May 11, 2010 « Admission Standards as a Predictor of Success in Adult-centered Programs »
This Executive Briefing is designed to provide guidance of potential use when revisiting admission standards for adult-centered programs. In a subsequent Briefing, I will address adult-centered admission standards in relation to those for traditional programming, including concerns that the two standards be commensurable, equivalent or identical. This Briefing will provide an empirically tested solution. To keep this Briefing within a manageable word count, some subtle issues have been ignored. I would be happy to discuss them with you offline.
Few issues in adult-centered higher education (seat time and instructional design being other candidates) are more controversial and less informed by empirical evidence than admission standards for programs designed for working adults. Ask for opinions on admissions standards at your next faculty meeting and you’ll get an earful.
Why Have Admission Standards At All?
Four reasons are commonly offered for elevating admission standards beyond an Open Admission policy. Only one of these reasons is robust.
Increase Institutional Quality
This reason is illogical and can be dismissed. A program that admits only high performers and adds little to their proficiency is not of greater quality than a program that admits poor performers and transforms them into mid-level performers. Quality in this sense has to do with adding value (outputs/inputs). Variations in admissions standards have varying and generally unpredictable effects on quality.
Make Faculty Feel Better about Themselves
Some faculties would elevate admissions standards to the point that they would be incompetent to teach their students. Why would they do this? The short answer may be that having “smarter” students means that they teach at a more “elite” institution and are therefore smarter professors.
Manage Capacity
Responsible administrators manage capacity to serve and support students at defined levels. This concern, however, does not support raising admission standards with lower limits any more than it supports lowering them with upper limits or targeting a mid-qualified band or segment. Capacity has no logical bearing on this discussion. That said, it is important to determine a target audience, whether low, mid- or upper band, and deploy resources appropriate to their unique needs and wants.
Predict Success
Predicting a successful outcome is the good and sufficient reason for having admissions standards. Programs that have no admissions standards will unnecessarily admit individuals who will fail. Programs that have excessive admissions standards will unnecessarily reject students who would succeed.
For students who are admitted and fail, the experience will have been negative in addition to being a waste of money and time on both sides. Programs that must conform to external standards of proficiency (e.g., RN for nursing, CPA accounting) present the greatest risk of admitting students destined to fail in the absence of appropriate admissions standards.
Predictive value is a sufficient reason for specifying admissions standards beyond those of Open Admissions. With the right standards, you can increase the probability that your students will retain to graduation when educated by your faculty in your environment.
Types of Admissions Standards
Open Admissions
So called Open Admissions typically require a high school diploma (or equivalent), minimal fluency in English, and perhaps minimal proficiency in quantitative reasoning. Requirements of literacy and numeracy are often applied not as conditions for admission but to determine remedial course requirements. While Open Admissions can be “democratic” in the sense that everyone is provided an opportunity to fail, one must be mindful of potentially damaging effects. Unqualified students can place undue pressure on teaching and evaluation standards. Good teachers may unconsciously adapt their standards beyond good practice in an effort to help these students. Unqualified students have diluting effects on the classroom. Unqualified learners are especially damaging to the potential for creating effective learning teams and fully exploiting the accelerated learning and transfer possible through horizontal learning (my term for structured student-to-student learning).
GPA-Based Admissions
Adult-centered programs that employ a GPA admission criterion typically set the floor at 2.0 or 2.5. In setting such a standard, it helps to keep the following in mind: (a) many adult students have had one or more unsuccessful attempts at higher education, (b) most unsuccessful attempts occurred when the student was in the 17-22 year age range, and (c) these adults are not the same potential student they were at the time of their unsuccessful attempt. On balance, I recommend minimal or no GPA-based admissions because they are poor predictors of success for working adult students.
Test-Based Admission
For reasons too complex for this forum, I recommend against standardized admission tests for adult students, especially for working adult students. My principle reason is that they also demonstrate low predictive validity for success. If you must concede to the forces favoring some kind of standardized assessment, the MAT is a modest predictor of success for certain, mostly graduate, programs. There are a few other tests you can use for specific programs but none rise too far above chance for the working adult.
Admission Based on Progressive Workplace Success
Evidence of progressive responsibility in the workplace is the best predictor of success in your adult-centered programs. Here is why.
Prospective students who have achieved several years of progressive responsibility in the workplace have generally: (a) acquired a habit of success in working inside an organization and with others, (b) learned how to set and achieve realistic goals, (c) learned how to mitigate risks for failure, (d) developed mature reasons for earning or completing a college degree, and (e) are more likely to have grounded their reasons in a larger social sphere, such as their family and employer.
The independent variable “progressive workplace responsibility” accounts for more variance in explaining the dependent variable, “retention to graduation” than any other admissions criterion ordinarily available to an adult-centered program’s admissions team.
