How did this happen?

In today’s talent-driven economy, the prosperity of a region is dependent on the educational attainment of the people in that region. Where you have high concentrations of highly-educated talent, high-growth, high-wage, knowledge-based enterprises locate, expand, and are created. So the economic development goal in today’s economy is to attract highly-educated talent; and in particular, because they are the most mobile, highly-educated young talent. The new reality is that talent attracts capital, and quality of place attracts talent.

Over the past twenty-five years, metro Detroit has not attracted talent at scale. And the primary reason for this is that its principal city, Detroit, has not attracted talent at scale. Young people, and highly educated young people in particular, continue to flock to vibrant central cities that feature dense, walkable, amenity-rich neighborhoods. Detroit the city’s still nascent economic resurgence, it still lacks these kinds of talent magnet neighborhoods.

Detroit vs. Denver

How do we change this? We could do much worse than to follow the example of Denver. One can make a strong case that Denver is the American region that has understood best the new reality that talent attracts capital.

In 1990 metro Denver and metro Detroit had roughly the same per-capita income – $21,295 for metro Detroit and $21,972 for metro Denver. Today, the per-capita income in metro Denver is more than $23,000 higher than it is in metro Detroit – $89,297 to $66,098. Denver’s per-capita income is nearly 30 percent above the nation’s while Detroit’s is five percent below.

The reason, of course, is that metro Denver has far higher levels of educational attainment than metro Detroit. Fifty percent of adults in metro Denver have a bachelor’s degree or more, compared to 34.5% in metro Detroit.

As noted above, because highly educated young adults are the most mobile segment of society, and they tend to congregate in vibrant central cities, a core driver of educational attainment at the metro level is the number of young professionals (25-34 year olds with a bachelor’s degree) in a metro’s central city. Since 2010, Denver has nearly doubled its number of young professionals, from 59,316 to 112,247. An astonishing 67 percent of young adults in Denver have a bachelor’s degree.

Most of these additional Denverites are transplants. Data from Migration Patterns shows that less than half of young adults in metro Denver raised in higher income homes (here household income is used as a proxy for college education) actually grew up in the Denver area, while 49% came from other states, many from the metro regions of Chicago, LA, DC, Minneapolis, and Detroit. Denver became a talent magnet, and young professionals flocked there from across the country.

The picture is much different in Detroit. Less than 25,000 young professionals live in Detroit, and just 25% of all young adults in the city have a bachelor’s degree. While the young adult population raised in higher income homes of metro Denver is largely made up of transplants, most young adults raised in higher income homes in metro Detroit (85%) grew up in metro Detroit. Detroit’s problem is not retention of young people as much as it is attraction of young people.

While young professionals make up 16% of Denver’s population, they make up just 4% of Detroit’s population. If Detroit’s population had the same share of young professionals as Denver’s, there would be an additional 75,000 young professionals living in the city.

The Denver story: rail transit and talent magnet neighborhoods

So how did Denver become a talent magnet? First, they went big on rail transit. The region now has the kind of rail transit system the Detroit region can only dream of, with a line running from the airport to downtown, throughout city neighborhoods, and into suburban communities. Transit oriented developments – new dense, walkable, neighborhoods, complete with housing and small businesses – have sprouted up along rail stops, and downtown Denver has exploded with development.

In addition to rail transit, Denver has prioritized building dense, walkable, vibrant neighborhoods across the city. It is a city’s neighborhoods – densely packed with young professionals, amenity-rich, with recreational, arts, and cultural offerings – that are the main attraction for young talent.

Economic development leaders in Denver have long understood this, and made the creation of talent magnet neighborhoods a priority for the city. In 2007, the Downtown Denver Partnership put out its vision for downtown Denver, copied below. The themes of walkability, the expansion of amenities, the cultivation of distinct neighborhoods, and the prevalence of outdoor recreational opportunities are evident throughout. It’s a citywide plan designed to create the kinds of neighborhoods/districts that attract young talent.

It’s not the mountains

When we use Denver as an example of the kind of place that Detroit or Grand Rapids ought to model itself after, folks will often say that it was the mountains and natural beauty that attracted so many young folks to Denver, not the rail transit or the city’s vibrant, walkable neighborhoods. What we like to point out is that the mountains were also there in 2005, when the city had just 45,000 young professionals. It was only after rail transit and an explicit focus on building dense, walkable, vibrant neighborhoods that the city emerged as a talent magnet.

If Detroit hopes to attract talent at anything like the scale that Denver has over the past decade, metro Detroit needs a robust rail transit system, and the city needs to intentionally build dense, walkable, amenity-rich neighborhoods. The example of Denver makes clear that in order for that to happen, we need leaders – in Lansing, in Detroit city government, in the Detroit business community, and in suburban communities across the region – to champion rail transit as their central cause, over and over again, for years. And we need these leaders to prioritize building talent magnet neighborhoods in our central cities as the economic development imperative in today’s economy.

Last year, the state created the Michigan Talent Partnership, based on a proposal we designed – a competitive grant fund that calls for Michigan cities to create the kind of dense, walkable, vibrant neighborhoods/districts that Denver has been building since the mid 2000s. It’s a start, but we will need much more of this kind of activity if we are to build a more prosperous Michigan.

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These low scores are unacceptable, and must be fixed. Developing strong literacy skills early in a child’s education is critical for their long-term educational and life success, setting the strong foundation needed to build knowledge, think critically, and solve problems. Political leaders in Michigan are right to be concerned, and are right to emphasize the need for widespread adoption of evidence-based practices, like the science of reading, across all Michigan schools.

However, as important as early literacy is, it is also not enough. When we talk about Michigan’s broken education system, we need to be talking about much more than 4th grade reading scores.

Reframing the goal of Michigan’s education system

We have long argued that the goal of Michigan’s K-12 education system ought to be centered around postsecondary success. And given that most high wage jobs in today’s economy require a bachelor’s degree, we argue that the goal of Michigan’s K-12 schools should be to prepare all students to pursue and complete a bachelor’s degree if they so choose.

If we use postsecondary success as our ultimate measure of our K-12 system’s success – rather than 4^th grade reading scores – Michigan is in no less of an educational crisis. After rising slowly from 2008 to 2014, the share of graduating Michigan high school students who complete a bachelor’s degree within six years of finishing high school has plateaued, and even declined slightly in recent years. Today, just 32% of graduating Michigan high school seniors will have a bachelor’s degree six years later, and less than 40% will have a degree or certificate of any kind.

One might reasonably argue that even if our ultimate goal is postsecondary success, political leaders are justified in placing our near-term focus on 4th grade reading scores, because surely 4th grade reading scores are an indicator of one’s future educational attainment. But the relationship between test scores and educational attainment is not as strong as one might think. A number of studies, leveraging the natural experiments created by charter school lotteries, find that schools that are very successful in raising test scores have little impact on postsecondary attainment, while some schools that have a large impact on postsecondary attainment have little impact on test scores. Another well-regarded study found the same effect with teachers – that those teachers who reliably improved their students’ “non-cognitive” skills were a different set from those teachers able to move test scores, and that the advancement of non-cognitive abilities ended up being a better predictor of long-run outcomes than improved test scores.

