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College Excellence Program
FAQ
- What is the goal of the Aspen Prize?
- Why is the Aspen Prize needed?
- Can a prize really have a transformative impact on a field?
- Who is involved with the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence?
- How was the Prize competition designed?
- What are the guiding principles for the Prize?
- What kinds of measures are being used for the quantitative analysis?
- Will IPEDS data be used?
- What will the qualitative analysis involve?
- Will this be fair to colleges that serve students with more barriers to success?
- What is the timeline for the Prize?
- How much is the Prize for, and what can the money be used for?
- Why should a community college participate in this competition? What other benefits will this provide to the field, beyond a monetary prize for the winner?
- Will the winner of this Prize truly be the best community college in the country?
- What can I do to make sure my community college gets on the list of eligible institutions in future years?
- Why are certain community colleges with national reputations for innovation not on the list of eligible institutions?
- Are minority-serving institutions represented on the list of 120 eligible community colleges?
- Is accreditation standing taken into consideration in order to qualify?
- How does the methodology for selecting eligible institutions account for the fact that the IPEDS graduation rate does not include part-time students?
- For Round 1 eligibility, why did change over time focus on the count of credentials per FTE but not graduation/retention rates?
- Why isn't remedial education success one of the metrics for eligibility?
What is the goal of the Aspen Prize?
The purpose of the Aspen Prize is to honor excellence, stimulate innovation, and clearly define what success looks like for community colleges. The Prize will reward community colleges for outstanding performance and outstanding improvements over time, and should incent scaling of effective strategies for improved program completion, transition to 4-year institutions, and employment outcomes.
Specifically, the Aspen Prize will:
- Honor Excellence: Shine a spotlight on community colleges that deliver exceptional results in student completion rates and workforce success, both in terms of absolute performance and dramatic transformation.
- Stimulate Innovation: Identify exemplars, document successful practices, and create opportunities to learn from them, generating momentum for reform-minded educators, governors, employers and community college presidents across the nation.
- Clearly Define Success: Contribute to the development of high-quality, consistent measures and benchmarks for assessing community college outcomes so prospective students and businesses can get a clear sense of how effective schools are in helping students – including the most disadvantaged – learn, graduate, and secure good jobs.
Why is the Aspen Prize needed?
Postsecondary education and training are increasingly essential for individual economic security and national economic growth. Since 1970, workers with college education have remained in the middle class or moved up; those without any college have languished with stagnant wages or fallen into poverty. Despite these trends, supply has not kept up with demand: labor economists at Georgetown University project that, by 2018, the U.S. will face a shortfall of at least 3 million workers with college degrees (associate or higher) and at least 4.7 million workers with postsecondary certificates.
Political and education leaders increasingly are calling for a concerted focus on student success in community colleges (and, indeed, across the postsecondary spectrum). President Obama articulated a bold national goal for the U.S. to regain the international lead in postsecondary education by 2020, and leading national foundations and nonprofit organizations have embraced similar goals. Clearly, community colleges will have to play a major role if America is to dramatically boost educational attainment: more than 6,000,000 students – youth and adult learners – enroll in America’s nearly 1,200 community colleges every year.
But efforts to increase completion rates are stymied by several obstacles. One is a widespread sense that community colleges are not high-performing institutions. Existing data on community college performance do paint a bleak picture overall: According to longitudinal data from the U.S. Department of Education, fewer than four out of every ten community college students completes any type of degree or certificate after six years. While some students aren’t pursuing credentials or degrees, the overwhelming majority of students are -- and such massive leakage in the education pipeline imperils the country’s economic future. Underneath the averages, outstanding community colleges surely exist, but are not recognized for their accomplishments.
A second challenge: the lack of generally accepted measures of student success in the community college sector impedes meaningful evaluation and comparative analysis of success. This relates to a third challenge: without clear measures of success, it is hard for community colleges to benchmark against one another, analyze what field leaders are doing, and emulate the practices of those who are succeeding with more students. As a result, the accomplishments of the best community colleges go unnoticed and colleges have few incentives, expectations, or roadmaps for improvement.
