The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) is among a group of higher education organizations supporting a Senate bill that they say is “one of the most significant opportunities in decades” to modernize the nation’s postsecondary data infrastructure. The backing comes as the Senate Health, Education, Pensions and Labor Committee plans to mark up the bill, the College Transparency Act (S. 2511), on Thursday.
In a July 27 letter to the committee chair and ranking member, the group — AACC, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public Land-Grant Universities — say the bill would help fill gaps in current federal data and provide more robust information for students and families, as well as policymakers, college officials and others. The letter notes, for example, that much of the data on the College Scorecard and the upcoming Student Tuition and Transparency System and Earnings Accountability framework includes only recipients of Title IV federal student aid, excluding the outcomes of nearly 40% of postsecondary students.
“These limitations are particularly pronounced at community colleges, where close to sixty percent of all students finance their education without federal aid,” the letter says. “These gaps leave policymakers, institutions, and prospective students with an incomplete and sometimes misleading picture of institutional and program performance.”
The legislation also comes at a time when the federal government is increasingly emphasizing program-level outcomes for federally funded programs, such as the new Workforce Pell program.
“For Workforce Pell in particular, institutions must work with states and vendors to retrofit and/or use proxies to assess potential program eligibility, because there are no federal mechanisms to report the outcomes of non-Title-IV-aided students,” the letter says.
The associations also observed the bill would fill gaps in federal data on the outcomes of certain student groups, such as military veterans, who are often omitted from federal data as they may rely on Department of Veterans Affairs benefits rather than Education Department student aid.
