Diverse Issues in Higher Education January 13, 2012 Policy Study Touts the Expertise, Experience of Minority-Serving Schools by Jamaal Abdul-Alim When it comes to reaching the nation's college completion goals, Minority Serving Institutions, or MSIs, should be seen as "experts in the education of low-income, first generation, and under-represented students." That's one of the key points of a new policy brief <http://www.ihep.org/publications/publications-detail.cfm?id=151> issued this week by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, or IHEP, a D.C.-based organization that seeks higher education reform through research and policy. "In this time of economic stress and rapid demographic shifts, we will need to turn to MSIs, which are experienced in doing more with less and are recognized leaders in educating and graduating students of color," the brief states of MSIs, which enroll more than 2.3 million students or nearly 14 percent of all students, including African-American, American Indian, Hispanic and Asian American Pacific Islander students. "MSIs are one of our greatest resources as we press forward to accomplish our national completion goals." While the brief is meant to cast MSIs in a more favorable light than they are sometimes portrayed or seen, it also highlights the Lumina Foundation's MSI Models of Success <http://www.luminafoundation.org/newsroom/news_releases/2009-03-31.html> project. The project, which began in fall of 2009 and is set to conclude this fall, seeks to "dramatically increase college completion" among first-generation, low-income students and students of color. It involves 25 MSIs and, among other things, seeks to improve the ability of MSIs to use data to inform decisions that will boost completion rates. An evaluation of the project - being done by Princeton, N.J.-based Mathematica Policy Research - is ongoing and won't be available until after the completion of the project. Not everyone is convinced that MSIs, or American institutions of higher education in general, for that matter, need to increase graduation rates as called for in the Lumina project. Restoring the United States to its former place as the most college-educated nation in the world by 2020 is also a goal of the Obama administration. "The trouble with efforts at increasing graduation rates from most colleges - not just MSIs - is twofold," said George Leef, director of research for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. "First, the U.S. labor market is already awash in people who have college credentials, with a large and growing percentage of them working at jobs that don't call for any academic preparation," Leef said, citing a study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity titled "From Wall Street to Wal-Mart."<http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/research/studies/from-wall-street-to-wal-mart> "We have pushed college so far that we now have large numbers of graduates doing such work as customer service reps, cashiers, and taxi drivers," Leef said. "You have to question whether additional efforts and expense at increasing the number of graduates is sensible." Leef said a second concern is that many of those who graduate tend to have "weak skills." "The focus should be in improving the rigor of existing educational programs and instituting new ones where students have to acquire new knowledge and skills in order to pass," Leef said. Dr. Noel Harmon, a senior researcher at IHEP and author of the new IHEP brief titled "The Role of Minority-Serving Institutions in National College Completion Goals," said the Lumina MSI Models of Success project seeks to address some of the concerns raised by Leef. "That is one of the purposes of this Lumina project ... that it's based on making data-driven decisions, using data to help institutions not just put together random programs that they think are going to help students succeed, but using real data, analyzing that data and making decisions about programs, initiatives, curriculums, that is informed on previous data," Harmon said. Dr. James Minor, director of higher education programs at Southern Education Foundation, one of the grantees under the Models of Success project, said MSIs often get a bad rap by those who seek to measure the schools strictly by graduation rates. He said one of the things his foundation is working on through the project is developing an alternative set of metrics that gets at what students learn and which calculate graduation rates based on transfers and other students whose completions don't always get calculated by conventional graduation metrics. Among other things, Minor said MSIs are particularly adept at serving students who aren't well-prepared for college, something he said they often do well in part because minority students often identify with faculty of color, who are more prevalent at MSIs than at other institutions. The Models of Success project has five specific goals: -To improve the capacity of MSIs to collect, analyze and use data to inform decisions that will promote student success. -To create a collective voice for policy advocacy on behalf of MSIs. -To strengthen policy and practice to improve developmental education. -To increase MSIs' commitment to transparency and effectiveness in improving student learning outcomes. -To increase the postsecondary completion of traditionally underserved students, especially men of color. Harmon, of IHEP, said a brief on each of those objectives, and a comprehensive wrap-up brief, are expected later this year. SANDRA M. 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