A national prize competition for community colleges will help lift up the best community colleges and galvanize nascent efforts to increase completion rates and improve employment outcomes.
Can a prize really have a transformative impact on a field?
Prizes, challenges, and competitions can be powerful tools for spurring innovation on key national challenges.
A prize is an old idea with potential for producing private and social benefits. As early as the 18th century, the revolutionary government in France offered a significant prize for the development of a method of food preservation, producing a solution whose basics are still in place today. Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic to win the Orteig Prize.
Now, the resources dedicated to prizes are expanding, according to research by McKinsey & Company. For example, the aggregate cash available annually from awards larger than $100,000 has more than tripled since the late 1990s. At the same time, prize sponsors have become more creative in the types of prizes they employ and in the issues they target, creating demonstration cases that increase the potential for impact.
The interest in prizes is not just from the private and philanthropic sectors: the Obama Administration has also been encouraging federal agencies to explore prizes and competitions as tools for spurring innovation. The President’s 2009 Strategy for American Innovation called on agencies to do so and a 2010 OMB memo laid out guidance for agencies for using prizes. A number of agencies, including Education, Energy, Defense and NASA have sponsored or helped develop prize competitions.
Prizes can produce significant impact and spur massive innovation efforts. A few examples:
- The Ansari X PRIZE, awarded in 2004, not only succeeded in putting a reusable vehicle into space twice in ten days, but also mobilized more than $100 million in capital in pursuit of a $10 million prize.
- NASA’s Astronaut Glove Centennial Challenge succeeded in mobilizing problem-solvers from outside the established supplier community, which demonstrated a new approach to the design of the gloves and led to the creation of a new company.
- An evaluation of the FIRST Robotics competition, a participation prize, has shown that the experience of competing can change behavior: the high school students who compete for it are not only disproportionately likely to major in science and technology in university, but are also not necessarily students that would have pursued education in those fields if not for the incentive of the competition.
- The Broad Prize, awarded annually to the most improved urban K-12 school district in the country. The Broad Prize consistently generates attention among educators, policymakers, researchers, and in the mainstream media. Urban school districts were previously seen by many as indistinguishable and incapable of being reformed; the Broad Prize has helped build the idea that excellence is possible even with the most at-risk students. It has also given ballast to reform-minded mayors and superintendants engaged in wrenching transformation efforts. Big city school leaders are now designing long-term reform plans with the goal of winning the Broad Prize.
- The Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE awarded $10 million in September 2010 to the teams that won a rigorous multi-stage competition for clean, production capable, and super fuel-efficient vehicles that exceed 100 MPG. Established automakers, startups, universities, inventors, and even a high school were among the diverse group of 111 teams that entered the competition.
The Aspen Institute has drawn on some of the country’s foremost experts on prizes and challenges, as well as leaders in the community college field, to design the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. Its goals – to honor excellence, stimulate innovation by identifying and sharing best practices, and help the field coalesce around high quality performance measures – are ones that both could greatly benefit the community college sector and ones that that other prize competitions have successfully accomplished.
Who is involved with the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence?
The Aspen Institute is the lead sponsor and administrator of the Prize. It is being designed and implemented through a collaboration with Aspen, the Joyce, Lumina, and W.K. Kellogg Foundations, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable foundations of Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase, America Achieves, the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor, and in cooperation with senior officials from the Obama Administration.
The Aspen Institute will run all aspects of the competition and efforts to document and disseminate effective practices. The foundations will provide financial support, thought partnership during planning and execution, and visibility for the Prize through their own networks and communications channels. The Administration will shine a national spotlight on the Prize, provide thought partnership during planning and execution, and seek synergies between the prize and its own efforts to strengthen community college credential attainment and employment outcomes.
In addition to these partners, several dozen community college leaders and other field experts, as well as employers, have participated in discussions to inform the design of the Aspen Prize. Over the coming months, the Aspen Institute will draw on the expertise and advice of additional field leaders and experts to finalize elements of the competition.