We see the same disconnect between test scores and postsecondary success when we look at NAEP scores among states, and those states’ overall levels of educational attainment. Test scores are an easy area to place our focus because they feel controllable. In the complex process that is a child’s education, test scores give us a concrete number, that we can try and improve upon and in doing so, we think, improve a child’s education and their life outcomes. However, for this to be true, test scores would need to be predictive of educational and career success. Improvements in test scores in one year would need to lead to improved test scores in future years, which would lead to greater levels of educational attainment.

The trouble is this smooth line of predictability doesn’t exist. Just look at Michigan. From the late 1990s to 2019, Michigan’s scores on the NAEP 4th grade reading exam were basically flat. Over that same period, however, Michigan’s scores on the 8th grade NAEP reading exam fluctuated dramatically. In other words, steady 4th grade scores did not lead to steady 8th grade scores. Add to this that the students who took the 8th grade reading NAEP in 2007, when Michigan’s scores bottomed out, went on to have the highest level of educational attainment of any educational cohort in the history of Michigan.

Some of the states we have heard mentioned over the years as potential models for Michigan’s K-12 education system include Indiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Florida. But in each of these states you see the same disconnect between NAEP scores in 4th grade, NAEP scores in 8th grade, and ultimate levels of educational attainment. Indiana has long had 4th grade reading scores well above Michigan’s – yet the share of young adults in that state with a bachelor’s degree is three percentage points below Michigan’s. Mississippi’s 4th grade reading scores have been growing at a steady clip since the late 90s, but this progress has not been matched by their 8th grade test scores, which have been essentially flat. And for all that state’s growth in early reading, the share of young adults with a bachelor’s degree today is just 28% – roughly the level of educational attainment Michigan young adults had in 2010 (today we are at 37%).

What states should Michigan be looking to as a model for its K-12 system? Again, we think the ultimate assessment of a school system ought to be the educational attainment and career success of the students in that system. And if we use this as our barometer, there are three states that stand out: Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado.

The Lumina Foundation publishes a database called Credentials of Value, which measures the share of adults in every U.S. state that both have a postsecondary credential and earn a wage that is at least 15% more than the national median wage of those with no education beyond high school. Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado are the only U.S. states where more than 50% of adults 25-64 meet both of those criteria. This is in large part because all three states have very high rates of BA attainment, and those with a bachelor’s degree or more are the most likely to be earning high wages. States like Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which are often mentioned as models for Michigan’s education system, all sit below 40%. A table of select states is below.

Focus less on the tests, more on what happens in the classroom

The reason that performance on standardized tests doesn’t line up neatly with educational attainment is that standardized tests measure only a small sliver of the capacities we need our students to develop if they are to be successful throughout their academic and professional lives. To be successful in college and career, students need to have a broad base of knowledge, be able to think critically, be able to communicate clearly, and be able to solve problems. On reading standardized tests, they are asked to read and demonstrate their understanding of arbitrary and decontextualized texts. One of these is not like the other.

It also turns out that if we want our kids to be better readers, we might do well to do less of what we might call literacy instruction. In 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which altered the shape of schooling in America. The law stated that by 2014, every student in the country would be proficient in math and reading. Much like 3rd grade reading laws that have emerged in state legislatures across the country over the past decade, NCLB stated a bold goal that was centered around students earning a “proficient” score on a high-stakes standardized test. Failure to make progress towards that goal would lead to consequences – principals and teachers would lose their jobs, failing schools would be shuttered. The theory of change felt sound: create a high standard, and then hold people accountable to achieving that standard.

The effect of the law on our schools and classrooms was that our students spent a lot more time on math and reading instruction, and a lot less time learning about science, social studies, literature, and the arts. But NCLB fell far short of its goals. In 2014 every student in the country was not proficient in math and reading – not by a long shot. In fact, between 2001 and 2014, student scores on the NAEP barely inched up. Over the same stretch, students’ scores on the SAT, ACT, and the international PISA exam either stagnated or declined.

Why did this happen? It turns out that doubling down on literacy skills in an effort to boost test scores may actually be counterproductive if we hope to produce proficient readers. We often think of reading as sounding out words, and of course that’s a big part of it. But in order to read effectively, and comprehend what you read, you not only have to be able to sound a word out, but also need to know what that word means, how it relates to all the other words in that sentence, what they all mean together, and how this piece of knowledge relates to everything else you know. In other words, your reading ability is directly related to your content knowledge.

In fact, many scholars cast doubt on the idea that there is a sort of “generalized” reading ability – rather, they suggest that all reading is context dependent. That is, if you know a good deal about what you’re reading about, you will read and comprehend more fluently than if you’re reading about a topic you have never encountered before. In one study, students were split into groups based on reading ability – one group of weak readers and one group of strong readers – and asked to read a passage about soccer. However, the weak readers all were quite knowledgeable about soccer, while the strong readers were not. The weak readers, able to neatly fit what they were reading into the web of knowledge already stored in their heads, performed better than the strong readers, who were attempting to build a new knowledge web while they read.

It may seem obvious that the more knowledge you have about a topic the better you will understand a passage about it, but these kinds of findings have dramatic implications for what students ought to be doing in our K-12 schools. If content knowledge is so important to reading fluency and reading comprehension, it means that when faced with low reading scores we perhaps ought to be spending less time on literacy instruction and more time on building students’ broad base of knowledge through science, social studies, literature, and the arts.

This has not, however, been our response so far. Faced with low proficiency scores on standardized tests, our students have been fed more drills and more “literacy instruction,” and less knowledge about the world. The worry is that a single-minded focus on 3rd grade reading scores as the sole measure of our education system’s success would only accelerate this trend, pushing more and more “literacy” instruction into our K-12 schools, which would yield little to no improvement in student learning, and the longer-run outcomes we ultimately care about.

What should we be focusing on in K-12?

The case I’m trying to make in all that’s outlined above is that we need to be really careful about building our education system around a single test in a single year, and the ways in which such a single-minded focus can negatively impact the learning experiences of Michigan children. If we place all our focus on the narrow band of educational skills measured by standardized tests – which may end up being counterproductive in actually improving even that narrow band of skills – we may miss all of the rest of what we should be developing in kids: the ability to communicate clearly, think critically, and build a broad base of knowledge that will help them to read, solve problems, and ask the right questions.

Indeed, it is this set of “other” skills, mindsets, and capacities that our children will need to be successful in college and career, and where we should be placing our focus. Engaging content – through which students can build a broad base of knowledge – should sit at the center of our children’s education. Without a broad base of knowledge, students will struggle to comprehend what they read, think critically about information they consume, or solve complex problems. Students should develop a deep understanding of math and science concepts, rather than surface-level “rules” for solving problems. And the ability to write clearly – to make arguments, and back them up with evidence – should be a skill consistently reinforced throughout our children’s education. If we do all these things, our students will be adequately prepared for college and career. Their scores on 4th grade reading exams will improve as well, though that is a secondary concern.   

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Key takeaways

• In Michigan, just 3 in 10 jobs pay $65,000 or more. In Massachusetts, nearly half do. If Michigan’s economy had the same share of middle-class jobs as Massachusetts, we would have an additional 800,000 middle-class jobs.

• Over the past half century, Michigan has gone from one of the richest states in the country to one of the poorest.

• In 1980, Michigan and Massachusetts had roughly the same per-capita income. Today, Massachusetts ranks first in per-capita income, while Michigan ranks 39^th.

• The reason why is because Michigan is a low BA attainment state, and Massachusetts is a high BA attainment state. In today’s economy, low educational attainment states are low prosperity states, and high educational attainment states are high prosperity states.

