The IPEDS graduation rates are based on the following formula:

Number of Graduates from CohortA with x years/(Number in CohortA-Approved exclusions [Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, military service, religious mission, death, etc.]) 

Where CohortA are all First-time students in the fall of a given year, including those whose enrollment also began in the summer, initially enrolled as full-time.

The calculation is performed where “x” is four, five, and six years post-entry for students pursuing four-year degrees, two and three years for students at two-year colleges.

There is no magic here, simply a set of assumptions of normal expectations that full-time students are likely to remain full-time – assuming their initial enrollment indicates their academic plans should thus complete in four years, but additional years are “allowed” for incidental delays along the way.

Institutions complain frequently that this measure is imperfect, especially community colleges.

It seems that most fail to realize that just because the law requires Title IV-participating institutions to report these figures to USED each year, THEY DON’T HAVE TO STOP THERE.

If an institution wants to report graduation rates for part-time students, or transfer students, star-bellied Sneetches and Sneetches with out stars, they are completely free to do so.

And they should.

Most don’t, I guess because they can’t compare to someone else, such as their self-defined peer groups. Isn’t this insane? Does it really matter how one institution performs against another when an increase in the metric over time is clearly the desired change? Institutions should be focused on improving student success and understanding who doesn’t graduate on time, and why. From there they can work to better support students and address structures that  improve their success.

It simply isn’t that difficult. Comparisons and benchmarking have stopped institutional development, or at least slowed it, for institutions that rely on federal data. The only way to change that is to change the data available – with something like the Student Right to Know Before You Go Act. States can also get involved, like we do in Virginia.

We are coming up on the second annual Virginia Longitudinal Data System Insights Conference. This is kind of a big deal since it is our second conference and we have a little more to talk about in terms of research outcomes. This is still very much a work in progress, but VLDS is here to stay.

I will be speaking a number of times. First, as part of an opening panel on VLDS. Second, the impact of VLDS on legislation leading to HB886 that requires high schools, school divisions, colleges and universities to link to the outcomes and student performance data on our website. Third, I will be discussing the upcoming release of our mid-career wage outcomes data and other data products.

There are lots of other sessions to attend if you are not interested in hearing me. College and Career Readiness, Teacher Preparation, Career and Technical Education, Workforce Education, and other topics. It will be another great event.

The second annual Insights Conference will be held on Tuesday, June 24, 2014 at the Hilton Richmond Hotel & Conference Center. The conference theme, “Bridging the Data Divide,” will emphasize how the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS) is bridging the data divide among citizens, researchers, and policymakers by providing a single point of access for educational and workforce information. The conference will open at 8:00 AM with registration, a networking breakfast and a demonstration of VLDS. Sessions will run from 9:00 AM until 5:00 PM with a break for lunch. For more information and registration, please see: http://www.cit.org/insights-conference/

The objectives of the Insights Conference:

• Link communities of data providers and data consumers
• Celebrate and build the future of VLDS
• Inspire stakeholders to provide insights to citizens

There is special beauty in solving a challenging problem.

That is what I like about art. In my view, it is a series of solving problems. (I was a painter, occasionally I still am, so I will stick with that.)

1) Identifying the goal. Sometimes a complex message, sometimes a simple desire to create beauty or to challenge perception.

2) Selection of media. This may be pre-determined by the training and preferences of the artist, or a part of the process. This includes picking the size of the canvas.

3) Standing before the blank canvas (or whatever the media).

4) Execution. Sometimes once you start it all flows to the finish without interruption or real challenge.

5) The thousands of decisions along the way – color mixing, color choice, composition.

6) Seeing what’s there v. what you think is there. One of the most common mistakes in representational art

7) Remaining faithful to your vision.

8) Finishing. Finishing. Re-finishing. And again.

Of course, if you look at this list and change a few words, it applies to coding. And a bunch of other things, such as higher ed policy analysis. Or maybe it is just the way I approach my job. Whichever it is, I enjoy what I do a lot.

Even more, I enjoy seeing that there is an ever greater beauty in watching someone you trained, taught, or raised, solve the problem themselves with only a brief hesitation. Last weekend I was watching my son work on a project that developed into a bit of a puzzler. We realized there was a problem about the same time and I just watched. He stared at it awhile and then things clicked. You could see the click in how his body relaxed suddenly. At that point he made some changes in what he was doing and finished.

I nodded to myself, thinking, “Yep, that’s what I would have done.” Out loud I said, “Good solution, good job.”

It was very cool.

Same kind of thing happened today at work. I stopped at the DMV on the way to work. While I was there I got a note that the webserver was presenting an error. I told the sender I couldn’t do anything, so just let my assistant directors know. Using my phone I was able to establish the macro issue and knew it was out of our hands and that a ticket would have to be filed with tech overlords. Now I just needed to wait and see how long it took my staff to figure out what to do.

Just a handful of minutes. A little longer than it took me. Good.

When I got to the office and talked with them, they told me what they had done to isolate the problem. I was pleased. I love problem solving.

Unfortunately, the outage has not yet been fixed. Turns out to have affected a number of agencies and 14 hours later they are still working to implement the solution identified four hours ago.

Some problems take longer.

Sometimes years. It took me quite a few years to get to the point where legally, politically, technically, and practically we could publish the wage reports. Small accomplishments each year to solve tough problems.

It might be good to take that approach to the big problems as well.

I had a twisted thought this morning thinking about student debt and certain institutions that seem to be ineffective at student learning and more interested in feeding at the public trough than student success. Perhaps both. So, a bit of doggerel with apologies to Sir Mix-a-Lot.

