WalletHub recently released its 2024 Community College rankings. I have always said that I am not a big fan of rankings like this, mostly because I think these rankings focus on the wrong elements of what makes a community college valuable.
For whatever reason, WalletHub’s methodology places strong emphasis on the cost of college attendance. The “value” in a college education is not measured by what someone pays for it. Rather, the real value of a college education is what someone gets out of it. How much more income can a person make with a degree than without? What is the average income for a student? How many students completed a degree? These metrics are much more telling than what a community college costs to attend.
Additionally, the rankings place what I think is an unreasonably generous emphasis on whether the state offers free community college tuition. (The schools have nothing to do with state funding decisions; they should neither be credited nor penalized for the presence or absence of tuition subsidies.) As a result, Washtenaw Community College tends to rank higher because it has a comparatively low tuition rate.
WalletHub also ranks on educational outcomes – retention rates, graduation rates, faculty-to-student ratios, full-to-part-time faculty ratios, etc. Here, WalletHub’s methodology doesn’t distinguish degrees from certificates. I think that’s a problem because employers certainly distinguish between degrees and certificates. The Department of Education does, too.
WalletHub’s third metric is career outcomes. To me, these are the most important questions a community college needs to answer. Can the student get a job with their degree or certificate? What is the student loan default rate? What is the median income of the school’s graduates? Does the student get paid more than they would be making if they hadn’t gone to school?
Community college degree value is in its economic return
Of the three categories, WCC ranks worst in career outcomes. Compared to all other ranked community colleges, WCC is in the bottom half of the rankings in terms of career outcomes. To be fair, WCC has improved this particular element over the past few years, but not by enough to meet the exacting economic standards of Washtenaw County.
Since 2020, I have been saying that WCC degrees don’t produce enough income for people to both work and live here. Make no mistake about this: the stakes here are high. Washtenaw County is losing its young adult workforce because people cannot make enough money to live here.
I have also said that there is little value in generating a lot of low cost, crap degree and certificate programs. It would be much better to use the county’s ample tax collections to invest heavily in high-wage, high demand programs that will both attract new employers and provide sufficient income for young workers to remain here.
But even here, the US Department of Education has raised the stakes. If a certificate program cannot demonstrate that it enables a person to make more than someone with just a high school diploma, the school will no longer be able to issue federal financial aid for those programs. And since Michigan Reconnect and other similar state tuition programs are “last-dollar” awards, certificate programs that don’t qualify for federal financial aid won’t qualify for state grant funding, either.
It is time to start demanding performance from WCC’s overwhelming number of certificate programs. We really can’t afford to maintain a solid stable of underperforming educational programs here anymore.
Photo Credit: Brett Jordan , via Flickr
