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Inside Higher Education
Quality and
Noncollege Learning
August 17, 2016
By Paul Fain
Education Department announces eight winning partnerships in experiment
to open federal aid to alternative providers, with a possibly
influential new way of assuring academic quality…
The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday revealed the eight winning
applications for an experiment that will free up federal financial aid
for noncollege job training, including offerings by coding boot camps,
online course providers and General Electric.
In addition to the alternative providers, each of the eight
partnerships features a traditional college or university and a third
party that will monitor the academic quality and results of the job
training, serving as a sort of alternative accreditor, although
regional accrediting agencies still will need to approve the programs.
Ted Mitchell, the U.S. under secretary of education, said in a phone
call with reporters that the role of the so-called quality assurance
entities will be to "monitor and measure the outcomes, the quality and,
ultimately, the value of these programs to students."
As the program took shape, department officials and higher education
experts said they hoped it would put pressure on traditional
accreditors to be more transparent and more focused on outcomes like
the employment of former students. If the program is successful, they
said the alternative quality assurance groups also could become
accreditors, perhaps even those that serve as gatekeepers to federal
aid.
Paul LeBlanc is Southern New Hampshire University's president. He also
last year served briefly as an adviser to the department and is a
member of the federal panel that oversees accreditors. LeBlanc said the
quality assurance piece is the most interesting part of the experiment,
which is dubbed the Educational Quality through Innovative Partnerships
program, EQUIP for short.
The project, LeBlanc said, encourages innovative approaches to quality
assurance and could lead to a "dramatic shift from inputs and
ill-defined outcomes to well-defined claims for learning."
Such a change, he said, could help avoid "a lot of what has bedeviled
the for-profit sector."
Quality Matters is one of the EQUIP quality assurance groups. The
Maryland-based nonprofit has long conducted certification reviews for
online courses. Its partners for the experiment are Thomas Edison State
University and Study.com, an online course provider. Students will be
able to earn two types of bachelor's degrees under the program, with at
least half the courses being self-paced and online.
For its part, Quality Matters will monitor the program's performance on
metrics such as credits earned, completion of degrees, cost and student
satisfaction.
"We're looking to see if and how these programs are making a positive
difference for students," said Deb Adair, the group's executive
director.
Other selected quality assurance groups include establishment players
like the American Council on Education, one created by the Council for
Higher Education Accreditation's (CHEA) and the American National
Standards Institute (ANSI). On the more upstart side, participants
include Entangled Solutions, Climb (a private education lender) and
Tyton Partners, a strategy consulting and investment banking firm that
is creating a nonprofit group in partnership with Burning Glass
Technologies and others to serve as the quality assurance entity, which
will conduct assessments as part of the process.
"Quality assurance is the next big issue in higher education," said Amy
Laitinen, director for higher education at New America. "This is where
we need to start focusing."
It's too early to tell if EQUIP will influence accreditation
significantly, she said. Whether that happens depends on the rigor of
the process, and if it uses strong metrics to make sure the programs
offer high-quality job training.
"We really have to make sure that the data are robust and verifiable,
and not self-reported," said Laitinen.
Affordability and Access
The department, which unveiled EQUIP last year, said the total
enrollment in the eight partnerships will be capped at 1,500 students.
Participating students will be able to quality for Pell Grants and, if
needed, federal loans. Department officials said grant aid expenditures
for the first year are projected to be $5 million.
Mitchell said dozens of partnerships applied to participate in the
"very tightly selected group."
The project will operate under the department's experimental sites
authority, which allows the feds to drop certain financial aid rules in
the spirit of experimentation. In this case, the department will waive
a ban on colleges outsourcing more than half of their course content
and instruction to a nonaccredited entity.
A goal of the department for the program was for low-income students to
be able to take advantage of innovative job training, which in many
cases can be expensive. Most coding boot camps, for example, charge
about $12,000 for roughly 12-week programs.
Affordability was a key part of how the department scrutinized
applications, as was equitable access, particularly for needier
students.
"The goals of EQUIP are both to expand access to these programs for
lower-income Americans and to test out new ways of measuring quality
outcomes for these nontraditional programs in higher education," the
White House said in a blog post.
The State University of New York's Empire State College and the
Flatiron School, a New York City-based coding boot camp, submitted one
of the successful applications. Both have worked with lower-income and
nontraditional students -- the public Empire State was created in 1971
to do just that, and Flatiron recently began offering a no-cost program
for New Yorkers funded by the city.
Nan Travers, director of Empire State's office of collegewide academic
review, praised EQUIP's use of a third-party reviewer -- ANSI in this
partnership -- for the university's well-established practice of
issuing credit for learning outside the traditional college classroom.
"It gives us the ability to really validate a process that our college
already has in place," she said, also noting that the program also
shows "how higher education and industry can really integrate."
The highest-profile partnership includes General Electric, a massive
multinational conglomerate, and Northeastern University, which is well
known for its co-op program, which places students in semesters of
full-time work, related to their majors, with more than 3,000 employer
partners. Northeastern also recently got into alternative credentials
with the creation of a boot camp for data analytics.
General Electric will provide the work experience for an initial group
of up to 50 General Electric employees, said Joseph Aoun, the
university's president. Northeastern will provide the teaching and
academic oversight, he said, with ACE doing the quality assurance.
Students in the program will be able to earn an accelerated bachelor's
degree in advanced manufacturing. GE will not receive any federal aid
payments.
Aoun said Northeastern has big plans for its piece of EQUIP, and hopes
to expand it to students across the country and in different
industries, such as cybersecurity and robotics.
One student outcome will be central, Aoun said: "Are they job ready
when they finish this program?"
See chart on winning applications here
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