Latest / Market Pulse / Higher Education: A Data-driven Approach to Proving ROI and Putting Students First
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- Equifax Market Pulse podcast Ep. 31 – Education Brandi Recker: Hello and welcome to the Market Pulse podcast from Equifax. I'm Brandy Rector, an analytic advisor in higher education here at Equifax and I will be hosting today's episode on the challenges around post-secondary education. We've all seen the news headlines and chances are you've experienced firsthand the unprecedented issues swirling around post-secondary education. An increasing number of students and parents are asking themselves, is a college education worth the hefty price tag? And that's just the beginning. College and universities are seeing declining enrollment rates, affordability concerns, mounting regulatory pressure. the resumption of student loan payments, and now the reversal of affirmative action and admissions. I'm joined today by Lori Lindenburg, District Director of Enterprise Analytics and Strategy at Maricopa Community Colleges. We will be discussing some of these macro industry challenges, including pressure to prove the ROI of a college degree and what Maricopa is doing to address it while delivering on their student first mission. But before we start our conversation, David Fieldhouse, Director of Predictive Analytics at Moody's Analytics will set the stage overview on the economics behind these challenges. David? that better. Okay. Is this, is it green right now? Or do I need to talk louder than this? Okay. Okay, so one more time. Or do you want, that last one wasn't good? One more time. Yeah, so I should keep continue? Okay, got it. Thanks, David. Laurie, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you here today. Lori Lindenberg: Thanks Brandy, happy to be here. Brandi Recker: Before we dive into today's topic, tell us a little bit about Maricopa Community Colleges and your role there. Lori Lindenberg: Yeah, absolutely. So I am the district director of enterprise analytics and strategy. And I run a team, lead a team of data professionals at our district office that provide services related to data visualization, research, and other analytics support for our community college district. We're a large district of 10 colleges across the Phoenix metro area. We have about 140,000 students. Nine out of 10 of those colleges are Hispanic-serving institutions. And we're the number one provider of higher education to students of color in the state of Arizona. We also have just redeveloped our mission statement at Maricopa. So our mission is to ignite talent, transform lives and enrich communities through teaching, learning and service. So we're very passionate about transforming lives in the way of giving students the opportunity for gainful employment after they complete with us. We conducted a study. of the economic impact of Maricopa Community Colleges and found that we contribute almost $7 billion to the local economy. And one out of every 27 jobs in Maricopa County is supported by the work of our colleges and our students. Brandi Recker: That's really amazing. Can you tell us a little bit more about Maricopa's mission to reduce wage inequality for minority groups? Specifically, you know, I know you serve a large portion of the Hispanic population. Can you share any specific initiatives or examples? Can you share examples of specific initiatives and programs? Lori Lindenberg: Yeah, absolutely. So we've acknowledged that there is some work to do related to how well our students are doing after completion in their wage outcomes. We're proud of the fact that the median wage for our students is a livable wage. But we do acknowledge that there is some challenges within that. We found equity gaps in our wage outcomes, anywhere from $7,000 to $8,000 a year difference for our minority graduates compared to our non-minority graduates. and one to 2,000 difference for our first generation graduates. We've also worked with some external partners to do some research in the Phoenix metropolitan area and have found that the highest wage occupations in our economy have the least diverse workforce. The flip is also true where the lowest wage occupations have the most diverse workforce. I think Maricopa sees ourselves as an organization that can help solve that problem. A couple of things that we've done to try to address this, we've been trying to create more intentional short-term programs that lead to high wage opportunities. So an example of this, it's gotten a lot of great attention as our semiconductor bootcamp, which is a really short-term program, but it produces an opportunity to earn 20 to $25 an hour in an entry-level job. And the average wage is actually $62,000 a year for someone with experience in that area. So there's more opportunities than just that one, but I wanted to highlight that one as one of those stellar short-term programs that helps a student get in, get out quickly, and earn gainful employment. We've also really focused on helping students understand the opportunities that they have to earn a high wage upon completion. And so we're working with our students even prior to them entering our programs in Maricopa so that they understand what that path would look like. They can evaluate their interests and pick something that really aligns with their passions, but they also know what's the wage potential of that occupational area. And so a couple of things that we're doing related to that, we have a partnership with Pipeline AZ, the Maricopa Pipeline AZ platform, is technology