• To reverse this decline, we need to advance policies that dramatically increase the share of Michigan adults with a bachelor’s degree.

Since the turn of the century, our state has experienced a precipitous decline in economic prosperity relative to the rest of the country. In 1999, Michigan ranked 16^th in per-capita income. In 2023, we ranked 39^th. And the slide shows no signs of slowing.

What we have been doing over the past 25 years isn’t working. We need a new approach. And that approach centers on increasing the share of Michigan adults who have a bachelor’s degree or more.  

The cause of Michigan’s decline in economic prosperity is simple – Michigan has too few high wage jobs. And to get more of them, we need to dramatically increase BA attainment here in Michigan. This is because in today’s knowledge-driven economy, it is those places with high talent concentrations where high-wage firms locate, expand, or are created. 

What would a Michigan economy with much higher rates of BA attainment look like? How would Michigan’s economy look different from what it looks like today if we had more high wage jobs?

For an answer, we can look to Massachusetts, the nation’s leader in both BA attainment and, not coincidentally, per capita income.

BA attainment in Michigan and Massachusetts

Let’s first look at BA attainment in both states. In Massachusetts, 47.8% of adults over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher. In Michigan, this figure is 32.7%. This is a massive difference. If Michigan had the same level of BA attainment as Massachusetts, more than 1 million additional Michigan adults would have a bachelor’s degree.

This picture gets worse when you look at young people. 57.2% of 25-to-34-year-olds in Massachusetts have a bachelor’s degree or higher. In Michigan, this figure is 37%. The BA attainment gap between the two states is widening, not shrinking.

This large BA attainment gap leads to a large prosperity gap. In Massachusetts, a high BA attainment, high-wage economy, the per-capita income is $90,600 – the highest in the nation (green line below). Here in Michigan (blue line below), a low BA attainment state, the per-capita income is $61,100 – a full $30,000 lower than Massachusetts.

In 1980, the two states had roughly the same per-capita income. But a large prosperity gap grew over time, both because the BA attainment gap between the two states grew, and because the BA wage premium (the average wage of BA holders compared to those with no education beyond high school) has grown over time.

How increasing BA attainment changes the economy

Becoming a high BA attainment state alters the shape of the economy – the kind of work people do, and what they get paid. In Michigan, roughly 31% of all jobs pay at least $65,000 annually, a rough threshold for a “middle-class” income. This means that nearly seventy percent of jobs in the Michigan economy do not pay middle class wages. This is what we mean when we say Michigan does not have a high-wage economy.

The picture in Massachusetts is much different. There, nearly half (48.3%) of all jobs pay middle-class wages. If Michigan had the same share of middle-class jobs as Massachusetts, it would be the equivalent of adding nearly 800,000 middle-class jobs to the state economy.

How does a more educated populace lead to more high wage jobs? The first, and most mechanical explanation is simply that those jobs that require a BA or more are the highest paying jobs in the economy. The higher the proportion of adults in your state with a BA or more, the more high-wage jobs there will be.

But in addition, high concentrations of highly educated individuals also lead to the development of more high wage jobs in a virtuous cycle. In today’s economy, capital follows talent, not the other way around.

High talent concentrations also yield the birth of new high-wage firms, owing to the knowledge spillovers that occur when you get a lot of smart people together. Not to mention the fact that where high wage jobs go more high wage jobs follow in the form of professional services industries – law, finance, accounting, consulting – that provide high-wage services to high-earning individuals and companies.

The bottom line is, increasing BA attainment changes the shape of the economy – you become far more concentrated in high wage work, far less concentrated in lower wage work.  

For example, as a share of total jobs, Massachusetts has nearly three times the number of “marketing managers” (median income $134,000) Michigan has, two and a half times the number of “management analysts” (median income $85,000) Michigan has, and double the number of “computer and information systems managers” (median income $151,000) that Michigan has. These are all high volume, high wage knowledge economy jobs, and Massachusetts, as a result of their high BA attainment, has a far greater concentration of this kind of work than Michigan does.

Where are Michigan jobs overconcentrated? In low-wage manufacturing work. Michigan has nearly 7 times the number of “assemblers and fabricators” (median income $38,000) that Massachusetts does; more than 7 times the number of “machine operators” (median income ($41,000); and 21 times the number of “engine and other machine assemblers” (median income $49,000).

Two different economies

In the early 2000s, the economist Ed Glaeser wrote a paper about the way in which Boston, in the 1980s, was able to break away from its industrial past and reinvent itself as a knowledge economy hub. They were able to do this, he wrote, because they had a high concentration of highly educated workers. He wrote that there was nothing certain about Boston’s, and therefore Massachusetts’s, economic rise after 1980 – that the city very well could have gone the way of Syracuse or Detroit. But the city’s high concentration of highly educated individuals allowed it to adapt to the coming knowledge economy, where Detroit, and Michigan, did not.

This carries on to today. Today, Michigan continues to identify itself with manufacturing work, through rhetoric and economic policy, and this shows up in the data: Over 10% of Michigan jobs are production jobs, paying an average median wage of $47,300. In Massachusetts, production jobs make up just 4% of all jobs in the economy. Where Massachusetts is overconcentrated is in the knowledge-economy – defined here as occupations in which most jobs within that occupation require a BA or more. In Massachusetts, 43% of jobs are in the knowledge economy, versus just 34% in Michigan.

This is the essential difference between the two economies. Both economies have roughly the same share of workers employed as HVAC technicians and auto mechanics, electricians and carpenters, retail sales workers and fast-food workers. The difference is simply that one economy is overconcentrated in production, one is overconcentrated in knowledge work. And the difference ends up being that Massachusetts is the most prosperous state in the nation, with a per-capita income of $90,600, and Michigan is 39^th, with a per capita income $30,000 less than that of Massachusetts.

The question is which economy do we want to have? The answer has profound ramifications for how we view economic development policy here in Michigan, and the kinds of policies we pursue in the years ahead.

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Over the past several weeks, I wrote a series of posts about the importance of educational attainment – both to our statewide economy and to individual economic mobility and prosperity –  and how we should be designing our K-16 education system to increase the number of Michiganders who attain bachelor’s degrees.

This is the fourteenth and final post in the series. See links to previous posts below:

Post #1: Educational attainment and economic development

Post #2: Educational attainment and economic well-being

Post #3: College completion rates

Post #4: Beyond free college

Post #5: Developing writers in K-12

Post #6: Building college-ready skills in K-12

Post #7: An assessment system designed for college success

Post #8: Holding school systems accountable to postsecondary success

Post #9: BA attainment and K-12 funding

Post #10: Improving completion rates at four-year colleges

Post #11: Public policy levers to boost completion rates at four-year colleges

Post #12: Improving completion rates at Michigan’s community colleges

Post #13: Policy levers to improve outcomes at Michigan’s community colleges

We are often surprised that we still have to make the case – to policymakers, business leaders, and parents alike – that the best thing a young person today can do to lay a strong foundation for a successful forty-year career is to pursue and complete a four-year college degree. Likewise, when we are confronted with data showing unmistakable link between the educational attainment in a given state and that state’s overall prosperity, we are surprised that we still have to make the case that the best thing a state can do to grow its economy is ensure many more of their young people go on to pursue and complete a four-year degree.

But in this concluding post I’m going to stay focused on the individual, and summarize the key themes I’ve been writing about in the previous thirteen posts: about the impact a four-year college degree can have on one’s life outcomes, and the need for Michigan to design its education systems to ensure every young Michigander is prepared to pursue and complete a four-year college degree.

