• The New Normal

    The New Normal. On September 13 WICHE President David Longanecker and three other higher education leaders testified during the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s hearing on improving college affordability. The committee, convened to get a better grasp of what’s happening in the states and chaired by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, also heard from WICHE Commissioner Cam Preus, commissioner of Oregon’s Department of Community Colleges and Workforce Development; Muriel Howard, president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities; and John Morgan, chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents.   

    Senator Harkin opened the hearing with a few well-chosen facts indicating how dramatically the responsibility for covering college costs has shifted among the three primary “partners”: students and their families, the states, and the federal government. This shift is reflected in the change in state spending on education as a share of the budget: currently, 11.5 percent on average, down from 14 percent 20 years ago. It can also be seen in the lower dollar amount states invest in higher ed as a proportion of personal earnings: an average of $6.12 for every thousand dollars of income now, compared to $8.75 in 1990. Not surprisingly, the burden students and their families carry when it comes to covering college costs has grown heavier: the tuition they pay now contributes 43 percent of overall higher education funding – nearly double what it was in 1986. 

    As Harkin pointed out, “This model of shifting costs is neither sustainable nor desirable.” And it has occurred during a time when those costs haven’t just shifted: they’ve also skyrocketed. Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, a former WICHE commissioner, relayed a comparison between college costs and the price of milk and gas, made at a July Senate Committee on Finance hearing on education by Lynn Munson, president and executive director of the advocacy group Common Core: if milk and gas had risen as fast as college prices since 1980, milk would be $22 a gallon today and gas $13. 

    Longanecker, introduced by Colorado Senator Michael Bennett, gave a primer on U.S. initiatives to improve higher education affordability – a history that stretches back to the 1960s – and then discussed three types of policies states are employing to allow more students to afford college. Supply-side interventions, like performance funding and incentive funding, focus on changing institutional behavior; such initiatives are in place in California, Colorado, Oregon, South Dakota, and Washington. Demand-side interventions target student behavior, using financial aid to incentivize them to earn a degree in a timely manner or study economically essential fields; Washington’s new public/private partnership, designed to reward lower- and middle-income students who choose to major in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, is an example. Yet other interventions combine supply- and demand-side tactics: Oregon’s shared responsibility plan, for instance, is a model for incorporating intentional partnership between students, families, philanthropy, institutions, and state and federal government to make college affordable and students successful. 

    While many Western states are making smart use of such interventions, there remains much to do. “The unfinished agenda is for the various partners – students, families, institutions, and state and federal governments – to work more in sync to ensure that their various strategies blend well and assure affordability in a world of limited resources,” Longanecker testified. “The federal government could provide a major impetus for such a partnership if its major student financial assistance programs required a stronger partnership between federal and state governments and institutions. With limited resources at every level of government, it simply makes sense to assure that these partners, along with students and their families, work together as a team to win the higher education affordability game.” For more details, see Longanecker’s full presentation, “State Efforts to Assure Affordability in the New Normal.”

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  • Allied Healthcare Consortium Wins Grant

    A consortium of eight academic institutions in Colorado, Alaska, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming has been awarded a $14.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to enhance allied health programs and train a highly qualified healthcare workforce. The four-year grant, part of the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Initiative, will fund the Consortium for Healthcare Education Online (CHEO) as it develops online and hybrid allied healthcare courses and programs, with the ultimate goal of creating and awarding certificate and degree credentials in a host of areas, from emergency medical services and hospice care to practical nursing. In addition, CHEO will help to forge partnerships between allied-health providers, community colleges, and local workforce centers to train returning veterans and unemployed and underemployed workers, among others. The project builds on the work of the WICHE-managed North American Network of Science Labs Online (NANSLO), an innovative U.S.-Canadian consortium of institutions that facilitates the sharing of remotely accessible scientific equipment through use of the Internet and a distributed network, providing students with the opportunity to conduct virtual-hands-on science experiments online. WICHE’s role in the CHEO project will be to coordinate the use of NANSLO and put together professional development programs for career coaches at the eight participating institutions: Alaska’s Kodiak College; Colorado Community College System’s Pueblo Community College (the CHEO project lead and fiscal agent), Otero Junior College, and Red Rocks Community College; Montana State University-Great Falls College of Technology, as well as Montana’s Flathead Valley Community College; South Dakota’s Lake Area Technical Institute; and Wyoming’s Laramie County Community College. 

