If there was one question on the minds of the institutional research professionals who recently gathered for the Association of Institutional Research Forum in Washington, D.C., it might be this:
How are we going to measure and track the earnings graduates of specific degree programs achieve after they enter the workforce?
The question’s front and center for IR professionals because of the recent federal legislation that will require higher education institutions to track and report student outcomes for specific degree programs. The federal government intends to use this data to determine the degree programs that qualify for federal student loans and financial aid. The new rules are intended to help the federal government more consistently loan money to students who have the means to pay it back.
In many ways, the federal rules put the long-standing problem of affordability in higher education at the door of every IR professional. Their employers and institutions depend on students who receive federal financial aid. Now, someone has to provide the data that demonstrates how students with specific degrees fare financially after they graduate.
We spent much of our time at the AIR Forum offering perspective to help IR professionals meet the new requirements. These conversations helped us distill three takeaways we consider relevant for every IR office at institutions where federal financial aid is critical for future relevance and survival.
- Now’s the time to know the degree programs that may be problematic. The federal requirements suggest that students with specific degrees must earn more than peers without a college degree. Several IR professionals rightly saw the need to know, sooner rather than later, the specific degrees where graduates do not out-earn their non-degreed cohort. Such insights, they correctly reasoned, could help determine, if not reshape, the degree programs they offer today.
- The degree-/student-level data is available. While many IR offices may not have gathered degree- and student-level data in the past, it is available today thanks to advances in AI and data-management technologies. These tools provide both the bridge to connect once-disparate pools of data and the means to mine them for relevant, reliable degree- and student-specific insights.
- Predictive insights will be essential. We liked one IR director’s comment: “We need something like a radar to know when a degree program’s trending the wrong way.” She’s absolutely right. Such radar-like understanding of how and where degree programs and related outcomes will trend over time will be invaluable as individual colleges and universities consider their course offerings.
To be sure, our conversations at the AIR Forum also covered criticism toward the new federal financial aid rules. But even the most vocal critics could agree that as the federal government treats its financial aid program more like a business, colleges and universities will need to follow suit.