Let’s again review the data, which are unimpeachable. The “wage premium” associated with earning a four-year college degree is large and growing. If we look at the average full-year, full-time worker with a bachelor’s degree (this analysis is limited to bachelor’s degree holders, and does not include those with graduate degrees, whose earnings are even higher), we find that in 2022 that worker earned roughly $96,500. This is $42,000 more than the average income for a full-year, full-time worker with no education beyond high school, $33,000 more than a worker with some college, but no degree, and $29,800 more than a worker with an associate degree. The gap was slightly smaller, though still substantial, for workers early in their careers ($22,700, $19,700, and $17,030 respectively), but is massive by mid/late career: for those between 55 and 59, the gaps were $52,900, $41,200, and $38,900 (see Chart below).

But maybe this is backward looking, one might argue. Some claim that a four-year degree may still provide an earnings bump today, but will not in the years ahead. Wrong again. According to a new report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, in 2021 there were nearly 73 million “good” jobs, defined as those that pay a median of $74,000 to workers ages 25-44, and $91,000 to workers ages 45-64. Nearly 43 million of those jobs (roughly 60%), require a four-year degree. These researchers project that by 2031, the number of good jobs will grow to nearly 88 million, and roughly 58 million (roughly 66%) of those jobs will require a four-year degree. Only 200,000 good jobs requiring a sub-BA credential will be added over that time period, and the number of good jobs requiring no education beyond high school will decline by 600,000. Meanwhile, the number of good jobs requiring a four-year degree will grow by 15.6 million. This means that of the good jobs added to the economy between 2021 and 2031, nearly all will require a four-year degree.

Pursing and completing a four-year degree is also the most dependable route towards economic mobility in our society today. Below is a great chart from a Brookings analysis of Opportunity Insights data, a massive data set that charts economic outcomes across generations. What they found was that, in general, a parent’s income rank was highly correlated with their child’s income rank; in other words, if a child grew up poor, they were likely to remain poor as adults. Unless they got a four-year degree. A child who grew up in the poorest fifth of households but earned a four-year degree was, on average, vaulted to the top half of earners as an adult. If that child found their way to an elite college, they jumped to the top third of earners.

But beyond any chart or graph I can show you, we should be preparing all young people in Michigan to pursue and complete a four-year degree because to do otherwise would be to close off opportunity to some segment of the population. Preparing students to attend and succeed at a four-year college education represents our best chance to ensure all young people are equipped with a broad-based education that enables them to pursue a range of potential careers, the landscape of which will inevitably shift over the next fifty years, just as it has in the previous fifty.

Writers and thinkers who care about racial and socioeconomic equality have long understood the necessity of a broad-based education, equating it not only with improved economic prospects, but with a sense of power and agency in one’s life. The famed sociologist and civil rights icon W.E.B. DuBois, writing in the early to mid 20^th century, when the modern “knowledge” economy was still more than half a century away, advocated fiercely for a broad-based, liberal education for all, because he knew that advanced education equaled opportunity. University of Wisconsin education professor Matthew Hora writes, “For W.E.B. DuBois, the freedom to pursue a liberal education was essential for racial equality, ensuring that African Americans had as many opportunities to become doctors, politicians, scientists, and lawyers as whites did. But DuBois was not arguing for the creation of a class of black elites. For him, a liberal education was the key to a liberated mind and to men and women who knew ‘whither civilization is tending and what it means.'”

The data-driven case for pursuing and completing a four-year college degree is rock solid. Pursing a four-year degree is worth it, and then some. But you also don’t need any charts or graphs to tell you that. Education has always been the gateway to agency and opportunity, and it still is today. And we owe it to young Michiganders to provide them with an education that enables them to pursue any opportunity they set their hearts to.

So that’s the case. That is why we believe we need an education system that is set up to prepare all young Michiganders to pursue and complete a four-year college degree. The previous thirteen posts I wrote for this series provide some ideas for how we can go about doing that, though its only a start, and, as always, much of the real work is in the details. But we would love your thoughts, and we hope some of these ideas can serve as a starting point from which we can build a world-class K-16 education system here in Michigan.

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Over the next several weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts about the importance of educational attainment – both to our statewide economy and to individual economic mobility and prosperity –  and how we should be designing our K-16 education system to increase the number of Michiganders who attain bachelor’s degrees.

This is the thirteenth post in the series. See links to previous posts below:

Post #1: Educational attainment and economic development

Post #2: Educational attainment and economic well-being

Post #3: College completion rates

Post #4: Beyond free college

Post #5: Developing writers in K-12

Post #6: Building college-ready skills in K-12

Post #7: An assessment system designed for college success

Post #8: Holding school systems accountable to postsecondary success

Post #9: BA attainment and K-12 funding

Post #10: Improving completion rates at four-year colleges

Post #11: Public policy levers to boost completion rates at four-year colleges

Post #12: Improving completion rates at Michigan’s community colleges

In my last post, I outlined a set of reforms community colleges could take on to improve completion rates and transfer pathways. In this post, I’ll look more specifically at the public policy levers that can encourage institutions to take on these reforms.  

Provide the resources necessary for redesign

As I wrote in my previous post, the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) intervention at the City University of New York (CUNY) colleges was remarkably successful, doubling three-year completion rates for developmental education students. But this kind of intervention does not come cheap. Participating students received tuition waivers; free books and transit; and comprehensive and mandatory counseling supports. This last piece was particularly critical, and, presumably, expensive. While a typical community college advisor faces caseloads of roughly 1,200 students, and the typical community college student visits with their advisor just once per semester (if at all), the ASAP program ensured counselors had caseloads of between 60 and 80 students, and students were required to visit with their advisors twice per month. This means that for ASAP to be as effective as it was, CUNY needed to hire a lot of advisors.

For Michigan colleges to replicate the kind of success CUNY experienced through the ASAP program, far more resources, beyond the status quo, will be required. In a previous post, I reviewed research showing the impact that additional grant funding has on the quality of a student’s education at four-year institutions – how lower-selectivity four-year institutions, when provided additional funding, tend to put it towards student support services, as they seek to replicate the experience students have at elite institutions. This same kind of student success grant funding scheme could be applied to Michigan’s community colleges as well, where community colleges are awarded funds specifically designated for colleges to implement the successful features of the ASAP program. Last year the state rolled out a competitive grant program that seeks to support Michigan community colleges in taking on ambitious student success reforms.

Invest in high quality data systems

Just as we highlighted in the four-year space, we think there is great potential to use broadly accessible, user-friendly data to spur reform at the community college level. The most commonly cited student success metric for community colleges is the share of first-time, full-time students who complete a credential within 150 percent of the time allotted (e.g., completing a two-year associate degree in three years of initial enrollment). Community college leaders, however, may argue that this figure offers a poor representation of whether or not a school is doing right by their students. They’ll note that most community college students are not full-time, but part-time students, balancing work and school; that students come to community college for all sorts of reasons that may not result in the completion of a credential; and that these completion rates do a poor job of capturing transfer outcomes.

Setting aside for a moment the veracity of these claims, the bigger question is why we don’t have data systems that capture, with great detail, this broader set of outcomes. If there is a particular community college that is sending large numbers of their students to four-year institutions, and those students are experiencing success, state policymakers and education leaders should know that, so we can learn from successful institutions and spread promising practices to less successful ones. The opposite is also true – if we find that a particular community college is transferring very few students, and/or the students who transfer are not experiencing success at their destination college, we can figure out ways to better support reforms at the sending institution.

