Vital and Valuable by James V. Koch

Author:James V. Koch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC001000, Social Science/Ethnic Studies/American/African American & Black Studies, HIS056000, History/African American & Black
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.1 Percentage of major expenditures on student services, HBCUs and PWIs, FY 2004–FY 2019

Source: IPEDS.

Nevertheless, we do not find evidence of a statistical connection between student services spending and graduation rates; indeed, we find the opposite. Our estimates suggest that a 1.0 percent absolute increase in the share of expenditures on student services reduces graduation rates by about 0.37 percent. We caution that student services expenditures sometimes include intercollegiate athletics and that they frequently include admission and recruiting expenses. Thus, the expenditure data we have are not as clean as we would prefer, which cautions us to avoid making too much of this finding. However, the results are consistent with earlier work by Gansemer-Topf and Schuh.26

Not surprisingly, student services professionals find such conclusions difficult to accept and fervently believe they are doing positive things. We carry no brief about student services activities and expenditures, but sufficient evidence has accumulated to raise legitimate questions about their impact. Rigorous evaluation of HBCU student services, however, will require that they generate measurable metrics that will assist institutions in evaluating their student services activities more rigorously. That evaluation will require a change in culture on campuses where student affairs personnel have been resistant to attempts to measure their output. Not everything that is important can be measured, but it seems reasonable to ask student affairs personnel to keep track of which students access which campus activities and what happens to them. This information is absolutely essential for evaluating the effectiveness of student affairs programs.

Note in table 5.3 that our graduation rate analysis did not account for either the quality of an institution’s facilities or the amount of money each campus spends per student.27 Measuring the quality of facilities is beyond the scope of the work we report here; however, as noted earlier, the advantage that flagships have enjoyed in state funding per FTE student has diminished visibly in recent years.

Nevertheless, flagships’ funding sources other than from states (for example, from their related foundations) vastly exceed those on which regional institutions rely. National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) data reveal that the average value of a flagship’s endowment on July 1, 2018, was $1.503 billion, whereas the comparable value at the regional institutions in our sample was only $97.27 million.28 Thus, the typical flagship had fifteen times more in related foundation resources to utilize. Were we able to include these factors in our analysis, the graduation rate performance superiority of HBCUs would increase.

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