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  • Predictive Analytics Grant

    The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technology (WCET) has been awarded a $2.56 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to validate and extend its groundbreaking work exploring the effective use of big-data predictive analytics to improve opportunity and success for low-income and first-generation students. The Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework allows institutions to remove obstacles to student success and improve rates of student retention by looking for patterns that identify causes of student loss and momentum in online learning. The PAR project is a collaborative, multi-institutional data-mining initiative, managed by WCET and supported by 16 WCET member institutions. To learn more about the thinking behind PAR, read “Data Changes Everything: Delivering on the Promise of Learning Analytics in Higher Education,” coauthored by WCET Executive Director Ellen Wagner and Phil Ice, vice president of research and development at American Public University System, and published in the July/August Educause Review.

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  • WICHE Institutions Invited to Test Web Accessibility Tool

    The Internet has the potential to provide students, faculty, and staff with disabilities with greater independence than ever before, if institutional websites are designed to be accessible – but many are not. WICHE’s partnering in an effort to help address this issue. GOALS (Gaining Online Accessible Learning through Self-Study), a project supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), is working to create materials and processes to boost institutional web accessibility. Its just-developed Web Accessibility Benchmarking and Planning Tool is designed to assist institutions in assessing, planning, tracking, and improving their infrastructure to support web accessibility – important moves for reaccreditation. GOALS staff invites WICHE schools to participate in a final beta test of the tool before it’s released. The first 50 institutions to sign up will receive free access to the tool, support from the GOALS staff, and materials to document their improvements for regional accreditors. To learn more contact Cyndi Rowland at cyndi.rowland@usu.edu or call 435.797.3381. 

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  • Call for New WRGP Programs

    The Western Regional Graduate Program (WRGP) allows master’s, graduate certificate, and doctoral students who are residents of the 15 WICHE states to enroll in 275 high-quality programs at 51 participating institutions on a resident tuition basis. In fall 2011 more than 850 students enrolled through WRGP and saved an estimated $11.5 million in tuition. Enrollments continue to increase, and a growing number of programs are now offered fully or partially online. WICHE is now accepting nominations for new WRGP programs. Graduate deans and provosts at all public institutions in the WICHE region have been notified of the deadline and submission process. WICHE is particularly interested adding programs (including professional science master’s and graduate certificate programs) in healthcare (for fields not available through WICHE’s Professional Student Exchange Program); health information technology; microtechnology and nanotechnology; green building and building energy conservation; emerging media and communications; biotechnology and bioinformatics; computer and cyber security; alternative energy technology; and homeland security. To be eligible for WRGP, programs that aren’t related to health must be “distinctive,” meaning they must be offered at no more than four institutions in the WICHE region (exclusive of California). Given the tremendous needs in the healthcare workforce, healthcare-related programs are not subject to the distinctiveness criteria but must be of high quality. WRGP is a tremendous opportunity for WICHE states to share distinctive programs (and the faculty who teach them) and build their workforce in a variety of disciplines, particularly healthcare. WRGP now includes some 80 healthcare-related programs, including those in graduate nursing, public health, mental health and psychology, audiology and speech pathology, biomedical informatics, and doctoral studies in occupational therapy. Participating programs have found WRGP to be an invaluable recruitment tool and an effective resource in diversifying their student pool. Programs can choose to limit the number of WRGP awards each academic year to ensure that their participation is feasible over the long term. Application forms and nomination information are available on the WRGP website. For more information, contact Margo Colalancia, Student Exchange Program director, at mcolalancia@wiche.edu.

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  • WUE Survey Results

    In April 2012 WICHE staff conducted an online survey of Western Undergraduate Exchange (WUE) institutions. WUE – a regional tuition-reciprocity agreement that enables students from WICHE states to enroll in participating two- and four-year public institutions at 150 percent of the enrolling institution’s resident tuition – is the largest program of its kind in the nation. Since the first exchanges began in 1988, WUE has provided students and their parents with discounts on more than 328,650 annual tuition bills, saving them an estimated $1.76 billion. Currently, there are 150 WUE institutions: 112 responded to the survey.

    The survey found that majority of respondents (72 percent) plan to maintain their WUE enrollments at approximately the same level as last year; 24 percent intend to increase them; and only 4 percent will decrease them. Over the last five years, WUE enrollment grew an average of 6 percent per year, though 2010 to 2011 saw an 8.1 percent boost. California was the top state that WUE institutions recruited from (62 percent of the respondents said they had); also popular were Colorado (59 percent), Oregon (49 percent), and Washington (50 percent).

    Most respondents (72 percent) make all majors available at the WUE rate; 24 percent make most of majors available. Some institutions exclude majors where there are large in-state enrollments: nursing is the most commonly excluded major. Others are kinesiology, psychology, dental hygiene, radiology, digital filmmaking (a high-cost program), biology, business, national park ranger studies, American Sign Language studies, and American Sign Language/English interpreting.