We should know this data by race/ethnicity, age, and income, and it should be widely available and easily accessible. Indeed, as low as completion rates are for community college students overall, the numbers are that much worse for low-income students and students of color. Here in Michigan, only five percent of Black students who begin at a community college will complete a bachelor’s degree six years later, and just ten percent of low-income students will. This kind of fine-grained data is only available through a report by the Community College Research Center, but the state could and should put it at everyone’s fingertips.

More and better data is also needed on labor market outcomes for all community college students, both those who do and don’t complete a credential. If those who leave community college prior to completing a credential are still capturing some amount of economic value from their community college experience, we should know that. However, it is unlikely this is the case. Research finds that though the labor market returns on sub-BA credentials are modest, those who complete a credential do much better than those who take some number of credits but fall short of the credential.

More data is also needed on the returns to various credentials. Though labor market returns by major and degree do vary at the baccalaureate level, we also know that the wage premium for a bachelor’s degree holder is large, regardless of major. The same is not true at the sub-BA level. Yes, there are some credentials that yield a solid earnings premium; but there are others that provide no boost, or whose holders do worse, relative to those with just a high school diploma. Prospective students deserve to know this data for the schools and programs they are considering, and colleges themselves should look closely at this data, to make student-centered choices about what programs to keep, and which to jettison.

The post Redesigning education in Michigan – part 13: Policy levers to improve outcomes at Michigan community colleges appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts about the importance of educational attainment – both to our statewide economy and to individual economic mobility and prosperity –  and how we should be designing our K-16 education system to increase the number of Michiganders who attain bachelor’s degrees.

This is the twelfth post in the series. See links to previous posts below:

Post #1: Educational attainment and economic development

Post #2: Educational attainment and economic well-being

Post #3: College completion rates

Post #4: Beyond free college

Post #5: Developing writers in K-12

Post #6: Building college-ready skills in K-12

Post #7: An assessment system designed for college success

Post #8: Holding school systems accountable to postsecondary success

Post #9: BA attainment and K-12 funding

Post #10: Improving completion rates at four-year colleges

Post #11: Public policy levers to boost completion rates at four-year colleges

My last two posts looked at strategies four-year colleges can deploy to increase completion rates at their institutions, and public policy levers the state can deploy to encourage institutions to take on these strategies.

In my next two posts I’ll be looking at the community college system, and the institutional strategies and public policy levers that can improve completion rates and transfer pathways at Michigan’s community colleges.

Success rates at community colleges are not great. Completion rates at two-year colleges, both nationally and in Michigan, are quite low: nationally, just 38% of full-time students complete a credential within six years of first entering the institution, and here in Michigan completion rates are below that national figure at 26 of our 28 community colleges.

But what about transfers? One important role of the community college system is to serve as an entry-point to the broader higher education system; students can start at a community college before transferring to a four-year institution. Indeed, 80 percent of students who start at a community college say they intend to transfer to a four-year school. However, despite these high expectations, just 16 percent of students who start at a community college will have earned a bachelor’s degree six years later.

In this post I’ll look at strategies to improve completion rates at two-year colleges, and strengthen transfer pathways.

Redesigning community colleges

The potential areas for reform in the community college landscape are too many to be named here, but we can outline broad themes that community colleges ought to pursue, and that state policies ought to incentivize. These broad themes are largely pulled from Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, the definitive text on community college reform, written by Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University.

Bailey and his colleagues write that what is needed at the community college level is not reforms at the edges, but a complete redesign of the system. At base, the community college system was simply not designed for the aims we currently need it to achieve – namely, to take a student population that is less academically prepared and more likely to face barriers outside the classroom than the general college-going population, and then ensure they experience success. As the authors write, “the same features that have enabled these institutions to provide broad access to college make them poorly designed to facilitate completion of high-quality college programs.”

Here I will highlight five core areas for reform that community colleges need to take on in order to dramatically increase student success rates:

• Move from a “cafeteria style” model to structured pathways. Traditionally, community colleges have been designed to offer something for everyone, allowing students to select the courses or programs that are right for them. However, entering community college students are often ill-equipped to select the right courses or structure the right pathways, leading to false starts and eventual drop out. Leading community colleges have instead sought to dramatically limit student choice, by instituting guided pathways, default curriculums, and meta-majors, whereby students select a general area of interest, and are then assigned a pre-determined pathway or basket of courses.

• Intentional design around course scheduling. Temporal flexibility is another hallmark of the community college experience, as students take courses that fit around their schedule – after work, at night, or on weekends. However, this type of flexibility also contributes to students’ failure to make meaningful progress, and to eventually dropping out. The programs with the highest completion rates are often those that provide options for full-time enrollment and block scheduling.

• Supplemental instruction and co-requisite coursework. For years, entering community college students have been hampered by remedial education: courses designed to build foundation skills, but which carry no credits towards graduation, and in which students often struggle. To counter this, leading schools have introduced “co-requisite” models, in which students are placed directly in a credit-bearing course while simultaneously taking a course that offers supplemental instruction, allowing students to build foundation skills while making progress towards graduation.

• Expanding the number of academic advisors, and instituting mandatory advising. In 2007, the City University of New York (CUNY) launched the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), which doubled completion rates for participating students. The ASAP program introduced a number of popular reforms, including mandatory full-time enrollment, block scheduling, structured pathways, and financial assistance for books and transportation. But perhaps the most powerful intervention took place around the structure of academic advising.  Traditionally, advisors at community colleges have enormous caseloads, with some as high as 1,200 students per advisor – in the ASAP program, advisors had a caseload of between 60 and 80 students. And whereas the average community college student might meet with an academic advisor once a semester or academic year – if at all – ASAP students are required to meet with their advisors twice a month, and attend any tutoring or other support sessions that might be prescribed following those meetings. The ASAP structure is much closer to the kind of academic advising one would see at elite four-year universities with high graduation rates. It only follows that the student body entering community colleges, who are less academically prepared and face more out-of-class barriers than their peers attending prestigious four-year colleges, would need advising services on par with if not more intensive than those offered at elite institutions. 

• Reforming community college instruction to center on more active forms of learning. Research on college success finds that if there is a single factor most important to student success it is, perhaps obvious enough, student engagement. If a student is interested in and motivated to learn the content before them, they are that much more likely to take on the academic behaviors needed to be successful. And Bailey notes that if there is a single pedagogical shift community college instructors can make to boost engagement in their classrooms, it is a shift from a “transmission” style of delivery (i.e., lecture-style instruction, presenting content to be learned) to a “learning facilitation” style of teaching, where a professor guides students through problems as students construct knowledge and understanding on their own. In recognition of the need for pedagogy centered on active learning and engagement, Valencia College, for years a leader in community college success efforts, shifted how they award tenure based on faculty achieving pedagogical goals that they set out for themselves through individual learning plans.

Improving transfer outcomes

As previously noted, though the vast majority of entering community college students plan to one day transfer to and graduate from a four-year college, less than one in five actually do. So what can we do to ensure more students achieve the goal they set out for themselves when they first step foot on a community college campus?

There are good examples across the country of strong partnerships between individual institutions, in which a particular community college and a particular four-year college work together to establish transfer pathways for their students, ensuring the transferability of credits and instituting advising supports to ensure a smooth transition. And, indeed, partnerships like this should be highlighted, and encouraged.

