POSTSECONDARY ANALYTICS, LLC
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education hired Postsecondary Analytics to evaluate the effect of reforms to the state’s primary financial aid programs. The reforms, implemented in 2013, required students to complete 30 credit hours per year to receive the maximum award, with reduced aid levels for students who completed 24 hours. Using a quasi-experimental “difference-in-differences” approach, we found significant increases in credit hours attempted and completed. Students affected by the new policy increased their course loads at significantly higher rates than students who were not directly affected. Read the report Lumina Foundation Paper Examines Institutional and Student Incentives in Higher Education Business Model In a paper commissioned by Lumina Foundation for a , Nate Johnson examines the role of institutional and student incentives in higher education finance. Nationally, the primary driver of revenue for colleges and institutions is the credit hour, a measure of short-term student enrollment. Credit hours produce revenue for institutions primarily through the tuition transaction (student payment, with or without financial aid offsets) and in some cases by determining the amount of state funding received as well. This “cash-for-credit” model fosters institutions that can increase revenue through raising prices per credit, increasing student enrollment, or selling more credit hours per student. Such a financial structure does not, however, provide a sustainable and scalable revenue source for other things that public higher education needs to do—focus on low-income students who cannot afford the full cost, offer courses in technical and scientific disciplines whose costs exceed tuition rates, invest in advising and long-term academic planning, or award credit for what students have accomplished at other institutions or through alternative instructional pathways. As states continue to focus on increasing educational attainment and fulfill the growing technical and advanced workforce needs, policymakers are examining and making changes to the funding system that shapes how they invest in higher education outcomes. When Is Higher Education Productivity an Institutional Issue and When Is It Systemic? In a paper published by TIAA Institute and NACUBO as part of a series examining higher education productivity, Nate Johnson argues that much of higher education’s output is a function of its systemic structure and composition, rather than simply the sum of its institutional parts. Historically, gains in total outputs have happened both by adding new institutions and by growing existing ones, while some of the biggest gains in efficiency (or its conceptual cousin, productivity) have come from the addition of new types of institutions that have had different objectives and missions than their pre-existing competitors. A focus on systemic productivity requires a population-based approach to measurement, which makes students and potential students in a given metropolitan area, state or nation the target of analysis, rather than a particular set of institutions. And when students are the focus, their own contribution to higher education outputs, in the form of time devoted to postsecondary study, becomes a critical input in productivity measurement. This survey study, funded through a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (the Basic Research B category of the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Project Code: 25285236), is part of a multinational research project examining how unit instructional cost expenditure measures are defined, calculated, and used in campus-level decision making across higher education institutions in the United States. In order to help answer those questions, we developed and distributed an institutional survey, and followed up with interviews at several institutions to learn more about their uses of unit cost analysis. AIR Forum 1 – Full-Time vs. On-Time: Results from a Survey of Student Course Load Intensity Commissioned by Complete College America The Indiana Commission for Higher Education hired Postsecondary Analytics to evaluate the effect of reforms to the state’s primary financial aid programs. The reforms, implemented in 2013, required students to complete 30 credit hours per year to receive the maximum award, with reduced aid levels for students who completed 24 hours. Using a quasi-experimental “difference-in-differences” approach, we found significant increases in credit hours attempted and completed. Students affected by the new policy increased their course loads at significantly higher rates than students who were not directly affected. Read the report Lumina Foundation Paper Examines Institutional and Student Incentives in Higher Education Business Model In a paper commissioned by Lumina Foundation for a , Nate Johnson examines the role of institutional and student incentives in higher education finance. Nationally, the primary driver of revenue for colleges and institutions is the credit hour, a measure of short-term student enrollment. Credit hours produce revenue for institutions primarily through the tuition transaction (student payment, with or without financial aid offsets) and in some cases by determining the amount of state funding received as well. This “cash-for-credit” model fosters institutions that can increase revenue through raising prices per credit, increasing student enrollment, or selling more credit hours per student. Such a financial structure does not, however, provide a sustainable and scalable revenue source for other things that public higher education needs to do—focus on low-income students who cannot afford the full cost, offer courses in technical and scientific disciplines whose costs exceed tuition rates, invest in advising and long-term academic planning, or award credit for what students have accomplished at other institutions or through alternative instructional pathways. As states continue to focus on increasing educational attainment and fulfill the growing technical and advanced workforce needs, policymakers are examining and making changes to the funding system that shapes how they invest in higher education outcomes.