By Kiara Doyal, The Seattle Medium
The Washington Student Achievement Council (WSAC) believes that the COVID-19 pandemic has had an extensive impact on credential attainment for students across Washington at the college level. Research from WSAC’s latest series of Research Digests reveals a drop from approximately 106,000 credentials annually pre-pandemic to about 95,000 last year—a 10% decrease. Emma Lacalli, WSAC Associate Director of Research, explained the council’s efforts to track these trends and to outline key policies to boost educational success statewide, focusing on accessibility and program completion.
“Recently, the Washington Student Achievement Council released a new data dashboard that we call the Strategic Action Plan dashboard, which is aligned with our agency’s strategic action plan and acts as a hub that combines data from several different sources,” says Lacalli. “The digest series is sort of meant to provide informal ways of talking about some of the data insights that we think are interesting from the dashboard.”
According to Lacalli, a lot of policy and program efforts in higher education are centered on access and enrollment. However, students must complete their programs and reach graduation to earn the credentials that offer the best benefits of higher education, and the pandemic has taken a huge toll on some students in the state earning those credentials.
The graduation rate for full-time, degree-seeking students in Washington was about 57 percent in 2022. For the past few years, this rate has remained steady and is only slightly higher than what the rate was a decade ago. However, this means that more than 40 percent of Washington’s college students will either take them more than 150 percent of the average time to graduate, which is expensive and time-consuming, or they will not graduate at all.
This problem is even further magnified when it comes to the completion outcomes for American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, Black, and Hispanic students, which all had graduation rates under 50 percent in 2022.
“I think there is really a whole host of reasons and different influences that are causing the decline in enrollment and graduation rates,” says Lacalli. “Starting with the pandemic and the challenges around remote learning and other pressing priorities that students had, like taking care of their families and needing to help provide financial support in some cases, and I think we have seen that decline continue.”
“I think it is a really good guess to say that those students who are not reaching graduation are moving into the workforce, but we can’t say for sure what is happening, although we do know that a lot of the benefits of higher education come from that credential attainment,” says Lacalli.
Despite institutions playing a central role in providing programs and implementing initiatives to boost completion on their campuses, there is still a role for the state to play as well. The WSAC is currently engaged in several efforts to support completion outcomes for postsecondary students in Washington, including an initiative to explore the implementation of the Accelerated Student in Associate Programs (ASAP) program in Washington, which combines support from advising and tutoring with financial aid for expenses beyond tuition. The ASAP model has been heavily studied and it has proven to double graduation rates.
In addition, WSAC is prioritizing completion in its most recent round of Regional Challenge Grant, a program that seeks to advance statewide postsecondary educational attainment goals by expanding the number of local and regional partnerships that are focused on increasing postsecondary enrollment and credential completion for students of color and other low-income, underserved student groups.
“I think a lot of times we think about completion efforts that are happening on campuses, but there are some ways that the state can also support completion,” says Lacalli. “We think [WSAC’s Washington College Grant program] is a huge and important investment in affordability for students to be able to afford to go to college.”
The WSAC believes that boosting the state’s postsecondary credential attainment rate will result in more degrees being granted, although it will take a collaborative effort from institutions, the state, and community partners. Focusing on strategies that not only address enrollment decline but also support students to persist and reach graduation, is the only way that the WSAC thinks they will reach their attainment goals.
“I think that higher education really opens up opportunities for individuals to experience economic mobility, social mobility, opportunities for different types of jobs that can be fulfilling, and provide family-sustaining wages,” says Lacalli. “So, to me, this is an incredibly important part of how our system is working to serve students in our state to be able to reach their full potential and those benefits of higher education.”