Browsing by Author "Yuen, Victoria"

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    Mounting Peril for Public Higher Education During the Coronavirus Pandemic
    Yuen, Victoria (Center for American Progress, 2020-06-11)
    The coronavirus pandemic has led to the most difficult semester in generations on college campuses across the United States. With that semester now wrapping up, public colleges and universities are facing costs that already dwarf the $7.6 billion in federal stimulus funds that are on their way to these institutions.1 Absent dramatic new action from Congress, many of the public colleges that support social mobility will confront an existential threat. This report argues that colleges that are too reliant on tuition in place of public funding will no longer resemble public higher education as we know it. Public institutions never fully recovered from heavy cuts to their budgets in the wake of the Great Recession. As a result, the U.S. higher education system is vulnerable to a potentially much deeper economic crisis.11 Without significant federal help, state disinvestment in higher education could become the norm in the years to come.
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    New Insights Into Attainment for Low-Income Students
    Yuen, Victoria (Center for American Progress, 2019-02-20)
    Recently released U.S. Department of Education data have revealed new insights into the college outcomes of low-income students. The new data offer some positive news—but they also present warning signs about just how poorly some sectors of higher education are serving students who receive the Pell Grant, the main federal grant offered to low-income students. On the good-news front, the data show that some nontraditional Pell recipients—particularly part-time transfer students—complete college at higher rates than their nontraditional peers who do not receive the grant. However, the data also reveal the cavernous gap that exists between the bachelor’s degree attainment rates of Pell and non-Pell students—more than 10 percentage points at public colleges and nearly 15 percentage points at private colleges.
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    What Graduation Rates Have Missed for Community College Students
    Yuen, Victoria (Center for American Progress, 2019-10-10)
    For years, federal data essentially ignored the outcomes of the typical community college student. The official Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) graduation rate counted only students who had enrolled in college for the first time and attended full time. It did not count transfer students or part-time students, even though 65 percent of community college students are transfers, part-time students, or both. And students who took longer than four years to finish school weren’t counted as graduates at all. This report analyzes how community colleges’ results on the Outcome Measures compared with their IPEDS four-year graduation rate. The new data show that community colleges do a better job supporting their students than the graduation rate has given them credit for.