50 Years After Apollo Landing, Higher Education Needs A Moonshot

Post date: Jul 10, 2019 6:30:50 PM

Here are the beginnings of a blueprint for how we can achieve higher education’s moonshot. It’s not complete. It needs your help and participation, so please join the mission.

Each and every university can replicate the lessons learned by Georgia State by using predictive analytics along with other levers such as proactive and intensive advising. These are tools and strategies that any university can adopt today. No excuses.

The IRS and Department of Education can team up to provide “proactive Pell grants” to all families who qualify by automatically offering students grants to college without even applying. This can be done through annual tax filings demonstrating family need, avoiding making them jump through complicated additional hoops such as filling out the FAFSA and applying to college. If they are proactively given notice of financial support for college before applying, it will help many more actually apply and enroll. Many of the lessons learned in improving enrollments from students in the bottom quartile are that steps like filling out the FAFSA are among the biggest roadblocks.

At the state-level, students from needy families and communities can be automatically enrolled in their local community college. Instead of applying, they would have to actively opt-out. What we’ve learned from behavioral economics is that many more people participate (in retirement savings, health plans, etc.) if they have to opt-out as compared to having to opt-in. An opt-out strategy for college would be a game-changer for students from the bottom quartile. Indeed, for students from the top quartile, it’s almost a “given” that they attend college. Why shouldn’t it be for those from the bottom quartile as well?

Employers have a huge role to play here too by creating ‘Go Pro Early’ pathways for high school graduates to go directly into paid jobs with college as part of the package. (The largest employer in the U.S. just took this step last month.) This “job first, college-included” pathway will be the model of the future. Employers will soon be one of the most powerful routes to a college degree along with productive employment and accelerated development for a large portion of traditional age students from all socioeconomic classes. But none will be helped more than talented students who can’t afford college and who are eager to get into the world of work. And the employers who embrace a Go Pro Early strategy will be the ones who benefit from a much more diverse talent pipeline.