How was the Prize competition designed
The Aspen Institute is committed to shaping a world-class prize based on student outcomes and informed by the best expertise available from practitioners and researchers. The Aspen Institute is convening three committees of thought leaders and practitioners to administer the Prize process
Data/Metrics Advisory Panel. Leading researchers and community college practitioners will examine available data and advise the Aspen Institute on measures/metrics, so that community college performance and improvement in performance can be measured fairly and accurately. The Data/Metrics Advisory panel is co-chaired by two expert practitioners with deep experience in measuring community college performance:
- Dr. Keith Bird, Corporation for a Skilled Workforce
- Dr. William Trueheart, Achieving the Dream
Finalist Selection Committee. Former community college presidents and faculty, along with respected researchers and policy experts, will review extensive data and applications for each eligible community college to select a set of finalists.
Prize Jury. A jury of former elected officials and other prominent national business, labor, education and civil rights leaders will review quantitative and qualitative data to select a winner and four finalists with distinction. The Prize Jury is co-chaired by two former governors, one who is also a former Secretary of Education, with deep experience in education and the workforce:
- The Honorable John Engler, Business Roundtable; former Michigan Governor
- The Honorable Richard Riley, Nelson Mullins Riley and Scarborough LLP and EducationCounsel LLC; former U.S. Secretary of Education; former Governor of South Carolina
Affiliations of Prize Jury, Finalist Selection Committee and Data/Metrics Advisory Panel members listed solely for purposes of identification, and do not reflect organizational endorsement of the Aspen Prize.
What are the guiding principles for the Prize?
The prize competition strives to be:
Fair: Community colleges serve a broad range of students and communities, with some community colleges facing greater challenges than others. Prize competition metrics will be designed to account for these differences to the greatest extent possible, so that apples-to-apples comparisons are used to identify colleges making the greatest contributions to student success.
Inclusive: Community colleges with bigger administrative offices and more savvy in seeking recognition should not be the only ones that are celebrated for their accomplishments. To help create a level playing, efforts have been made in Round 1 to minimize the data collection burden on individual community colleges, using publicly available data to evaluate student outcomes at as many community colleges as possible.
Performance- and
Progress-Oriented: Prize selection will consider both absolute achievement levels and improvements over time. It will not reward just the top overall performers or just colleges that show big gains but still have low student success rates, but rather, those which demonstrate both solid performance and impressive improvements. This dual focus will provide benchmarks that community colleges can strive to beat in subsequent years, both in terms of overall performance and dramatic increases in desired outcomes.
Comprehensive: No one or two metrics can fairly or accurately characterize the outcomes of a community college, especially in light of the multiple missions and broad range of students they serve. The prize competition will consider multiple outcomes (e.g., degree and credential attainment, transfer, career advancement) and multiple types of data will be examined in multiple ways (e.g., trends over time, absolute performance levels, gaps between groups of students). Moreover, professional judgment will complement rigorous data analysis at each stage of the process to ensure a holistic review of the data.
Guided by Practitioners: For the Prize to be effective, community college educators have to see their work and aspirations reflected. To this end, community college practitioner-leaders will participate in every phase of the process, from design to selection of winners.
The structure of the prize competition is designed to reinforce these principles. A four-phase competition will offer multiple points of recognition for colleges. The Prize will be awarded annually at a public event that will include elected officials, educators, students, and journalists; the second Prize will be awarded in early 2013. The Aspen Institute recognizes that much of the Prize’s potential impact occurs after winners are awarded, and is thus committed to distilling what works and helping all community colleges accelerate learning, innovation, and reform.
