Massachusetts wants to improve completion rates at community colleges by offering rebates to successful students.
Thanks to rebates, waivers, and frozen tuition and fees, “students could save more than $5,000 in the cost it takes to achieve a a bachelor’s degree,” according to Inside Higher Ed.
“Commonwealth Commitment through Mass Transfer” wants to spur students to complete an associate degree within 2.5 years, transfer to a state university, then finish a bachelor’s degree within two years.
Students would receive a 10 percent rebate off tuition and mandatory fees after each semester and additional tuition credits when the student starts a bachelor’s program. Twenty-four programs are eligible as of Fall 2017, and the Massachusetts Department of Education expects savings to be between $4,400 and $6,600 for students, depending on whether they attend a state university or the University of Massachusetts.
The program includes 28 colleges and universities in the state. Most state programs in place that incentivize student completion focus at the institutional level. Performance-based funding shapes how much funding colleges and universities get from a state budget, and about 25 states have those rules in place, according to The Washington Post.
The Massachusetts plan, if successful, could turn dropouts into graduates and boost the economic future of the students and the state. Officials need to monitor quality throughout the program.
“Despite funding challenges, there is little value in producing many more postsecondary credentials if those credentials provide poor preparation for the workplace. Quality must be maintained, if not strengthened,” Alene Russell wrote in a 2011 report for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities about the Obama administration’s “college completion agenda.”
Quality assurance, however, can throw a kink in completion initiatives. Offering students the chance to save money on a degree can lead them to choose savings over quality. When Massachusetts offered a scholarship to reward high-achieving students at under-performing high schools, the results were less than encouraging.
“Students are remarkably willing to forgo college quality for relatively little money and that marginal students lowered their college completion rates by using the scholarship,” Harvard Professors Sarah Cohodes and Joshua Goodman found. “These results imply that college quality has a substantial impact on college completion rates and that students likely do not understand this fact well.”
A cheap degree could lure students aware from a more expensive – but higher quality – one. If the program sends more students to the University of Massachusetts at Boston, which has a four-year graduation rate of 16 percent, rather than the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has a 63 percent graduation rate, it could worsen student outcomes. The best dollar value isn’t always the best economic value.
The success of the program won’t be clear for a few years. With any luck, it will signal a shift in focus from “enroll more students” to “graduate more students.”
