How to Hold Colleges Accountable?

Parent Cafe
1

I love to do lists / checklists - but there are some other important questions to ask before paying for tuition. I read this list recently and thought it was even more important with my second child heading to college this year. I find it amazing how different each of my kids colleges treat me as a parent and how difficult it is to identify answers to some common questions.

Please let me know what you think and other questions you might suggest.

  • what is the actual net cost of education
  • what % of students graduate in 4 years
  • what is the refund policy of the institution
  • what is the employment rate of graduates
  • what is the campus safety record (Clery Act)
  • WHAT else do you want to know???

If you are looking for it - you can search for an article about the entire topic appeared in the NY Times - How to Hold Colleges Accountable.

2

what is the actual net cost of education
-Impossible for the college to tell you. They can tell you the current cost of tuition and fees, as well as the current cost of on-campus housing and food plans. They cannot accurately predict increases, nor can they assure you that you will be able to get the on-campus accommodations you would like (if there are varying room/charges at the school). You will have to deal with assumptions and averages - which is fine, because you will be comparing assumptions and averages for all schools.

what % of students graduate in 4 years
-This is fine as long as you realize that some schools have a more flexible student body. For example, you are more likely to have students come and go and/or attend part-time at a large state U than you will have at a small, private school. This will affect the graduation rate.

what is the refund policy of the institution
-You may want to consider tuition insurance, if this is a concern.

what is the employment rate of graduates
-That would vary based on major (many freshman change their minds in the course of the time in school), as well as personal motivation (and luck). A better question would be what resources are offered for finding jobs? What are the opportunities during school for internships and other activities that would provide experience that employers might find valuable? (And you can have great opportunities and resources in place, but the individual student has to be self-motivated for it to be beneficial … says the mom of one who was and one who was not so much.)

what is the campus safety record (Clery Act)
-This is posted on the website for almost all colleges.

3

All or almost all of this information is available already. The trick is finding it. Maybe a better question is whether there should be a user-friendly summary of key information that all colleges must provide to prospective students.

4

i’m sure you’ll get answers, but some of them may be meaningless in your situation. Net cost, for instance, is unknowable, as @kelsmom explained

%who graduate in 4 years. That’s a statistic most schools report on, but it may not mean much for your particular child. A major change, a remedial need or a low course grade that puts him out of sequence/doesn’t all him to progress, or an “experience” semester may push him into needing more time even at a school with a very high 4 year grad rate. I think you get a better sense comparing the 4 and 6 year rates.

Refund policy should be available online. Search for the academic catalog. Many of those policies can be found in that document.

Employment rate is a prime example of how to lie with statistics. A certain percent working. In the field? How is the institution defining field? Is bank teller “in the field” for a finance major?

Clery Act info should be easy to get.

What else do I want to know? The retention rate is another number that an institution reports to the fed. More important to me is the persistence rate. Retention is a number that looks at incoming traditional freshman who return as sophomores. Persistence looks at the whole student body, including transfers, non-trads, etc.

5

Let’s also hold the student accountable for his or her choices too, e.g. the underwater basket weaving vs petrochem, the preparedness of the student for the degree, the potentially changeable nature of the major in large institution.

6

Petrochem has dismal near-term employment prospects. Good example of kids rushing to a field thinking it’s the golden ticket.

7

Most of that list, beyond the first question, is useless, or nearly so. They are great questions to ask of for-profit trade schools, but they aren’t going to be much use in evaluating selective colleges.

  1. The percentage of students who graduate in 4 years is going to track closely the wealth of the college and of its students. Students from affluent families don't need to work to pay for college, and don't run out of tuition money, and that's what keeps lots of students from graduating in four years. Wealthy colleges offer lots of sections of required courses, which handles another thing that extends college for many, and they provide lots of academic supports for struggling students. Finally, the colleges that really look good on this criterion are the colleges that only admit kids who are basically guaranteed to graduate on time because of their personalities. Other colleges, that may see their mission more in terms of providing opportunity to students, may take some risks, and when you take some risks you lose on some of them.

What you really want to know is what students are at risk for not graduating in four years, do those students run up additional costs by extending college, and what does the college do to help students avoid paying extra for their degrees or being stuck with debt and no degree. Those things are no so easily quantified.

  1. The refund policy is super-important if your child has a horrible injury or mental breakdown early in a term. If that happens, you will really wish you had known the answer to this question and somehow been able to plan for it. So, go ahead and ask. It will make you feel like a complete idiot three years from now when you don't remember what the answer was -- or the answer has changed -- and you find out that you are two days too late for your child to withdraw and get a refund for the semester's tuition. Except that for 99% of families it will never matter.
  2. The employment rate of graduates tells you nothing, because it combines computer engineers, who damn sure better be employed unless they decide to surf for a few months before cashing in, with fine arts majors who will only be employed someplace other than a food serving establishment if they have given up. Plus, in case you haven't heard, employment is sort of 20th Century; today it's all about the Gig Economy and the 1099.

What you really want to know is how the career services office works, and why its public information isn’t as awesome as the University of Pennsylvania’s. (Look it up; it’s awesome.)

  1. If you pay any attention at all, you know that there is practically no consistency from one college to the next in how they report their Clery Act data. Sometimes, there's practically no consistency within a single college. It's silly to compare isolated, well-defined rural campuses and open urban ones (and you don't need Clery Act data to know that if a college is in the middle of a poor neighborhood and not locked down like Stalag 17 it will have some street crime).

You want to know what the college does to keep students safe, and how many students get hurt seriously. You especially want to know what colleges do to keep students safe from one another, because that’s where the real danger is, and also where the problems most difficult to solve are.

8

I would add freshman retention rate to your list.

