Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 26

Income-Sharing Agreements
The problem isn't just that too many students aren't graduating.
It's that many of those who do aren't able to get a decent-paying
job afterward. One idea to address that is to make universities
share in the financial risk if students fail to succeed in the job
market. This was the thinking when Purdue University-under
the leadership of Daniels, who became its president after leaving the governor's mansion-launched a program called "Back a
Boiler," which allows students to borrow money from the school
and agree to pay it back by giving the university a percentage
of their salary. (The idea is now being championed, though not
exclusively, by conservative thought leaders, including at the
American Enterprise Institute.)
This isn't, at some level, much different from simply taking
out a loan. After all, you still owe money that, research shows,
can hinder you from getting married or buying a home. Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University, a skeptic of incomesharing agreements, referred to them as a form of "indentured
servitude." Proponents, however, say that making schools have
"skin in the game" creates an incentive for them to improve the
quality and marketability of the degrees they're offering. Other schools to have since adopted this model include the University of Utah, Colorado Mountain College, Lackawanna College,
Clarkson University, and Messiah College.
Yet, because these arrangements are so new, they are not
yet regulated. Private companies, most notably Vemo Education, have gotten into the business of issuing income-sharing
agreements to students, increasing the possibility of exploitation. For that reason, several members of the U.S. Senate, including Democrats Chris Coons and Mark Warner and Republicans
Todd Young and Marco Rubio, proposed a bill in July to establish
some rules of the road, such as creating an income threshold for
when repayment obligations kick in and capping obligations at
20 percent of a graduate's income.

Remedial Education Reform
Too many students, for too long, have been getting caught
in the remedial education trap. This happens when students
deemed unprepared for college-level work are placed in remedial classes before they can advance to courses that count toward a degree. This discouraging experience appears to hurt
students more than it helps them. Research out of Columbia
University shows that fewer than half of the students who are
referred to remediation advance beyond it. For African Americans and older and part-time students, the results are even
worse. All in all, students who are forced to take remedial classes have a much worse chance of graduating than comparable
students who aren't.
That realization led two California community college professors, Katie Hern and Myra Snell, to develop the California
Acceleration Project, one of the most ambitious applications
of what's called "corequisite education." In a corequisite model, students take remedial courses and regular, for-credit ones
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September/October 2019

at the same time, often through courses where remedial work
is included alongside the normal curriculum, instead of having to pass the remediation gauntlet before earning any credit.
Study after study has demonstrated far higher course pass rates
through the corequisite model than through traditional remedial courses.
But while that approach has boosted success rates, it
hasn't changed the fact that many students placed into remediation shouldn't be there in the first place. For decades,
thousands of schools have relied on standardized tests to determine which students should be shunted into remedial programs. This is despite mounting evidence that these downscale versions of the SAT, for which students are seldom, if
ever, asked to prepare, aren't very good at predicting future
academic success.
Judith Scott-Clayton of Columbia University was one of
the first to notice that high school grades were better indicators
of whether a student is ready for college-level math and English.
Other data shows that placement tests were holding back people who would succeed if allowed to take regular courses. That
includes research done by the Multiple Measures Assessment
Project, a nonprofit made up of California community college
staff. The group's analysis of California public college data led
state lawmakers to pass legislation in 2017 requiring community
colleges to demonstrate evidence that a student is "highly unlikely" to succeed in a college-level course before placing them in
remediation. The only metrics that can count as evidence are the
student's high school course work or grades.

The New Urban Work College
There has long been a small group of rural colleges, including
Berea College in Kentucky and the College of the Ozarks in Missouri, that have provided decent educations to poor students
through a work requirement. While the two schools are different in many ways, the basic model is the same: every student
works a job-whether on campus or off-that essentially pays
for his or her tuition.
In 2007, Michael Sorrell brought this same concept to the
small, historically black urban college that he was taking over
as president and that was, by all accounts, failing. At the time,
Paul Quinn College, in Dallas, only had about 250 students
enrolled-and it was struggling to keep them. So Sorrell undertook a dramatic plan that included eliminating the football program and turning the field into a farm. This was the first step of
creating what he calls the "New Urban College Model." Another
way to put it: he's transplanting the rural work college idea to
the big city. In addition to operating the farm, students are also
placed in a variety of part-time jobs in firms around the Dallas
metro area. They earn a salary that first goes toward paying off
their tuition, and then goes into their pockets. Ultimately, this
new approach enabled Sorrell to lower tuition at Paul Quinn by
almost $10,000 while increasing enrollment.
Sorrell also reinvented the college's curriculum so that
students would be gaining the skills that employers want-

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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