But the real work to be done is at the system level to ensure students entering any community college have a decent shot at obtaining a bachelor’s degree from any four-year college they might transfer to. A major priority in this area is establishing articulation and transfer agreements between all two-year and four-year institutions in Michigan. This is obviously easier said than done. Four-year institutions, particularly elite four-year institutions, may be likely to guard against policies that push for transfer uniformity, the logic being that part of what makes the institution elite is the non-transferability of the educational experience at that institution.

However, many states have done this hard work of executing universal articulation agreements. Thirty-eight states have policies in place that require a set of core lower-division courses be transferable; thirty-five states guarantee the transfer of an associate degree, such that associate degree holders will be able to transfer all of their credits at a public four-year institution, and enter as a junior; and thirty-one states have taken the additional step of instituting common course numbering between community colleges and four-year institutions. Michigan, at last check, had taken on none of these popular reforms.

In my next post, I’ll outline some state policy levers Michigan can deploy to encourage Michigan institutions to take on these potentially impactful reforms that can help turn Michigan community colleges into engines of opportunity and social mobility.

The post Redesigning education in Michigan part 12 – Improving completion rates at Michigan’s community colleges appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts about the importance of educational attainment – both to our statewide economy and to individual economic mobility and prosperity –  and how we should be designing our K-16 education system to increase the number of Michiganders who attain bachelor’s degrees.

This is the eleventh post in the series. See links to previous posts below:

Post #1: Educational attainment and economic development

Post #2: Educational attainment and economic well-being

Post #3: College completion rates

Post #4: Beyond free college

Post #5: Developing writers in K-12

Post #6: Building college-ready skills in K-12

Post #7: An assessment system designed for college success

Post #8: Holding school systems accountable to postsecondary success

Post #9: BA attainment and K-12 funding

Post #10: Improving completion rates at four-year colleges

In my last post I wrote about the need for Michigan’s four-year institutions to improve completion rates. What is the role of state policies in encouraging and supporting our four-year institutions to do that?

The answer is not immediately obvious. The knee-jerk reaction that we have seen in states across the country is to try to increase completion rates through “performance-based” funding schemes, where state funding is allocated to institutions based on, for instance, completion rates or workforce outcomes. However, research has shown that these policies can skew institutional behavior in undesirable ways. For instance, in an effort to boost graduation rates schools could end up restricting access to lower income or less academically prepared students who might be less likely to graduate. In addition, such schemes, almost by definition, can end up penalizing those institutions most in need of support, which is not a good long-term strategy for creating a statewide system that increases the number of students completing bachelor’s degrees.

So, if not performance-based funding, what is the right lever to increase completion rates? In this post I’ll outline two core strategies we can deploy: one that is relatively cheap though perhaps not a very strong lever, and one that is likely a stronger lever, but is much more expensive.

Strategy 1: Shine a light on student success data

One relatively low-cost way the state can compel institutions to boost completion rates is by publishing student success data in a way that’s publicly accessible and user-friendly. Currently, this data is hard to access. The federal Department of Education maintains the National Center for Education Statistics, and through their “College Navigator” tool users can uncover a range of data about every institution, including financial aid, net price, admissions data, and completion rates. However, the site is not user friendly, nor widely known. One can imagine the state putting together a user-centered site that highlights completion rates, by racial and income subgroups, over time, to see how an institution is or is not improving.

There is some evidence that this strategy can compel institutions to improve. In 2011, Wayne State University had a six-year graduation rate of just 26%, and just 7.6% for Black students. A number of organizations and the press began to highlight this data publicly, and called on Wayne State to take on the hard work of ensuring more of their students left with a degree. And this public pressure did indeed spark institutional change. By following the playbook popularized by Georgia State, Wayne State earned national awards for its rapid improvements in student success. In 2023, the institution’s six-year graduation rate was 60%, more than double what it was in 2011, and its six-year graduation rate for Black students had risen to 40% – still a lot of room to grow, but moving in the right direction.

Strategy 2: Provide funding for institutions to implement the student success playbook

Aside from the pressure of public data, Michigan can also boost completion rates by ensuring our four-year schools have the resources needed to take on impactful student success reforms. David Deming, a Harvard University economist, has found that “there is a strong causal relationship between per student spending by an institution and degree completion.” “More spending” might not feel very innovative, but it turns out to be essential if we hope to boost completion rates.

Deming notes that between 1990 and 2015, inflation-adjusted state spending on higher education rose less than 4 percent, while college enrollment grew by 45 percent. This means that our public colleges have, over the past three decades, been asked to support many more students with less resources. Deming notes that colleges have always spent much more per student than they charge in tuition; the more they are able to spend per student, on academic support, instruction, and advising, for instance, the higher quality the student’s educational experience. Deming refers to this surplus that colleges spend above and beyond the price of tuition as the “subsidy.” Deming notes that in 1990, as a result of more generous public support for higher education, public institutions had, on average, $7.26 in subsidy for every one dollar paid in tuition; by 2014, this subsidy had been nearly cut in half, down to $3.87.  While elite institutions can lean on high tuition rates and large endowments to provide financial, academic, and social supports, Deming notes that minimally selective public institutions, which end up serving the majority of students, “often have large classes and provide little in the way of academic counseling, mentoring, and other student supports” because of budgetary constraints. When colleges are able to boost spending on student supports and mentoring, however, we see increases in persistence and completion rates.

The common critique of simply increasing spending on higher education is that the institutions will not use the additional funding wisely. Indeed, it’s not hard to find an op-ed suggesting that our nation’s colleges are simply funneling student tuition into fancy gyms and dining halls, all to lure more students paying higher tuition. Though this narrative is not entirely baseless (institutions have increased spending on facilities to compete for students), a hard look at the data yields a more complicated picture. For example, spending on deferred maintenance from an initial building boom in the 1960s has driven facilities spending far more than new buildings. Still, if there is concern that institutions receiving additional state funding will spend the money not on student supports but on fancy buildings, the state could restrict how the funds could be used, requiring some share be put towards counseling, academic advising, instruction, and academic supports.

However, even these restrictions might be unnecessary. Research has shown that when higher education institutions are provided additional public resources, they generally put the money towards student supports, as they try and emulate the kind of educational experience found at highly-selective institutions. Completion rates are higher at highly-selective institutions in part because they admit students who are better prepared academically, but also because they have far more resources than their less selective peers. With these additional resources, students are provided robust wraparound supports that, in effect, don’t allow them to fail. Less selective institutions, when provided additional resources, attempt to provide these same supports. Deming found that “a 10 percent increase in state funding of nonselective public institutions leads to a 17 percent increase in spending on academic support programs.”

It turns out that if we care about completion rates, state spending on higher education – that is, funding to support the institutions themselves – ends up being really important – even more important than financial aid programs. For all the attention on financial aid to individual students – be it federal Pell grants, state-based “free college” programs, or even more ambitious efforts like the Kalamazoo Promise – there is very little evidence to show these programs meaningfully impact completion rates. The removal or easing of the burden of tuition is surely a positive intervention and could both increase access and allow students to take on behaviors that would increase the odds of persistence and completion. However, if a student needs additional supports – if they’re struggling in their coursework, or they don’t know what classes to take, or they feel like they don’t belong in college – tuition assistance is of no help. Rather, the student needs support from the university; they need a higher quality education.

