Postsecondary Education Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

FAFSA Issues, College Going Rate And More Presented To LOCEA

A change to a federal financial aid form for college students is having major ripple effects through West Virginia’s higher education system.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) unlocks both federal and state financial aid for students but a recent attempt to simplify the form has caused delays for college applicants across the country.

“At this point this year, we have six million students who have filled out a FAFSA,” said Sarah Tucker, chancellor of the Higher Education Policy Commission. “At this point last year, we had 17 million, this is across the country. So we have a significant deficit right now that we’re trying to make up and trying to figure out exactly what’s going on and how best to help our students.”

Tucker told an interim meeting of the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability Sunday the Student Aid Index (SAI), which determines student need, is now being determined by a new interface between the IRS and the federal Department of Education that is not working correctly. Further delays occur because users of the new system are not notified of errors until after the form has been submitted.

Tucker told the commission the faulty SAI formula is causing delays for the state’s educational programs as well.

“I need to know how much money the federal government is going to be giving to all of our students in order to know what our award is going to be for West Virginia Invests,” she said.
“We’re really sort of stuck in limbo until this functionality gets fixed.”

The Higher Education Grant Program, West Virginia Invests and PROMISE Scholarships are all currently delayed.

Nationally, West Virginia is faring slightly better than average with the new FAFSA. As of last month, more than 6,000 seniors across the state have filled out the form, a number Tucker credits to hundreds of FAFSA workshops the HEPC and other organizations have hosted.

“We’re actually ranking 20th in the number of high school seniors who have completed the FAFSA,” she said. “The West Virginia Department of Education has done a lot of work as have all of our institutions in trying to do FAFSA workshops to make sure that our students know how to fill out those forms.”

Tucker said West Virginia Invest and PROMISE may revert to awarding the same amounts as last year without adjustments to ensure students are not further delayed.

“I think that may be where we end up because I don’t want to keep stringing students along,” she said. “I want to do the best we can to make sure that they know that they can go to college. Our college going rate is finally ticking up. We have this great momentum.”

College Going Rate

The oversight commission also heard a report on the state’s college going rate from Zornitsa Georgieva, director of research and analysis for HEPC. She highlighted a one percent increase in post-secondary enrollment from 2022 to 2023, including enrollment in trade programs or other career and technical pathways.

“For the class of 2023, the college going grade is 47.4 percent,” Georgieva said. “We’ve had more than 7,900 high school graduates continue into some kind of post-secondary education this year. I think that really speaks for the hard work of high school staff, high school counselors, teachers, our staff in our secondary system, as well as post-secondary institutions and staff that works around outreach. And providing information about financial aid.”

In 2021 the national immediate college enrollment rate was 62 percent, which puts West Virginia 15 percent below the national average. “Immediate college enrollment” is the metric used by the National Center for Educational Statistics and looks at students who enrolled in a post-secondary institution the fall after graduation.

Georgieva said when looking at the 12 months after graduation, including spring enrollments, West Virginia’s college going rate jumps to 49 percent. Rates differ from county to county, and 36 of 55 of West Virginia’s counties increased their college going rate year over year.

Benchmarks and Screeners

As part of House Bill 3035 – also known as the Third Grade Success Act – that passed last year, screeners or benchmark assessments must be administered at the beginning of the school year and repeated mid-year and at the end of the school year to determine student progression in reading and mathematics kindergarten through third grade.

Sonya White, state deputy superintendent, presented the results of the mid-year screeners to the commission.

“Overall, we were encouraged by the results, we had a decrease in the number of students… who needed that intensive intervention,” she said.

Even accounting for regular academic gains in the first half of the school year, White said the need for intensive intervention decreased from the start of the year to mid-year. She said the screeners are also identifying new students that need intensive interventions and are getting the help they need.

“On the front side are the literacy results,” White said. “We had an average decrease of 5.4 percent of students that needed intervention in grades K through three, and an average of 6 percent of the students in grades four through eight were scoring in the lowest category.”

White presented even higher decreases in intensive intervention for mathematics, “with an average of 6 percent for K through three and an average of 8.1 percent for four through eight.”

Del. Joe Ellington, R-Mercer, expressed concern at some of the numbers that showed an increase in the need for math intervention between first and second grade.

“Do we have schools looking at why there might be that big change from only 17 percent initially in first grade up to almost 40 percent when they get the second?” he said.

White cautioned that the state is still in its first year of collecting the data but theorized that those numbers could be a result of lowered learning opportunities three years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are being proactive,” she said. “We are also looking at getting more detailed data for each section so we know what pieces of mathematics are struggling with.”

Policy 7212

Earlier in the meeting, legislators heard a brief description of changes to Department of Education Policy 7212. The policy applies to the transfer of students, both inside and out of their county of residence.