The Aspen Prize competition will have four phases, including three rounds of selection:
- Round 1: Evaluation of Public Data. Guided by the Data/Metrics Advisory Panel, publicly available data on student outcomes will be analyzed to winnow the field in an initial cut by determining the 120 community colleges around the country that have demonstrated the highest levels of performance on three key metrics: student outcomes, change over time, and equity in student achievement. The Data/Metrics Advisory panel is co-chaired by two expert practitioners with deep experience in measuring community college performance:
• William Trueheart, CEO of Achieving the Dream
• Keith Bird, Senior Policy Fellow at the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce and Chancellor Emeritus, Kentucky Community and Technical College System. - Round 2: Collection of New Data. Eligible community colleges will be invited to compete by submitting additional data on student outcomes and contextual variables. In addition, the Aspen Institute will explore ways to assist community colleges in compiling data that are not already available. Multiple analyses will be conducted to examine performance levels and trends in performance over time in academic and workforce outcomes. A Finalist Selection Committee of former community college presidents and faculty, along with respected researchers and policy experts, will review extensive data reports for each participating community college to select a set of finalists. In addition, full data reports will be provided back to community colleges that submit data, conferring a unique benefit for participating in the competition.
- Round 3: Qualitative Data and Expert Judgment. Qualitative research, including a site visit, will be conducted on-site at each finalist institution. Along with full analysis of quantitative data, written reports from the qualitative research will be provided to a Prize Jury of prominent former elected officials, national business and civic leaders, and former community college leaders, who will review quantitative and qualitative data to select the Prize recipient(s).
- Post-Award Knowledge-Sharing Phase. Identifying exemplars is just the start. In addition to celebrating the winners and finalists, the award event will serve as a launching pad for learning from leading colleges and networking among education leaders with similar challenges and concerns. Participating community colleges will generate an unprecedented database of the characteristics of excellence across institutions, creating the opportunity for learning and knowledge-sharing. Profiles of the winning community colleges’ strategies and practices will be released and a media campaign will be developed to increase public understanding of the work being done in outstanding community colleges.
The Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence will focus attention and galvanize efforts on the postsecondary completion agenda. It will create new demand for – and supply of – best practices. It will inspire and reward those community colleges that are the most effective incubators of successful students and skilled workers. Most important, it will generate acclaim for the educators whose efforts have been ignored for too long -- and spur a new generation of leaders to innovate for student success.
What kinds of measures are being used for the quantitative analysis?
For Round 1, publicly available data on student outcomes have been analyzed to winnow the field in an initial cut by determining the 120 community colleges around the country that have demonstrated the highest levels of performance on three key metrics: student outcomes, change over time, and equity in student achievement.
For Round 2, the top 120 community colleges will be invite to submit additional data on student completion, learning, and workforce outcomes, and other contextual information. These measures will include more refined student completion rates, transfer rates, employment outcomes, as well as narrative descriptions of the contextual factors that colleges believe have influenced or contributed to the demonstrated outcomes.
For Round 3, information will be gathered during site visits designed to examine data submitted in the Round 2 application and explore practices that enabled finalists to achieve exceptional student outcomes. These practices will serve as the basis for post-award knowledge sharing, aiming to deepen understanding among all community colleges about how to improve student success.
IPEDS data will be used in combination with other data sources. The Data/Metrics Advisory Panel will consider the limitations of this data set when making recommendations.
What will the qualitative analysis involve?
The Aspen Institute will conduct site visits to each of the finalist colleges to learn about and document the strategies, innovations and practices that are driving performance and improvements. This qualitative research will complement the quantitative data and paint a more robust portrait of what exceptional community colleges are doing to increase student success. In addition to informing the selection of prize winners, this qualitative analysis will generate important information for improvement efforts at other institutions.
Will this be fair to colleges that serve students with more barriers to success?
The prize design explicitly seeks to be fair and inclusive, ensuring that colleges serving students who may have more barriers to success are fairly considered. The criteria for winning will take into account both absolute levels of performance and improvement over time, with special consideration of success with minority and low-income students.
What is the timeline for the Prize?
During 2012-2013, the Prize will be administered in Three Rounds:
- In April 2012, the list of 120 community colleges eligible to compete for the Prize will be announced. Each will be invited to submit an application by May 25, 2012.
- By September 2012, 10 finalists will be named. Site visits will be conducted to each campus.
- In March 2013, the Prize winner and four finalists with distinction will be announced.
Prize winners will be announced annually thereafter following a similar schedule.
How much is the Prize for, and what can the money be used for?
$1 million will be awarded. The Aspen Institute will award a $600,000 first-place prize, with a division of the remaining $400,000 among the four finalists with distinction.