In my next post I’ll begin exploring the reforms needed in Michigan’s community college system if we are to ensure the roughly 15,000 Michigan high school graduates that enter a community college every year are entering a system that will expand, rather than restrict, the opportunities available to them.

The post Redesigning education in Michigan part 11 – Public policy levers to boost completion rates at 4-year colleges appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts about the importance of educational attainment – both to our statewide economy and to individual economic mobility and prosperity –  and how we should be designing our K-16 education system to increase the number of Michiganders who attain bachelor’s degrees.

This is the tenth post in the series. See links to previous posts below:

Post #1: Educational attainment and economic development

Post #2: Educational attainment and economic well-being

Post #3: College completion rates

Post #4: Beyond free college

Post #5: Developing writers in K-12

Post #6: Building college-ready skills in K-12

Post #7: An assessment system designed for college success

Post #8: Holding school systems accountable to postsecondary success

Post #9: BA attainment and K-12 funding

In the past several posts I’ve looked at our K-12 system: the competencies the K-12 system needs to build in its students for them to be successful in college, the accountability system needed to push the K-12 system to build those competencies, and the funding required to enable all schools to build these competencies.

We will now turn our attention to the higher education system. And because here in Michigan the four-year college system is a completely different animal from the two-year college system, with completely different opportunities for reform, we will look at these systems separately, starting with the four-year system. And we’ll start with a hard look at how four-year colleges – both nationally and here in Michigan – are doing at getting the students who enter their institutions to graduate with a bachelor’s degree (some of this data was reviewed in a previous post, but this post takes a deeper look at the figures).

The state of college completion at four-year colleges

Let’s say, for a moment, that we were to design a K-12 system as I have described in my previous posts: one that prioritizes the development of the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and mindsets student needed to succeed in college and career; one that teaches students how to think critically, communicate clearly, and learn deeply; and one that prioritizes the transition from K-12 to higher education.

Even if this were to happen, we would still need to redesign our systems of higher education, to ensure that far more of the students who attend college end up leaving with a degree in hand.

There were roughly 3 million 16- to 24-year-olds who completed high school in 2015. Roughly 2 million (69% of all graduates) went on to college, with 1.3 million attending a four-year college, and 700,000 attending a two-year college (these figures are taken from Table 302.10 in the NCES Digest for Education Statistics). Of those that went directly to a four-year college, roughly 850,000 (65%) graduated with a four-year degree within six years of entry. Of those that started at a two-year college, 238,000 (34%) received an associate degree within three years, and roughly 112,000 (16%) went on to receive a bachelor’s degree within six years of entry. In total, on top of the roughly 1 million high school graduates from the 2015 cohort who did not enroll in any college at all, this leaves another at least 800,000 students who began college, but had no two- or four-year degree to show for it six years later (It should also be noted that this paints a relatively rosy scenario, because it assumes that all those who entered college were attending full-time, and that the group who graduated with a two-year degree is mutually exclusive from those who started at a two-year college and eventually earned a bachelor’s degree).

Here in Michigan, our bachelor’s degree granting institutions vary dramatically in the share of entering students who leave with a degree six years later. The University of Michigan and Michigan State University graduate 93% and 83% of their students, respectively, while Ferris State University and Eastern Michigan University graduate just 48% and 45% of their students, respectively. The performance of each institution rests on many factors, including a school’s financial resources (U-M’s endowment is nearly $18 billion and MSU’s is $4 billion; EMU and Ferris State have endowments closer to $100 million) and the academic qualifications of entering students. Still, of the 33 bachelor’s degree granting institutions I looked at (full table copied below), 20 have six-year graduation rates below 65%, 23 have six-year graduation rates for Black students below 50%, and 12 have six-year graduation rates for Hispanic students below 50%. These figures are clearly a cause for concern, and require action. 

The good news is that we know what it takes for colleges to graduate many more students than they currently do. Over the past two decades, a number of pioneering institutions have written the guidebook on what it takes to dramatically improve graduation rates, particularly for non-affluent and first-generation students.

Georgia State University in Atlanta is considered by many to be the standard bearer for student success. Georgia State is a mid-selectivity public institution that in the early 2000s graduated just 30% of its students. Since then, however, led by former president Mark Becker and former senior vice president for student success Tim Renick, the school transformed itself into a leader in student success, boosting its graduation rate by nearly 70 percent between 2003 and 2017, and eliminating outcome gaps between white and Black students. They did it through a number of now well-known strategies, including:

• Obsessive attention to data on student success, using predictive analytics to better understand which students were likely to struggle when, and developing new programs to intervene at those pain points.

• Dramatically increasing student support staff, and, with the support of robust data systems, reaching out to students proactively, rather than waiting for students to come to them.

• Implementing an emergency cash grant program to provide students who are on track academically but short on tuition with small grants to make up the difference and keep them enrolled.

More important than any one strategy, however, was the way in which university leadership prioritized student success as a central attribute of the institution. Georgia State leadership made the conscious decision that they weren’t going to try and become an elite public institution, but rather one that admitted and then graduated academically marginal non-affluent students. This commitment, more than anything else, seems to be what’s most needed for institutions to make progress on student success.

(However, it should also be noted that despite Georgia State’s improvements, graduation rates at the institution have plateaued over the past several years, stuck at just over 50 percent for both all students and for Black students.)

In my next post, I’ll dive into some public policy levers we can deploy to encourage Michigan’s four year institutions to take on the hard work of increasing completion rates at their institutions, and provide them the support needed to do so.

The post Redesigning education in Michigan Part 10 – Improving completion rates at four-year colleges appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts about the importance of educational attainment – both to our statewide economy and to individual economic mobility and prosperity –  and how we should be designing our K-16 education system to increase the number of Michiganders who attain bachelor’s degrees.

This is the ninth post in the series. See links to previous posts below:

Post #1: Educational attainment and economic development

Post #2: Educational attainment and economic well-being

Post #3: College completion rates

Post #4: Beyond free college

Post #5: Developing writers in K-12

Post #6: Building college-ready skills in K-12

Post #7: An assessment system designed for college success

Post #8: Holding school systems accountable to postsecondary success

In my last post, I noted that one way to hold schools accountable to building the skills needed for postsecondary success is to actually hold them accountable for their students’ postsecondary success. A system that pushed schools to regularly reflect on their students’ postsecondary outcomes would compel those schools and school systems to identify the features of their educational model that did or did not support postsecondary success.

As I noted in my last post, one piece of that model that would become glaringly apparent to most schools if they were forced to go through this exercise would be the inadequacy of their college counseling services. The quality of college counseling a student experiences is incredibly important to their eventual college success, yet most schools are woefully understaffed, and therefore unable to provide high quality college counseling services that can mean the difference between college success or dropping out.

The lack of high-quality college counseling in most schools is a problem that can only be solved by more resources. To hire more high-quality college counselors, schools need more money.

Improving college counseling services is just one of the many ways that additional funding for K-12 schools can help to improve postsecondary outcomes. There are many others. From smaller class sizes to increased special education supports to implementing college prep curriculums like Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB), any reform that might have a shot at improving postsecondary outcomes will require K-12 funding above and beyond the status quo.

In this post, I will briefly review the evidence around K-12 funding and postsecondary outcomes, and discuss why expanding educational attainment cannot be done on the cheap.