that helps a student do that career assessment and analysis of their interests aligned with wage outcomes. And then we really build on this with our first year experience course that we just implemented last fall. And in that course, students go through an interest assessment. They explore jobs that sound interesting to them. And we've had a couple of really exciting anecdotes come out of that experience with our students. For example, students just not realizing that their passions actually exist in the world as an occupation. And that Maricopa offers a program to help get them there. A couple examples of this are our music therapy program. and our veterinary technician program, where students realize that could be an option for them and that Maricopa had programs that would help them achieve that outcome as their job. And the other things that we're doing really have to do with making sure that all of our students of whatever background feel a sense of belonging in our programs and that they see themselves in who's teaching them and who's working at the schools just in our diverse workforce. Recording 2 Brandi Recker: So Lori, when you were talking about Maricopa's mission, you also touched on the affordability. And we know this is a rising concern for prospective students and their parents, even more so in a challenging economy. We see that prices increased to 10,000, sorry, think about it, in 1980, the price to attend a four-year college full-time was $10,000 annually, including tuition, fees, room, and board, and adjusted for inflation. according to the National Center for Education Statistics. By 2020, the total price increased to $28,775. That's a 180% increase. How has Maricopa impacted by the affordability concerns and what steps is the school taking to address this very real and valid issue? Lori Lindenberg: Great question, Brandy. We recognize that the cost of going to college is a real concern. In fact, we found that 18% of our incoming prospective students have chosen not to enroll with us because they're concerned about the cost of coming to college. And it's even higher when we look at our underserved students at 23%. However, I think that the two-year institutions in Arizona have done a particularly good job of keeping costs low. So even with a recent modest increase to our tuition rates at our colleges, across Arizona, two-year institutions have been able to keep this low at nearly $500 lower than the national average when you look at the net tuition revenue per student. So we're really proud of our ability to do that and it's been something that we've really prioritized and been committed to. We also are really encouraged by some recent changes to what we're allowed to do for our students. So a recent bill passed that allows us the opportunity to offer in-state tuition to our Also, another bill passed in our recent legislative session that is allowing us to discount student tuition for dual enrollment students for students who are low income. So I think through those opportunities, we can get creative about offering students the lowest cost option in our tuition. Lori Lindenberg: Another thing that's great about where we're currently at with our tuition rates is that for Pell eligible students, their grants completely cover their tuition and their fees most of the time. So they're not leaving us with a whole lot of burden from student loan debt. And then in addition to keeping all of these costs low, we also are committed to helping our students find financial support when they do need it. We have a lot of scholarship opportunities and we have a really active foundation that's associated with our district. Brandi Recker: We also are committed to helping our students find financial support when they need it. We have a lot of scholarship opportunities and we're really active about making sure that the specific program is going to work. That's really great. It's awesome the work you guys are doing to really keep tuition affordable for students. So in order to stay competitive, schools must prove the value of the amount that people are spending. on education, especially when they're making such a significant investment. And on top of that, I know that there's mounting regulatory pressure for higher education institutions to prove the value of their degree programs. For example, Ohio Bill 27 requires that an in-state post-secondary school provide financial costs in a disclosure as well as an income range of similar cohorts of students post-graduation. providing greater transparency to students around anticipated costs and value of a degree. Does the industry anticipate similar regulation coming from other states? And how does Maricopa navigate this landscape? Lori Lindenberg: I think that we are expecting increased pressure from federal requirements and state requirements in the future, but that also isn't new. We already are under that pressure from external partners and as a requirement of certain funding sources to provide that data. And this is really where we've received the most benefit and value from our partnership with Equifax. There's a lot of data pieces that we are required to report as a part of this funding and with our external partners that we just didn't have access to before. and using Equifax's match to our student records, we're able to find their wage outcomes and provide that as part of our reporting to external partners and as a part of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. So we owe a programs actually are required to report second quarter and fourth quarter wages, and