Vladimir Kogan is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University and a senior research fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The latest city-commissioned study on the Columbus Promise program includes a startling admission: Despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars to provide free community college tuition forColumbus school district graduates, there is little evidence that it has resulted in a single student earning a college degree they wouldn’t have otherwise received.
Unfortunately, this is not the impression most people would get from reading the glowing summary that leads off the report or from the initial positive coverage it has received. For the truth, you would have to dig into the technical details
buried deep in the back of the document — in Appendix F (no joke).
To appreciate the importance of this appendix, one first has to understand the core disagreement between supporters of the program and critics like me.
There is no doubt that the Columbus Promise has significantly increased enrollment at Columbus State Community College for city high school graduates. The central question is how many of these enrollees are students who would never have attended college at all as opposed to students who would have gone to a different school — potentially a much better four-year university.
The answer matters because the vast majority of students who enroll in the program — more than 80 percent — earn no degree, or even a certificate, within the three years the scholarship covers.
Making students worse, not better
For the one graduating class the report can follow for the full three years, the program produced only about 30 additional associate degrees, out of a high school graduating class of nearly 2,500.
I have long worried that many, if not most, of these new associate degrees are awarded to students who would otherwise have gone to universities and earned four-year degrees instead. Appendix F in the report suggests that this is indeed the case, and the program is actually making some Columbus graduates worse off.
Using a statistical model that compares Columbus with hundreds of other Ohio school districts, the new report estimates that the rollout of the Columbus Promise has led about 40 students in each graduating class who would otherwise have enrolled in a four-year public university to go to Columbus State instead. In the report’s own words, “the consistently negative effects across post-Promise cohorts suggest a modest displacement effect on four-year public college enrollment rates associated with the Columbus Promise.”
This diversion rate may indeed be “modest” in absolute terms — but it is essentially identical to the number of additional associate degrees the program has produced, which the report elsewhere describes as “a meaningful impact for both individual students and the local economy.” A modest displacement from better universities is concerning precisely because the documented benefits are so small.
Most disturbingly, the report’s summary and conclusion flatly deny what its own appendix shows.
The opening highlights section of the report states: “One important question for program partners and local policymakers is whether increased enrollment at CSCC was achieved by shifting students from bachelor’s-granting institutions to the community college. This is not the case.”
This is clearly wrong and contradicted by the report’s own figures.
The conclusion claims, again falsely, that “community partners can also be assured that increased community college enrollment did not come at the expense of enrollment at bachelor’s-granting institutions.”
Releasing the study to the media under a tight embargo meant that no one noticed these contradictions in the initial wave of positive coverage. Columbus taxpayers, who are paying for both programs, deserve a more honest accounting.
Vladimir Kogan is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University and a senior research fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus Promise is making kids worse, not better. Truth is in the details | Opinion
