Financial aid boosts fail to help grad rates

NASHVILLE — Tennessee notched another win for its approach to financial aid last week, but exemplary performance in that arena has done little to solve a more persistent challenge students face on college campuses.

Seventy-four percent of 201617 high school seniors in Tennessee filed the FAFSA, the gateway to federal financial aid, the state announced Thursday.

Tennessee logged a higher rate than any other state, a feat that is compounded by programs like Tennessee Promise, which eliminates tuition for high school students who file a FAFSA and attend community and technical colleges.

But even as access to scholarships and additional financial aid has skyrocketed, graduation rates have remained stubbornly low, particularly for community colleges.

Gov. Bill Haslam, who has made higher education a top priority, plans to focus on improving graduation rates during his final year in office. Education leaders said they will use their success in financial aid as a model for new strategies to boost graduations and academic success.

Mike Krause, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, said data played a crucial role in growing the state’s already strong numbers for the FAFSA, or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

During the 2016-17 school year, commission leaders tracked FAFSA completion at the individual high schools and deployed added supports, like workshops or one-on-one help sessions, to the schools that were lagging behind.

They repeated the process weekly, keeping an eye on incremental progress or warning signs in the data. It was a shift for the commission, which traditionally compiles annual reports on different data sets.

“Using that data as the framework for a leadership conversation is powerful,” Krause said. “We’re prepared to take this kind of focus” onto college campuses.

For instance, Krause said, commission staff members were looking at ways to use data to help minority students, who are statistically more likely to drop out of college without a degree.

If successful, student data analysis could help colleges bring targeted supports, like tutoring or advising, to struggling students in real time. A key component of such a plan would be regular re-evaluation as new data emerged.

“One of the things we’re really focused on now is mobilizing the data,” Krause said. “Deploying the data down to the front line faculty members (and others on the college level) will be an important ingredient.”

Emily House, the commission’s chief research officer, said that using data to track student success would be a more complicated process. The system would have to include several different factors, including GPA, class attendance and progress in college, just to name a few.

And the commission would have to work with colleges to help analyze data that are constantly changing.

“It’s a matter of early and often,” she said. “Having more consistent conversations around the data will keep everybody on the same page.”

Will Doyle, a Vanderbilt University professor and expert on higher education policy, said enduring success around graduation rates would depend on substantial state investments in assistance for students who are in college.

“Having higher FAFSA filing is a great step, but there are bigger steps down the road,” Doyle said in an email.

“The best solutions out there for improving college completion involve integrated programs which combine curriculum, academic support, financial aid, incentives for performance and family and community support,” he added. “These big, comprehensive programs obviously aren’t easy to create, and they require substantial funding.”

Reach Adam Tamburin at 815-726-5986 and atamburin@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter @tamburintweets.