In fact, at the point on the distribution where you are likely to be operating, "progressive workplace responsibility" can account for more predictive variance than the sum of the other predictive coefficients.
Recommendations
Recognizing that you may face complexity not addressed here, this section provides basic recommendations which may need refinement to accommodate your specific circumstances.
For Some: Open Admission
Programs lacking defined external proficiency standards may want to adopt or retain Open Admission standards as defined above. When you choose this approach, I recommend segmentation of the marginal admission students until it can be determined that they will not unduly trigger the liabilities identified above.
For Most: Progressive Workplace Responsibility
As a practical matter, requiring progressively responsible workplace experience as a condition of admission creates a range of practical policy and operational questions. What definitions should one use for the key terms? Where should the line(s) be set with respect to experience?
I recommend avoiding excessive and unproductive detail in specifying criteria in favor of allowing for a substantial “grey zone” where such applications are resolved via an admission re-review process. [Contact me for more information on the most successful ways to implement this.]
Adult-centered Undergraduate Programs
As a starting place, you might begin with the requirement that applicants meet the Open Admission standards (see above) and, in addition, must demonstrate through work records, employer letters and interviews, and other documentation a minimum of three years of progressively responsible full time post-high school (or post 17 years old) work experience where “progressively responsible” is defined as earning at least two promotions in title, responsibility, and/or compensation during the period. Employment must have taken place in what would be broadly viewed as a career-track setting where ongoing promotions into positions of progressively greater responsibility are open to high performing employees. (Part-time burger flipping or car parking would not qualify but working as a fast food manager or in the food service or lodging industry might.)
Adult-centered Graduate Programs
The same general criteria apply to graduate programs with the following changes: (a) successful completion of an undergraduate degree, (b) five years progressively responsible experience with some leeway allowed for more advanced positions.
Benefits
You stand the greatest chance of admitting an adult whom you will retain to a successful outcome (e.g., graduation) by looking carefully at workplace experience, minimizing other considerations, and developing a separate track (perhaps no track at all) for adults who cannot demonstrate progressively responsible experience in the adult world. At some point, you can integrate these two tracks to secure operational and financial advantages.
Robert W. Tucker, President and CEO of InterEd, Inc.,
has been leading innovation in higher education since 1986.
He can be reached through this forum.
The expression of differing views by other leaders is welcomed.
Reader Comments (1)
I regret having been away for so long -- there is much here that I have missed.
>Increase Institutional Quality. This reason is illogical and can be dismissed.
Yet, in the highly-symbolized sector that is the educational environment, there are many such irrational symbolic tokens -- Nobel prize winners, high-tuition, etc. -- which serve as markers of educational quality. The restriction of admissions as a means of driving perceived institutional quality is a very real part of the symbolic universe -- however irrational it may be -- inhabited by our institutions of higher education. It is, in fact, a core feature of institutional legitimacy and institutional logic.
>A program that admits only high performers and adds little to their proficiency is not of greater quality than a program that admits poor performers and transforms them into mid-level performers.
Again, this depends on how you understand the value of education. Suffice it to say that this idea (i.e., "high performers" only) is itself the flip-side of that "Unqualified students have diluting effects on the classroom." The normal distribution of individual achievement allows you to create the illusion of learning simply by removing the lower quartile. Learning, then, is defined by the mean, which moves in a positive direction once lower achievers are removed. I tentatively suggest that this would be part of the thinking behind stricter admissions standards.
> Unqualified learners are especially damaging to the potential for creating effective learning teams and fully exploiting the accelerated learning and transfer possible through horizontal learning (my term for structured student-to-student learning).
This is a fascinating conceptualization, and implies a distinction between horizontal and vertical learning, and may even relate to a particular conceptualization of "what" learning is.
The policy discussions about learning "benefit" is also implicated in this sentence, since it relates to a prior measurement of a student's potential to benefit.
>>Test-Based Admission
>>For reasons too complex for this forum, I recommend against standardized admission tests for adult students, especially for working adult students. My principle reason is that they also demonstrate low predictive validity for success.
This, of course, cries out for elaboration: if testing is NOT an appropriate means of establishing a student's potential to benefit, then testing also is not valid for gauging achievement. The entire remedial testing industry is predicated on placement exams for community college students, and it is not at all clear why adult learners should be exempted -- it would be a grave injustice NOT to address remedial needs, I think. Placement exams are used BECAUSE they can predict those that will NOT succeed in general education course work.
Stepping back, two contradictory themes are at play here -- the technical measures of education (job placement, training, certification rates) and the symbolic values -- both at the heart of the community college. They are very different when they are viewed from the opposing pole -- each with their own substantial constituencies, even cultures.