking to guidance counselors about a completely different project. And she said, “You know my students keep coming in with these financial aid forms from H&R Block. I don't know what this is all about.” What she said, a few of my students have brought in the aid instruments from H&R Block. These aid instruments had made the students want to come in and learn more about their college options. So that's exactly what she would want to happen. That when they know that they can afford it, they actually take the time to prepare, and it all cycles together.
So we're now just getting all of the data back from the Ohio Board of Regions in terms of who is attending. We have the National Student Clearing House data. And the U.S. Department of Education is giving us data on who did complete the forms if they weren't submitted electronically. So high hopes about this project.
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