    Eighty-one percent of respondents require WUE applicants to meet the same academic standards as their resident applicants; 21 percent use WUE as a merit scholarship and require applicants to meet higher academic standards than residents. Transfer students benefit from WUE too: 89 percent of respondents offer the WUE rate to them.

    Online studies are also an option for WUE students: 46 percent of respondents award the WUE rate to students enrolled in fully online or hybrid programs, while 43 percent said they don’t; and 11 percent don’t offer such courses.

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  • Mixed Media

    WICHE's new brief, “Strategies for Success: Promising Ideas in Adult College Completion,” is the first of a series focusing on promising new ideas and innovative practices developed through the Adult College Completion (ACC) Network. ACC, funded by Lumina Foundation, is a step toward the foundation’s “big goal” of having 60 percent of the adult population attain a degree or certificate of value by 2025. The network works to find ways to reengage adults who’ve left college without finishing, helping them to return to school and earn their degrees. The brief addresses five topics of importance to those working to improve adult college completion: data availability particular to the returning adult population; partnerships between employers and higher education institutions; communications and marketing campaigns to reach and reengage adults with prior college credit; transfer credits; and prior-learning assessment. It also details the themes raised during a recent meeting of more than 35 organizations, state agencies, postsecondary institutions, and others spearheading adult completion projects.

    “Badges” are an emerging phenomenon in higher education: an alternative means of demonstrating that someone’s competent in a particular area (with verification by a subject-matter expert), as well as a way to show this competency to others, such as potential employers. WCET recently launched “Who’s Got Class?” – a game that explores the world of badges and games for learning. Open to all WCET institutional members (parts of it can be played by nonmembers, as well), “Who’s Got Class?” will run until October 31, with prizes awarded at the WCET annual meeting in San Antonio (October 31-November 3).

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  • Meetings Debriefing

    The 2012 annual meeting of the Legislative Advisory Committee (LAC) was held in Sacramento on September 11-12. Themed “A New Day in Higher Education: Access, Alignment, and Achievement,” the meeting drew LAC members from nine WICHE states and focused on a variety of topics, including state authorization, Common Core State Standards, outcomes-based funding, remedial education, career technical education and financial aid. David Longanecker and Jere Mock, WICHE’s vice president of Programs & Services, gave a presentation on the proposed State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement, which would create reciprocity among WICHE states for the state authorization of distance education programs operated by colleges and universities in each state where a student is enrolled. The agreement outlines review standards and processes to enable accredited institutions to be in compliance with their home state’s regulations regarding authorization and requirements for state reciprocity between the participating states. Staff is working with the three other regional higher education compacts to seek interregional agreements.

    This summer WICHE staffers spoke at a number of meetings. Brian Prescott, WICHE’s director of policy research, presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Chief Admissions Officers at Public Universities in Boulder, discussing demographic trends facing selective public four-year institutions, based on WICHE’s projections of high school graduates, whose 8th edition will appear this winter. He also spoke at the annual Education Commission of the States National Forum on Education Policy in Atlanta on ways to reconstruct financial aid in order to boost college affordability and completion. In addition, Prescott addressed an Idaho financial aid task force, including legislators, financial aid officers, foundations, and members of the business community, on the purposes of state financial aid and promising programs in other states. Lastly, Prescott spoke on the multistate data exchange project at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Higher Education Policy (SHEEO) Conference in Chicago and moderated a discussion of state financial aid programs at the same meeting. Demarée Michelau, WICHE’s director of policy analysis, presented on state legislative activity related to prior-learning assessment to a group that’s helping the American Council on Education explore a national agenda for adult learners (she’s been invited to make a similar presentation in October to the leaders of several policy organizations, including the four regional higher education compacts, SHEEO, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Education Commission of the States, and others). Patrick Lane, WICHE’s project coordinator, presented important lessons and findings from the Non-traditional No More project and the Adult College Completion Network to key Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) staff and leaders in adult college completion from the South. The strategies and tools were presented to the panel guiding development of SREB's adult learner portal, which will eventually provide a nationwide access point for adults seeking information about adult degree completion programs.

    The Western Alliance of Community College Academic Leaders (the Alliance) will hold its second annual meeting – themed “Readiness, Completion and Success – on Whose Terms?” – on April 2-3, 2013, in San Francisco. The Alliance's members are the chief academic officers of the community colleges and technical schools in the WICHE states, along with their associated system and state agencies. Part of the meeting will be held in conjunction with that of the California Community College Chief Instructional Officers.

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Contacts

David Longanecker, President - Phone: (303) 541-0201, email dlonganecker@wiche.edu

Jere Mock, Vice President, Programs and Services - Phone: (303) 541-0222, email jmock@wiche.edu