{"id":23251,"date":"2015-02-09T06:54:46","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T11:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=23251"},"modified":"2015-02-09T06:54:49","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T11:54:49","slug":"study-performance-funding-doesnt-improve-higher-ed-graduation-rates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2015\/02\/09\/study-performance-funding-doesnt-improve-higher-ed-graduation-rates\/","title":{"rendered":"Study: Performance Funding Doesn’t Improve Higher Ed Graduation Rates"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"President<\/a>

<\/p>

President Obama wants to make two years of public community college free for many students. But institutions like Miami Dade College, pictured here, could only participate if they also have a performance funding program.<\/p><\/div>\n

Performance funding in public higher education is a way for states to hold institutions accountable for certain outcomes. But new research shows it doesn\u2019t do much to keep students enrolled or boost graduation rates.<\/p>\n

A study co-authored by<\/a>\u00a0Dr. David Tandberg, Florida State University assistant professor of higher education, shows little difference in outcomes between institutions that receive performance funding and those that don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The latest report examined community colleges in Washington State, but the research is part of a series of studies measuring outcomes nationally.<\/p>\n

Florida currently has no performance funding model for state colleges. But its program for state universities considers a long list of metrics including how many bachelor\u2019s recipients are employed or furthering their education one year after graduation, their salaries, and the six year graduation rate.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tandberg says it\u2019s difficult for institutions to boost their performance to earn the added funding without having additional resources to begin with. He says these programs have even been shown to have negative consequences, like colleges boosting enrollment criteria to keep lower achieving students out.<\/p>\n

Tandberg sat down with us to explain his findings.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>Give us a brief synopsis of your performance funding study.<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>Overall, we found very little impact on Associate\u2019s degree completions or on retention rates, or on long-term certificates. But we did find a significant positive impact on short-term certificates. A short-term certificate can be completed in less than a year, and it\u2019s not a degree – it\u2019s a certificate. On average in Washington, they generally don\u2019t lead to a salary that\u2019s significantly greater than what a high school graduate would receive. If institutions are ramping up those kinds of short-term certificates, that\u2019s probably a behavior that the student achievement initiative didn\u2019t want to incentivize.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>You\u2019re talking about how there are some unintended consequences, outcomes that happen in unanticipated ways. Can you just elaborate on some of these unanticipated issues?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>We\u2019ve seen that institutions will consider things like enrolling higher achieving students in order to improve graduation rates. When we implement a performance funding program, we\u2019re asking them to do something different and improve their outcomes. Those things quite often require additional resources. Performance funding may provide an additional incentive, but without additional resources, you can\u2019t expect significant differences in things like graduation rates or completions.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>President Barack Obama has proposed making community colleges free for the first two years for what he calls \u201cresponsible\u201d students. What can you tell us about how performance funding would play into the president\u2019s proposal?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>For states to participate in the program,\u00a0they must have a performance funding program<\/a>. There are multiple reasons to implement a performance funding program. One is to improve performance \u2013 that\u2019s the most obvious. Another is simply to use it as an accountability mechanism, so at least it\u2019s a way of holding institutions accountable. In that sense, it kind of makes sense because that\u2019s a lot of new federal and state dollars going to community colleges. Now, if the assumption is that the performance funding program is going to actually improve performance, well that\u2019s very questionable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Performance funding in public higher education is a way for states to hold institutions accountable for certain outcomes. But new research shows it doesn\u2019t do much to keep students enrolled or boost graduation rates. A study co-authored by\u00a0Dr. David Tandberg, Florida State University assistant professor of higher education, shows little difference in outcomes between institutions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[25,1040,762],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23251"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23258,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23251\/revisions\/23258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}