New community college accountability system

According to Inside Higher Ed,

...the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education announced Tuesday their funding of an effort to create a national, voluntary accountability system for community colleges.

The idea is to develop “common set of metrics and data points to evaluate their effectiveness, both internally and against one another, developed specifically for their mission.”

What MIGHT make this effort different from similar ones?

“We need to try to build on progression measures of students and not just focus on the final outcome of degree and certificate attainment,”.... “For instance, we need to highlight certain points along the learning path toward reaching graduation, such as the attainment of 30 credit hours or 60 credit hours or after the progression from development to college-level coursework [all points after which it is more likely that a student will graduate]. We also need to catch the things that community colleges do that aren’t necessarily credential specific, such as work force and community development. Maybe we could track job placement rates in these programs or show the income change among students who’ve taken x number of courses at a community college.”

Officials from Gates and Lumina expressed a similar desire to see better measurements taken at prescribed benchmarks as students move through community colleges.

“We need to see beyond graduation rates.... Even if colleges find that they have poor graduation rates - and many of them do - they can’t tell where students get lost and how they can get along to improve themselves. We need to pay more attention to milestone markers. Of course, we’re still interested in outcomes, but we need to know more about what’s happening along the way."

And now, for the rest of the story...