This is not really a question for admissions but while evaluating schools I would also look at the department of the major your child is interested in and look at the class offerings, professor ratings, etc.

9

Maybe add:

The attrition rate of the majors or tracks you are interested in.

In general, you could not be in a relatively “easy” major and still expect a good prospect of getting a well-paid job related to your major right after college. But majoring in a “hard” major does not necessarily result in a good job. (There are some exceptions though.)

10

Accountable for what? They could tell you the graduation rate was 99%, and it might be, but if you are in the 1%, how will that make the school accountable for anything?

Some schools can set any rules they want or ignore any rules they want, and people will still be lining up to get in. Harvard could tell you that 80% of the students take 5 years to graduate, only 75% are employed after 6 months, the refund policy is to refund nothing, and still people would line up and claw over little old ladies in line to get in.

You do need to know what you are buying, and in some cases comparing, but I don’t think knowing the safety record is going to change anyone’s mind. The crime rate in NYC can be high, but people still want to go to NYU and Columbia , U of Chicago isn’t hurting for students, USC and UCLA are still turning them away.

You should ask about things most important to you and your student.

11

I merged two identical threads so some of the posts may seem off/disjointed.

12

As the other posters have responded, what seems like these good questions break down under scrutiny because the value of college and the question of which college is better than another can be so hard to measure. Especially if you place the value at something we all hope for our kids, but is hard to measure - thriving in life and being happy.

Take Gallup’s recent survey results http://www.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/182312/college-worth-depends.aspx

From a massive Gallup study of 30,000 college graduates in the U.S. – it measured the degree to which graduates were engaged in their work and thriving in their purpose, social, financial, community and physical well-being
Graduates who strongly agree they had the following six experiences in college – which Gallup refers to as the “Big Six” – perform markedly better on every measure of long-term success compared with graduates who missed the mark on these experiences:

  1. a professor who made them excited about learning
  2. professors who cared about them as a person
  3. a mentor who encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams
  4. worked on a long-term project
  5. had a job or internship where they applied what they were learning
  6. were extremely involved in extra-curricular activities

Who wouldn’t want this for their child? If you go to the story, you’ll see the vast majority of graduates reporting they did not have most of these experiences (some not having any!). And we all know (and now we have some research to help back it up) that these things are likely important. In fact, I have read multiple other research studies supporting all of these that were listed (which is probably why they asked them).

Finally, other research has shown that it really isn’t that important where the child goes to college, it’s what they put into it and what they get out of the experience. Students at large state U’s can be just as successful and (more importantly) just as happy with life as those kids who get to the Ivies.

So yes, some schools are definitely better than others, and there are differences between the schools. But in reality, there are probably a multitude of schools that could provide a similar education and experience for each student at mostly similar price ranges.

Then the question boils down to, what can I do as a parent (or as the student) to ensure that I have all or most of those 6 experiences?

Is there really anything you can do, or does it boil down to a determined student + luck (lucky to find a helpful professor and mentor, lucky to find a great internship, because not all internships are created equal)?

13

To add to the previous comments about this goal “- what % of students graduate in 4 years”

Universities with good co-op programs, for engineering or other majors will have a higher than 4 year graduation rate, yet those students are graduating according to the plan they had since the beginning.

Another thing you could ask about is the number of faculty adjuncts a university hires. Adjuncts often get paid poorly, are not permanent university employees, may not have an office on campus (and be able to keep office hours).

Here again, there are caveats: Certain majors and departments–such as music–will hire a high percentage of faculty adjuncts because these will be working professionals in the music world. So that is a positive reason for hiring adjuncts.

14

The refund policy and total cost should be online on their website and readily accessible. If it’s not, that’s a bit of a red flag. That is, unless you wanted to know what tuition will be next year, the year after, and so on. Those numbers probably haven’t been decided yet so no one would be able to tell you.

15

Re: Post #9 - @twoinanddone : NYC now has a crime rate below the national rate. It has never been safer. That partially explains the steady rise in selectivity for Columbia, NYU, and Fordham. I went to Barnard as an underachiever in the 1970s, because they were eager to give promising, but imperfect, applicants a chance. Parents who were willing to send kids to Penn, in a worse neighborhood, balked at Columbia and Barnard then. NYC is probably the safest large city in the country, now, but that comes at a substantial, literal dollar, price.

16

When you are trying to get answers, always look first at the college’s Common Data Set. Google " common data set" and you can get some great info.

17

Another point worth making is that these questions won’t tell you much when you are comparing two kinds of college. They may have more relevance for two very similar colleges.

18

Back when college tuition could be paid alone by a student working a part time job there weren’t all these copter pads for parents.

19

That situation has been gone for quite some time now, but it can be difficult for colleges to keep up with the information requirements of many parents. The net cost issue has been touched upon; even with the advent of net price calculators, it’s difficult for families with businesses/self-employment income or separated families (very common) to forecast their net costs before applying. Unfortunately, a lot of that has more to do with the availability of financial aid than with the predictability of college costs; if financial aid did not exist, you could just use the posted tuition and room and board rates.

That’s true. Selectivity can skew graduation rates; for example, a school with low selectivity might end up with more students who are underprepared for college or unable to graduate in four years. This doesn’t tell you much about the quality of individual programs; a public university that is required to accept a certain percentage of in-state students by
law probably is going to have lower selectivity but they may have a great art history program or a great business school or a regionally well-respected medical program. How do you weight these different factors objectively? Different people are going to look at the same data and value each item more or less.

20

I work in the admissions office at my school and whenever we are asked these questions we just google the answers. Because it’s all publicly available. It’s not like the admissions counselors have private data just sitting in some file waiting for parents to ask about it.

If the information is publicly available we will put you on hold and google the information. If the information is available we will tell you, otherwise we will tell you that the data is not publicly available or not collected.