“I like Big Debt, and I cannot lie
other presidents can’t deny
when a student walks in with itty bitty EFC
merit aid don’t cut it, unless she don’t need it.”

In part, I was thinking about Don Heller’s position on the student loan crisis in Valerie Strauss’ blog at the Washington Post and reactions to it on Twitter.

My first thought was of my post the other night about the Washington Post and its failure to disclose the fact that it’s publisher sits on the board of Graham Holdings. I kept reading and re-reading the piece trying to determine if this was honest reporting or if this an effort to cover the Post’s ass – pretend . I know Don and respect his work, so I was doubly curious.  Thus I was glad to see Sherman Dorn’s blog post this morning which does a nice job of explaining and rationalizing the issue.

One of the big problems is that in higher education there is a mantra “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”  I suspect some really believe that $1.2T in student debt is a crisis, while others simply see it as an opportunity push for greater taxpayer support.

I’m not wild about student debt, I don’t know how much is too much, and as I have said before – Student debt is like pornography. I don’t know how much is too much, but I know it when I see it.

As Dorn and Heller rightly point out, the total amount of debt is the wrong focus for determining the existence of a crisis. Unless one believes no student should have any debt. The problem with that position is that it requires that higher education pretty is always paid for by someone other than the student. After all, it is a very rare student indeed that can afford to purchase higher education outright. Eventually though, this is a problem we have to wrestle with – who pays for college and how much.

I think the one thing that most people can agree upon is this – we should be working towards a system where family income at entry is not an effective predictor of student completion.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s SF classic Lucifer’s Hammer has a post-apocalyptic discussion that has stuck with me since I was a teenager. Just about the end of the book, as a society reforms following a massive comet strike, a discussion about what to do with prisoners of war takes place:

“What can we afford?” Senator Jellison asked. His voice was low, conserving energy. “Civilizations have the morality and ethics they can afford. Right now we don’t have much, so we can’t afford much. We can’t take care of own wounded, much less theirs, so all we can do is put them out of their misery. Now what can we do with our other prisoners? Maureen’s right, we can’t let ourselves become barbarians, but our abilities may not be up to our intentions.”

The thing is, there is really no question that we can afford to do the most ethical thing we can agree upon, up to, and including, free postsecondary education for everyone. We merely have to decide what other things we are going to stop paying for. I think most of us can make list, but there will be wide variance and disagreement from list to list.

Meanwhile, student borrowing and debt increases while we debate the existence of a crisis and how to respond. In five years, undergraduate debt of graduates increased almost 50% at the median. What will it look like in another five? Even if we can reach agreement on what to do this year, it will take a number of years to implement any significant change.

The crisis may not be here yet, but it is coming like a giant hammer.

One of things I did this week was re-read Larry Niven’s novel Protector. Toward the end there are several passages dealing with a battle in space. Unlike Star Wars and Star Trek (and every other adventuresome space opera) the battle is painfully slow. It is slow enough to be thematically related to Theodore Sturgeon’s Slow Sculpture in that movements of the enemy craft are observed from such distance that weeks and months might go by before the result of a maneuver can be noted.

Reading this put me in mind of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. When I first saw the movie,I learned something about submarine navigation. Being in the infantry, I never worried about how the Navy got from place to place. We had our maps and as long as we were somewhere on the ground, that was represented on a map that was in our possession, and we could see something to triangulate on, we could figure out where we were with a great confidence. I know I could, and still can.

Out on the water, away from land, it is another thing. GPS makes things much easier today, but it doesn’t really work underwater. Navigating a submerged vessel is tricky business. Movement is in three dimensions, unlike ground-based life. (Yes, one can argue that we move in three dimensions when on land, but only while there is a plane underneath our feet to counteract gravity – our vertical movement.) Submarines can’t see where they are, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea aside. A submarine moves from a known point to another point by tracking its vectors of travel ( with velocity, direction, and duration) against maps and sonar readings. It is effective use of imperfect information.

If only navigating higher education was as easy and effective. Too many institution leaders and policymakers think they can effectively reach a “place” by relying on benchmarks that tell them where they have been and where some select group of institutions have been. Any time comparative data are used, the lag time makes them irrelevant to now and just another marker as to where the institution has been. The solution would seem to be to ignore what other institutions are doing and not worrying about comparisons. Unfortunately, those in charge seem incapable of thinking this way. Gee whiz, it seems simple enough to select achievable goals and the desired profile of an institution and navigate to those.

Institutions rely way too much on IPEDS data and data from national projects. It forces them to always live in the past. Comparable data across institutions provides a nice a map, but unlike a real map, the landscape keeps changing. The flow of students and the choices they make don’t map the same way as mountains, valleys, rivers, and lakes. Roads and buildings have some stability, but they change enough to require new maps on a regular basis. People just don’t map well.

Until we start thinking about measuring institutions in meaningful terms of velocity, direction, and duration, and how they relate to a specific goal, I just don’t see things changing very much for higher education…at least in terms of the changes desired by higher education. The change we will see will be that forced upon the industry by others.

For the record, student unit-record data at the national level will not solve this problem. It can improve the map through greater detail and precision, but it will likely create more dependency on comparable metrics instead of freeing decision-makers from the chains of comparative benchmarking.

This post has actually gone a different direction than I had intended. Originally I had planned to draw the link between the the long-term nature of the space battle described in Protector and how long it takes to see the results of a policy change at an institution. Instead, I got hung up on the difficulty of measurement and the fixations of decision-makers on benchmarking. I’m not sure which is the more important issue.