IHE: Performance Based CC Funding

[Wahoo Redux]

IHE: 'More Refined' Performance-Based Funding for Community Colleges

Oregon is joining the wave of states that have shifted to performance-based funding models for their community colleges. The Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission approved plans last week to replace its current model, based entirely on enrollments, with a new formula that bases a portion of funding on student equity and success metrics, starting in the 2024–25 academic year.

****

The new formula in Oregon will base up to 10 percent of state funding for community colleges on measures including the number of underserved students enrolled, including low-income students, adult learners, students of color and students in career and technical education programs. That chunk of funding will also be based on outcomes such as the number of students who earned at least 30 credits or who earned credit in an English, writing or math course and who completed a credit or noncredit credential. The colleges will get even more funding when students in underserved categories hit these milestones.

****

Some Oregon community college leaders expressed tentative optimism about the new formula and how it'll affect their finances.

[dismalist]

It's anything but refined. "Success metrics" is propaganda. The best thing about this plan is that only a small share of funding depends on these "success metrics".

The difficulty is that the goals can be easily be traded off against each other in a dysfunctional way.

--Underserved students enrolled: Check. We can do that. Admit everybody in sight.
--Underserved students who earned credit in English. Check. We can do that. Give credit to everybody in sight.

--Underserved students will be badly trained and not succeed in the real world.

To get at the principle involved -- incentives -- think of the famous cartoon in the Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil [1922 - 2008]. A certain factory, which produced nails, was given an output plan expressed in tons [of nails]. To fulfill its plan, upon which bonuses and even life depended, the factory saw fit to produce a single nail weighing all the tons required!

https://i.imgur.com/zL6ntxH.jpg

[ciao_yall]

We have this in CA. Guess what - "performance" hasn't changed because the formula doesn't fix the real issues - need for full-time faculty, smaller classes, and differential funding for high cost-of-living areas.

[dismalist]

We have this in CA. Guess what - "performance" hasn't changed because the formula doesn't fix the real issues - need for full-time faculty, smaller classes, and differential funding for high cost-of-living areas.

I want more, too! :-)

[Antiphon1]

Texas has adopted this model.  Supposedly CCs will compete for the funding based on points awarded for completion of benchmarks by the students.  As far as I can tell it's really a way to withhold funding.  This model enables the state to change the definition of a benchmark achievement ad hoc. 

The only hope for CCs is a challenge in the courts.  The Texas constitution's only mandate is funding education. The legislature wants to turn CCs into technical colleges rather than academic transfer institutions. If the legislature wants to move academic funding to 4 year colleges and universities, it will have to fund for the expansion of instructors, facilities and so forth.  Even if you move a significant amount of core and foundational classes to online, offering the classes still requires funding.  Online education isn't free. Out sourcing brings it's own set of challenges and directionality. It's going to be interesting to watch how this paradigm sift plays out.   

[Hegemony]

One of my old teachers, who had become a friend, taught at my badly performing high school when it was the subject of this same experiment: funding was based on various metrics of how many students passed, etc. All of a sudden no one was allowed to fail students. Students, having caught wind of this, stopped doing any work at all (and they hadn't been doing very much to begin with). I remember her saying that they were so bad that at one point she would have failed 28 of the 30 students she had that year. Most of them had hardly shown up, and the ones who had had done no work, turned in no writing, passed no tests. But she was forced to pass them all. And lo! the figures showed that the school had done an amazing turnaround and now all the students were passing!

Why the designers of these metrics don't understand that this will be the result — well, it beats me.

[downer]

Evaluation of students would have to be done by a third party rather than their professors in order to avoid the grade inflation and dropping of standards. That would of course totally change how people taught and lots of students would fail. Lots of CCs would collapse.

[lightning]

Some universities use easy-to-measure "success" metrics like graduation rates, but that usually ends up resulting in more grade inflation.

[lightning]

Evaluation of students would have to be done by a third party rather than their professors in order to avoid the grade inflation and dropping of standards. That would of course totally change how people taught and lots of students would fail. Lots of CCs would collapse.

. . . partly why Assessment was born . . .

[downer]

Evaluation of students would have to be done by a third party rather than their professors in order to avoid the grade inflation and dropping of standards. That would of course totally change how people taught and lots of students would fail. Lots of CCs would collapse.

. . . partly why Assessment was born . . .

I've never heard of a case of an accrediting agency, which is the main driving force behind assessment, ever say anything about grade inflation.

[lightning]

Evaluation of students would have to be done by a third party rather than their professors in order to avoid the grade inflation and dropping of standards. That would of course totally change how people taught and lots of students would fail. Lots of CCs would collapse.

. . . partly why Assessment was born . . .

I've never heard of a case of an accrediting agency, which is the main driving force behind assessment, ever say anything about grade inflation.

Neither have I, but when our Assessment bureau implies it, it is enough for them to justify their Assessment bludgeon.

[downer]

Evaluation of students would have to be done by a third party rather than their professors in order to avoid the grade inflation and dropping of standards. That would of course totally change how people taught and lots of students would fail. Lots of CCs would collapse.

. . . partly why Assessment was born . . .

I've never heard of a case of an accrediting agency, which is the main driving force behind assessment, ever say anything about grade inflation.

Neither have I, but when our Assessment bureau implies it, it is enough for them to justify their Assessment bludgeon.

Certainly that's how the admin gets faculty to do assessment. It may have some good effects, but I've mostly found it to be a colassal waste of time and largely bullshit. It's mainly a mechanism to create more admin and bureaucracy.

[Parasaurolophus]

It's hard to see this resulting in anything other than grade inflation and exploitative recruitment. As Hegemony says, it's hard to see why this isn't obvious.

[AmLitHist]

My late office mate had a saying that resonates with me daily:  "You can't make chicken salad out of chicken s%&t." 

In one semester of Comp I, I can't make up for student coming to us after 12 years of little to no literacy training/education  (and we "don't do" developmental/remedial classes anymore, at all). Nobody can.

Yet under many performance-based funding CC plans, there would be one pot of money for all CCs in the state, with the worthy ones (who can show that students pass--and not even getting into the question of the legitimacy of those passing grades) in outstate areas with competent-to-good feeder schools will get the bulk of the money, leaving those of us in the areas with awful feeder schools (mostly, but not exclusively, in urban areas--and some urban CCs in the state get and produce very good students) to do our unending work with even less.

Related: the idiotic focus on CC "completion rates," when traditionally and increasingly, most of our students don't come to us to complete a degree--they come to pick up cheap gen ed classes to take back to their 4-year schools, or they pick up a class here and there to get a promotion at work, check a box on their resume to get hired somewhere, or so on.

In theory, the mission of CCs, particularly open-door CCs, is wonderful.  Like many other things, though, the idea on paper and the reality of it are far, far apart.

[ciao_yall]

California Community Colleges are all individually run by locally elected Boards. The State central agency has very limited ability to influence each individual college.

Many colleges have programs and policies in place that don't really serve students well. Yet inertia, politics, whatever, stops them from updating said programs and policies. And the State can't really mandate they change.

What the State central office can do is set the funding formula. So by tweaking the funding formula they hope to force colleges to make certain changes. As AmLitHist and others pointed out, the effect is often pushing a string. Even if colleges respond by making those changes, it still doesn't change the student population or the students' goals.

They can also badger the state legislature to pass laws which force those changes. But that is a lot of lobbying.