It was my first day at work at a university over 1,500 miles from my home. We were at a retreat in the Texas Hill Country and I was much younger than many of my colleagues who were deans and directors in student affairs. The speaker encouraged everyone to build a paper airplane and see who’s plane would fly the farthest – he was teaching us about systems thinking. I’ve never been much of a paper airplane builder, but I am competitive and I like to think out of the box. After seeing my new colleagues build and throw their airplanes, the speaker turned to me and told me it was my turn. I had not yet done anything to the piece of paper in front of me. But I had an idea that was risky but worth it I thought – in just a few seconds I crunched the paper into as tight a ball as I could and used whatever athleticism I had to hurl the paper ball as far as I could across the room. Not only did it surpass all the other paper airplanes, but it hit the wall on the other side of the room.
I tell this story because I want to offer an out of the box idea that I think it is time for higher education to implement. Currently, almost all merit-based scholarships are tied to students’ grade point averages (GPA). If a student earns below a certain GPA, they can lose the scholarship. Tying scholarship dollars to GPA makes a lot of sense, because GPA is one of the only outcomes colleges are aware of for demonstrating learning. That said, don’t forget that performance-based funding in many high schools has resulted in grades and graduation rates that far exceed any achieved before, while at the same time graduating students who are scoring lower on standardized measures of learning than ever before.
The more significant drawback of using only grades to maintain scholarships is that grades are only the top of an iceberg that had thousands of different variables on which it is built. I believe that failing to maintain a certain grade point average is not the best indicator for a student’s “merit” because low grades can result from any of the following non-academic factors: 1) having to work 20 or more hours/week, 2) living with a chronic illness, or 3) having difficulty with housing, food, transportation, and other basic needs. The result is that students are forced to either drop out or take on extraordinary amounts of debt to make up for personal issues that end up lowering their GPA.
Ten years ago, I was at a meeting of ~15 key players in enrollment management. The Chief Business Officer invited us to offer ideas for “boutique scholarships” that would not only attract students but also help them stay in college. I put forward the idea that we already knew that there were about nine high impact practices (HIPs) for student success and that if we linked scholarships to new students opting to participate in one of these HIPs, we would not only attract students to unique engagement opportunities, but also keep them in college longer based the research that led to HIPs!
Thankfully, my colleagues supported my idea and the result that year was 100 Student Engagement Scholarships of $3,000/year for students who 1) had financial need and 2) opted to participate in a high impact experience each semester. These scholarships would continue for these new students every semester they documented involvement in a high impact practice. The investment was significant, potentially over $1M, but that money would be well spent it because it attracted students who 1) wanted additional financial aid and could stack these scholarships on existing financial aid, 2) were interested in the high impact practices, and/or 3) were more likely to stay and graduate on time.
In the following years, we noticed that the students being awarded these Student Engagement Scholarships were performing at higher levels than their peers and by the time I left my dean role, we were awarding over 240 Student Engagement Scholarships per year for a university investment of 240 students x 4 years x $3K/year which was a total that neared $3M/year but was actually lower since all the students did not retain to graduation.
After five years of giving out these scholarships, we sat down with our colleagues in institutional research and started running a multi-year statistical analysis of these students’ success. We discovered that the most significant result emerged for the students with the most financial need who kept opting for high impact experiences and therefore kept receiving the scholarship.
You might think that this sounds like common sense – high impact practices, which were identified as a result of a metanalysis of the research literature on student success were not being used to prove out the validity of the high impact practices.
However, what this somewhat obvious result misses is that for over fifty years colleges have been relying on GPAs to maintain student merit aid. The outcome is that millions of students have lost merit aid because of personal or other non-academic issues that lowered their GPA. We showed that merit aid can be much improved by linking it to specific behaviors that lead to good GPAs.
Note – one challenge is that hardly anyone tracks student high impact practices. I was fortunate to have a staff member whose was able to spend 10-15 hours/week managing a database of students who submitted documentation of their HIP. We double-checked their submissions with university offices also tracking student involvement in HEIs like 1) study abroad, 2) undergraduate research, 3) student leadership positions, 4) senior projects/theses/performances, 5) internships, 6) regular community service, 7) residential learning communities, and 8) student customized ideas that showed they were involved in engagements that were similar in impact.
But please do not allow for this idea to fail because we don’t have someone managing student engagement in high impact practices. That is what we call the tail wagging the dog. The real question should be why are we not already documenting high impact practices? If we are not documenting student involvement in HIPs, what are we measuring that is more important to our students’ success? Please stop thinking all paper airplanes must be folded and show your colleagues that many of the incredible engagement opportunities offered outside the classroom are often some of the best measures for earning and maintaining scholarships.
Deep Thoughts on Higher Ed 