K-12 funding and reform

It’s hard to talk about K-12 education reform without also talking about funding. Any meaningful reform one might advocate for – higher teacher pay, smaller class sizes, additional help for special education students, curricular reforms, revamped teacher training, expanded college counseling – would require funding beyond the status quo. This is particularly true in schools and districts serving non-affluent students. For all the faults and potential areas for improvement in our K-12 system, those schools and districts serving affluent students generally do a decent job of preparing them for success in college and beyond. To be sure, some of the advantages these students have come from what they experience outside of school. But schools – and the resources that enable them to attract and retain experienced, high-quality teachers, fully staff their special education departments, and offer a wide array of extracurricular and elective courses – also play a role. If we are going to ask those schools serving non-affluent students to prepare a far larger share of their students for college success than currently meet that threshold, we need to equip them with the needed resources as well.

Over the past decade, a strong consensus has emerged in the literature that school funding is really important to student achievement and educational attainment – and that it’s that much more important for non-affluent students. In a landmark study by C. Kirabo Jackson and colleagues, the authors look at school spending “shocks” over a period of several decades brought on by legislative action or court orders. And they find that if a non-affluent student attends a school that receives a 20% increase in funding, and that increase persists through twelve years of education, that student is likely to complete an additional year of education, earn 25% more as an adult, and is 20% less likely to be low-income as an adult. In the world of education research, these are huge impacts. Meanwhile, more affluent students who experienced the same funding shocks saw no change in their predicted attainment or economic outcomes. In short, adequate funding really matters, and it really matters specifically for non-affluent students. 

What does adequate mean? Bruce Baker, a school finance expert at Rutgers University, and his colleagues publish an annual report looking at education funding adequacy across U.S. states. While there is tremendous variation between states (roughly half of all states continue to grant less revenue per pupil to their higher-poverty districts than to their lower poverty districts), on average higher-poverty districts are funded at roughly 20% higher levels than lower-poverty districts. However, when Baker and colleagues model the level of funding needed for students in higher-poverty districts to achieve average educational outcomes (as measured by test scores of basic math and reading skills), they find that students in higher-poverty districts should be funded at rates nearly 90% higher than lower-poverty districts.

Here in Michigan, we fall far short of this adequacy target. Baker and his colleagues find that Michigan’s highest poverty school districts receive 53% less funding than would be required to achieve average outcomes. And 41% of Michigan students reside in districts that are funded at below adequate levels (it’s worth noting that in high-scoring Massachusetts, just 25% of students are in districts with below adequate funding, and the highest poverty districts are only 10% below the adequacy target. The chart at the top of this post shows the large gap in per-pupil spending between Michigan and Massachusetts).

If we are going to hold schools accountable to the postsecondary outcomes of their students (and we should), ask them to provide high-quality college counseling services, and ask them to ensure all their students leave high school as analytical writers, with a deep understanding of core academic content, and a set of competencies that enable them to learn independently, we need to give them the resources to do it. States need to ensure that their schools and districts serving non-affluent students are funded at levels far higher than what is allocated for schools and districts serving affluent students if we are to get anywhere close to our goal of increasing educational attainment for all students.

In my next post we will leave the confines of the K-12 system, and begin to look at the reforms needed in our four-year and community college systems if we are to dramatically increase educational attainment here in Michigan.

The post Redesigning education in Michigan Part 9 – Increasing BA attainment will require increasing K-12 funding appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts about the importance of educational attainment – both to our statewide economy and to individual economic mobility and prosperity –  and how we should be designing our K-16 education system to increase the number of Michiganders who attain bachelor’s degrees.

This is the eighth post in the series. See links to previous posts below:

Post #1: Educational attainment and economic development

Post #2: Educational attainment and economic well-being

Post #3: College completion rates

Post #4: Beyond free college

Post #5: Developing writers in K-12

Post #6: Building college-ready skills in K-12

Post #7: An assessment system designed for college success

In my last post I discussed the ways in which our current K-12 assessment system is at odds with the development of college-ready skills, and the kinds of assessments that would actively encourage the development of college-ready capacities in our young people.

In this post I’m going to explore a second way we can center the capacities needed for college success in our K-12 system – namely, by holding K-12 systems accountable for their students’ postsecondary outcomes.

Whenever we’ve raised this idea in the past, we have been told that it’s impractical. We are told there are too many variables in a student’s life (family situation, socioeconomic status, postsecondary goals) for the high school to be held accountable for a student’s academic outcomes after they leave school.

But by not factoring postsecondary outcomes into our assessment systems, we are missing an opportunity to have schools honestly reflect on how their educational programs are preparing students, or not, for their postsecondary education, and what needs to change. Do students have the foundational math and reading skills to be able to thrive in their first-year courses? Do students get enough opportunities to practice writing substantive, evidence-based essays? Are students given opportunities to manage their own work and learning, as they’ll have to do in college? Are courses designed to build a deep understanding of the core concepts of various disciplines, that sets a foundation for future learning?

Shining a light on postsecondary outcomes would also underscore the importance of high schools’ college counseling programs, and overall college-going culture. The college application and financial aid processes are incredibly complex, particularly for first-generation students. And we know that where a student enrolls in college is incredibly important to their eventual success. One of the most important findings in the literature on college success is around the phenomenon now known as “undermatching,” where a student chooses to attend a school that is less selective than other colleges she could have gained admission to. This turns out to be important because a student who undermatches is less likelyto graduate than an observationally equivalent student who attends a more selective institution. This is because more selective institutions tend to have more resources, that they devote to financial aid and student supports, as well as the influence of higher-achieving peers.

Undermatching is that much more of a problem because it predominately occurs among low-income students, who could most benefit from the economic mobility impact of a college degree. The reason it largely occurs among low-income students is because most low-income students lack access to highly-qualified college counselors, who can provide expert advice on college match, the college application process, and financial aid. The national student to counselor ratio is nearly 400 to 1 – a figure that is much worse in under-resourced schools serving non-affluent students. It should also be noted that this high ratio accounts for all counselors –rather than solely college counselors – who must squeeze whatever college guidance they can among the traditional duties of a guidance counselor. If we hope to design a system that produces more college graduates, investments will be required to not only dramatically reduce student to counselor ratios in our schools, but also ensure college counselors are trained on how to use student success data to direct their students to the postsecondary institution that offers them the best chance of success.

This data is also readily available. The image at the top of this post is from the state’s MI School Data website, which provides a number of postsecondary reports by high school. From this data source one can see the postsecondary institutions graduating seniors from each high school in the state are enrolling in, and how many graduate with what credentials four, six, or eight years after graduating from high school.

I should note here what we mean by “held accountable.” When we say schools and school systems ought to be held accountable to postsecondary outcomes, we don’t mean it in the “high stakes” sense that we have become accustomed to, where a teacher’s job or even the existence of a school is dependent on student test scores. Rather, when we say postsecondary outcomes should be a factor in the K-12 accountability system, we mean that the underperformance of schools or school systems in postsecondary attainment should trigger additional supports – both financial resources and professional development resources – in educational design, instruction, college counseling, or whatever else a school might need in order to give their students a better shot at postsecondary success.

Because any major reform to our K-12 system will necessarily require additional funding, my next post in this series (and final one looking at the K-12 system), will look briefly at the state of funding in Michigan schools, and the funding increases that are required to design a system built to enable postsecondary success for all.

The post Redesigning education in Michigan Part 8 – Holding school systems accountable to postsecondary success appeared first on Michigan Future Inc..