Why should a community college participate in this competition? What other benefits will this provide to the field, beyond a monetary prize for the winner?
The Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence will do more than award money to excellent colleges. It will attempt to build a community of practice, highlighting innovation and centers of excellence at many colleges.
While the winner will ultimately receive a monetary prize, all finalists will be recognized publicly, and will be the subject of in-depth case studies, which will document effective practices and be widely disseminated. The Aspen Institute will seek to foster communities of practice and inquiry among community colleges with similar challenges and concerns, and will actively seek out and create learning opportunities for interested community college leaders. Finally, Aspen will endeavor to provide each finalist with full analysis of quantitative data, making participation a valuable opportunity for benchmarking and strategy development.
Will the winner of this Prize truly be the best community college in the country?
The Aspen Institute recognizes that community colleges in the U.S. serve a huge variety of functions for immensely diverse populations of students. The selection criteria for the Prize have been designed to be comprehensive and cognizant of that variety, while also defining institutional excellence in a standardized way. Specifically, the winner of the Prize will be an institution that has demonstrated excellence in both performance and improvement over time, equity in outcomes among all student populations, and a deliberate and sustained focus on using data to guide practice and policy to improve outcomes. In the end, the comprehensive nature of our three-round process will yield a list of finalist institutions and a winner that have achieved truly exceptional results for students.
What can I do to make sure my community college gets on the list of eligible institutions in future years?
Each year, the Aspen Institute will take a fresh look at the performance of all community colleges around the country on the key metrics. Because the eligibility criteria take into account change over time, colleges that have made significant gains in student outcomes on these metrics over the past two years may rise into the top 120 next year or in subsequent years.
Why are certain community colleges with national reputations for innovation not on the list of eligible institutions?
The eligibility bar for the Aspen Prize was intentionally set high, requiring strong student outcomes considering several factors: student graduation and retention rates, improvement in graduation rates over time, and success with minority and low-income students. Many community colleges are doing important work to improve student outcomes in one or more of these areas, but only those with the highest aggregate levels of success considering these factors were determined eligible for the Prize.
Are minority-serving institutions represented on the list of 120 eligible community colleges?
Yes. There are six Hispanic Serving Institutions and one Tribal College on the list of eligible institutions. In addition, as part of the eligibility criteria, all institutions were assessed based on their success in ensuring equity in student achievement. The selection process deliberately and explicitly took into account student-body diversity and equity in outcomes for students from underrepresented minority populations.
Is accreditation standing taken into consideration in order to qualify?
Yes. To be eligible for selection as a finalist for or winner of the Aspen Prize, institutions must have active, non-conditional/probationary accreditation.
How does the methodology for selecting eligible institutions account for the fact that the IPEDS graduation rate does not include part-time students?
The Aspen Institute, with technical support from the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) and guidance from our Data/Metrics Advisory Panel, has designed the prize selection process to incorporate a broad and comprehensive range of criteria. The initial selection of leading national community colleges relies on publicly available IPEDS data that do not include part-time students. However, we also looked at a variety of other metrics, including the portion of underrepresented students and part-time students served by the institutions, as well as the total number of degrees/certificates awarded relative to the total enrollment, taking into account part-time students as well as full-time students. We have attempted as best as possible, using publicly available IPEDS data, to assess excellence in outcomes with a comprehensive set of data points that look beyond just graduation rates and take into account the varied missions and populations served by community colleges.
For Round 1 eligibility, why did change over time focus on the count of credentials per FTE but not graduation/retention rates?
To calculate change over time, year-to-year data must be somewhat consistent. Particularly for small institutions, graduation and retention rates in IPEDs fluctuate too much from year-to-year to be used to calculate improvement rates.
Why isn't remedial education success one of the metrics for eligibility?
There are no nationally available data to measure success with students entering community college with remedial needs. However, success among students who test into remedial/developmental education will be considered in determining finalists and the winner of the Prize. The Round 2 Application asks applicant institutions to report those success rates, which the Selection Committee will consider as part of its selection of 10 finalist institutions, to be announced in early Fall 2012.