we're able to do that through our use of the Equifax wage outcomes data. Brandi Recker: Awesome. I do know that schools have a very heavy reporting burden between accreditation, national education data collection programs, and governing board reports. What are some of the enablers that you rely on to drive efficiency and accuracy in your reporting? Lori Lindenberg: probably been the biggest change for us over the last five years. So we have started to rely heavily on data visualization tools and modern data infrastructure. And really we've done that to improve automation and the speed that we can do internal and external reporting. So we've moved away from legacy data warehouses, we're using an AWS data lake. We also work really closely with other technology and student service teams to make sure that we're capturing student interactions wherever we can measure the return on the investment that we're making in those activities. And we've also put a lot of effort behind qualitative data capture. We've benefited a lot from that. However, what I will say is we used to rely entirely on that qualitative student survey data capture to monitor postgraduate outcomes. And we'd struggle with response rates, particularly with a student population who had completed and moved on. And so we never felt like we had the whole picture. We are now using Equifax to capture that data in a quantitative fashion, and we feel like that fills in that gap and really allows us to see that whole picture on our students. And also because it's student row level data, we can tie it back to any additional fields that we need so that we can be flexible and run any analysis that we need to and be responsive to both internal and external audiences that are asking for us to monitor those metrics. Brandi Recker: Lori, I really appreciate your thoughtful perspective on these challenges and how Maricopa is really applying what seems like a very cutting edge data driven approach to further your mission. Before I wrap up, I have to ask you about the end of the student loan forbearance program. So we know that student loan repayments will start again in October following a three year pause and Equifax data tells us that there are 43 million student loan borrowers with almost 1.5 trillion in federal student loan debt. and experts are forecasting a 17% jump in monthly debt commitments. How are you thinking about the effects of this on the graduate financial outcomes and what could it mean to Maricopa's efforts to prove ROI and maintain affordability for students? Lori Lindenberg: Well, this is a difficult question, primarily because we just haven't been faced with this before. And like a lot of things that came out of the COVID-19 pandemic, this is just uncharted territory. What I will say is that we are very fortunate to have low tuition. Like I mentioned before, if a student is eligible for Pell Grants, most of the time they're going to have all their costs covered. So often we have students who have relied on financial aid, but have been able to cover all of their costs with grants. However, cohort default rates is still something that we track very closely. We've had a couple colleges close to that limit previously, and we've put a lot of work in place in partnership with external organizations that specialize in working with students who are close to defaulting on their loan repayment, as well as just kind of changing our own internal work to make sure that students understand their requirements related to repayment and are ready to meet those requirements. The other thing that I will say is that we had students who stopped out when the pandemic hit. And I think part of the pause on loan repayment was it a recognition that students needed time to take care of everything that was going on in their lives during the pandemic. And now it might be time for them to return. And the restart of the repayment cycle might be that nudge to bring students back, to re-enroll and finish what they started. Their repayment would freeze again because they'd be actively working on their education. And then we'd work with them to get them across the finish line and relying on our guided pathways framework to make sure that they felt like they knew that they were on track and could complete their degree and certificate with us. Brandi Recker: Laurie, thank you so much for your perspective and for joining us today. These are hot topics that I know many across the education ecosystem are thinking about. If our audience would like to follow up with you, where can they find you? Lori Lindenberg: Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to say, we take this, all of this very seriously, which is why we've made the investment in using the Equifax tools. And we've benefited greatly from having that additional perspective. I welcome folks to follow up with me. You can find me on LinkedIn, or you can email me at lori.lindenberg.domail.maricopa.edu. Brandi Recker: Thanks, Lori, and we'll make sure to put your email address in the show notes for anyone that would like to follow up with you. If you enjoyed today's episode, tell your colleagues about us and subscribe to tune in to future episodes. You can also learn more about the impact of student loan repayments by listening to the replay of our August 17th Market Pulse webinar, which can be found at Equifax.com forward slash market pulse. Our team of experts works hard to provide relevant economic. credit and industry insights to help your organization make the more confident decisions and build resilience to help you focus on forward.