Reports & Tools 

‘Lost Decade’ Casts a Post-Recession Shadow on State Finances
A recent issue brief by The Pew Charitable Trusts examines the lingering effects of the Great Recession on state economies and budgets. After adjusting for inflation, state per-student financial support for higher education in fiscal year 2018 remained 13 percent below its high before the recession, with 40 states reporting lower per-student funding. Today, many states rely primarily on tuition revenue to fund public higher education, shifting the burden of earning a college degree to students and families. (Source: PostsecData / The Pew Charitable Trusts)

Lumina Foundation’s Goal Exploration Tool (Eric Atchison)
The Lumina tool allows you to explore the country’s attainment challenge in various ways – by state, by race/ethnicity, by age group, and by any of five specified percentages of residents who achieve such higher learning. With this tool, you can map two approaches to the attainment challenge. One is a “business as usual” approach. The other, a “path toward equity,” is an approach in which states and the nation achieve higher attainment rates and fairer educational results among people of races and ethnicities who are not well served by colleges and universities.

Realizing Your College Potential? Impacts of College Board’s RYCP Campaign on Postsecondary Enrollment
This working paper from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University provides results from a series of large randomized control trials administered by the College Board on efforts that sought to increase high-achieving, low-income students’ enrollment in selective colleges. The interventions examined aimed to reduce informational or behavioral barriers in the application process by, for example, providing students with easily digestible information on a variety of academically strong colleges. The analysis finds that these interventions had little impact on enrollment patterns, suggesting that large-scale informational interventions may not be enough to influence students’ behavior. (Source: PostsecData / Annenberg Institute at Brown University)

Scaling Success: Lessons From the ASAP Expansion at Bronx Community College (Casey Kerins)
This research brief from the Community College Research Center discusses results from the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), a program designed by the City University of New York (CUNY) to study low graduation rates in community colleges. The data reveal that the best practices in ASAP increased graduation rates and reduced cost per degree for the institution.

Ten Years Later, Young People’s Wages Remain Exactly the Same
A new fact sheet released by Young Invincibles finds that despite record low unemployment, the wages of young people today are no different than they were a decade ago, while the cost of higher education and student debt levels have significantly increased. The analysis reveals that college graduates earn $29 less per week in 2018 compared with 2009 and the country’s student debt burden has more than doubled in the last decade. With re-authorization of the Higher Education Act on the horizon, the fact sheet recommends that policymakers take steps to invest in higher education in order to address some of the causes of this crisis. (Source: PostsecData / Young Invincibles)

The Condition of Education
The National Center for Education Statistics released The Condition of Education 2019, a congressionally mandated report that summarizes important developments and trends in education using the latest available data. This year’s report includes special findings from recent surveys of outcomes in postsecondary education.  

The Economic Benefits of Educational Attainment
A new report from American Action Forum reveals that increased educational attainment benefits individuals through increased employment opportunities and wages and can result in aggregate economic growth. For example, the study finds that a 1 percentage point increase in state residents with at least a bachelor’s degree results in a 0.08 percentage point increase in the state’s real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate. The findings suggest that there are economic benefits to policy strategies that increase access to educational opportunities. (Source: Postsec Data / American Action Forum)

Emerging Trends

Data Alone, Without the Human Element, Can Be a Recipe for Disaster
This article discusses the importance of contextualizing data and analytics with “the human element” in reference to the College Board’s SAT “adversity score.” Highlighting stories of students whose adversity index may have been low but did not fully capture their extenuating circumstances, the author warns that quantifying student characteristics can threaten equity and emphasizes the need to take a holistic approach to making sense of postsecondary data. To ensure that the field’s use of data improves—rather than exacerbates—equity gaps, New America developed a framework for the ethical use of predictive analytics in higher education. (Source: PostsecData / New America)

Online Education: An Overlooked Lever of Education Policy (Casey Kerins)
Are higher education institutions “acting as if it’s 1990” concerning online education as a policy tool? This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education argues, “absolutely.” The article addresses the gaps in online education’s use and its potential to address higher education socioeconomic and enrollment issues.

Six Figures in Debt for a Master’s Degree
This article examines newly available program-level data on student debt released by the U.S. Department of Education through the College Scorecard. The data reveal high levels of borrowing for some graduate programs, such as in the medical fields, and highlights a number of programs where students are taking on especially high levels of debt. The author notes that the Trump administration plans to release program-level earnings data later this summer, and that these student debt data are preliminary and have not yet been reviewed by institutions. (Source: Postsec Data / Inside Higher Ed)

Policy Watch

Gainful Employment (Casey Kerins)
Gainful Employment Disclosures and Regulations are set to go into effect July 1, 2019. For more information, see these three announcements (1, 2, 3) from the Department of Education.

NCES Updates

College Scorecard Technical Review Panel
The College Scorecard Technical Review Panel #2, “Program-Level Measures and Institutional Comparisons,” was held April 11 and 12, 2019, in Washington DC. The summary of discussion and suggestions from the meeting are posted here and are currently open for comment. Comments should be sent to Janice Kelly-Reid, Project Director at RTI International, at ScorecardTRPcomment@rti.org, and are due June 20. The Department made updates to College Scorecard including 1) adding preliminary cumulative loan debt data by field of study to the data site; 2) updates to annual data sourced from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS); and 3) changes to the consumer website.

Going Back to College: Undergraduates Who Already Held a Postsecondary Credential
The National Center for Education Statistics released a new Data Point entitled Going Back to College: Undergraduates Who Already Held a Postsecondary Credential. This Data Point presents the percentage of 2015–16 undergraduates who had already received an undergraduate credential and the fields these undergraduates were studying. This is based on data from the 2015–16 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:16), which surveyed a nationally representative sample of all undergraduates enrolled in Title IV eligible postsecondary institutions in the U.S (including D.C.) and Puerto Rico between July 1, 2015, and June 30, 2016.

NCES Education Demographic & Geographic Estimates (EDGE) Geo Data
The Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates (EDGE) program develops information resources to identify and understand the social and spatial context of education in the U.S. It uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to create custom indicators of social, economic, and housing conditions for school-age children and their parents. It also uses spatial data collected by NCES and the Census Bureau to create geographic locale indicators, school point locations, school district boundaries, and other types of educational geography to support spatial analysis.

Registration Open for the 2019 NCES STATS-DC Data Conference
Registration is now open for the 2019 NCES STATS-DC Data Conference! The Conference, hosted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), will be held July 24-26, 2019 at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. The theme of this year’s conference is, “Providing Evidence to Drive Education.” The conference is free and open to the public.

Seeking Feedback on the Regional Educational Laboratory Program
IES is seeking feedback about what is working well in the current Regional Educational Laboratories (REL) program, what can be improved, and the kinds of resources and services related to evidence-based practice and data use that are most needed by educators and policymakers to improve student outcomes. We are seeking comments that are practical, specific, and actionable, and that demonstrate a familiarity with the mission and work of the RELs.