Student transfers became a point of contention this past fall after legislation passed during the 2023 regular session changed eligibility rules for student athletes after transfer. Gov. Jim Justice and others urged the legislature to revisit the issue during this year’s legislative session, but no action was taken by the legislature.

The proposed changes to Policy 7212 include significant clarifications of the requirement for county boards of education to implement an open enrollment policy for nonresident students, including a new allowance for boards to revoke applicants for chronic absenteeism or behavioral infractions. There is no mention of athletics in the proposed changes.

The changes to 7212, as well as other policies, are open to public comment until May 13.

WVU Student Aims To Connect Those Aging Out Of State Care To Higher Education

Less than three percent of people raised in state care nationwide obtain a college degree. One West Virginia University (WVU) Newman Civic Fellow aims to change that statistic.

Heidi Crum grew up in wardships, or as some know it, foster care. As an infant, she was removed from her biological parents, placed in state care and transferred across many states.

“When you’re raised in wardship, the people of influence are social workers, caseworkers, people in law enforcement,” Crum said. “As a little girl, that’s who I aspired to become. I was deeply ashamed when I wasn’t able to finish high school because of the way that I was discharged from the system. So I always knew that I aspired towards something serving other people or giving back.”

She describes her education as a journey, not a destination. She aged out of wardship at 15 years old and sought her GED as a personal goal.

“By the time I learned that less than three percent of people like me earn a college degree, I was frustrated enough, determined enough and convinced enough from personal experience that was accurate, that I wanted to get my degree,” Crum said.

Crum is attending WVU remotely from Missouri and will graduate in May of this year with her master’s degree in Higher Education Administration. She will begin doctoral work this fall in the same program.

When discussing state care, Crum said language is important. For her, terms like “foster care” paint an incorrectly comfortable portrait of the reality of day-to-day life as a ward of any state.

“As someone raised since infancy in wardship, my story has continually been written for me by other people,” Crum said. “There’s something very valuable about claiming ownership back of my voice, my story. And so the terminology, foster care, from my perspective, erases entire subpopulations because I was not only in foster care and foster care as a placement outcome after I had been removed from traumatic circumstances, the removal itself is traumatic, and the replacement is traumatic.”

According to the Pew Research Center, young adults without a permanent family fare far worse than other youth.

More than one in five end up homeless after age 18, while one in four become involved in the justice system within two years of leaving foster care. Fifty-eight percent of foster youth will graduate high school by age 19, compared to 87 percent of all 19-year-olds.

For her Newman Civic Project, Crum plans to expand her work with group homes, transitional living facilities and similar placement spaces.

“It’s just quite like WVU to continue to show up, to meet me where I am, and to validate and recognize that I am only one face and one voice, of people like me,” Crum said. “So it’s a tremendous honor. And I feel a little bit like an ambassador to sort of introduce two different worlds together. And that’s what I hope that I do very well.”

Crum completed her Regents Bachelor of Arts degree through the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences in 2021 with an emphasis on human services.

While she is a non-traditional student, attending virtually, Crum said WVU’s culture of support has helped inspire her to help others find safe spaces through education.

“But the crux of the issue at the heart of the matter was WVU simply allowing me to introduce myself, and to stand in the space that I was in, and for them to meet me where I was, in every single context, that has been the thesis,” Crum said.

Crum is one of 154 civic leaders from 38 states, Washington, D.C. and Mexico that Campus Compact has named to the 2023-2024 Newman Civic Fellows. She aims to close the gap between congregant facilities and colleges and universities, especially at regional and local levels.

Decline In Black Postsecondary Learners Sparks New National Initiative

From 2011 to 2019, the state saw a 35 percent decline in Black learners in higher education – about 3,000 students – and from 2019 to 2020, West Virginia saw another 10 percent decline. This is according to Martha Snyder, the managing director of Postsecondary Education Transformation with HCM Strategies.

For the past decade, the nation has seen a decline of more than 600,000 Black students in postsecondary education. More than half of that loss has been in our nation’s community and technical colleges.

West Virginia has seen a similar decline.

From 2011 to 2019, the state saw a 35 percent decline in Black learners in higher education – about 3,000 students – and from 2019 to 2020, West Virginia saw another 10 percent decline.

This is according to Martha Snyder, the managing director of Postsecondary Education Transformation with HCM Strategies. She and other education leaders from around the country discussed these declines and solutions in a webinar Wednesday.

“After digging into this data for some time, we simply could not ignore these facts and the impact that this has on both the individual and social levels,” Snyder said. “State and national economic and social vibrancy suffer. There’s economic impacts to these declines as much as the moral imperative as well. Collectively, this loss of Black learners has cost the nation $2.9 billion in indirect wages each year.”

Snyder said the declines are not due to obvious factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic or population loss, but rather access and transparency issues – things like understanding the true costs of college or simply reaching students and making sure they understand their higher education options.

The speakers sounded a call to action for colleges, universities, and the state and federal levels to join a new initiative called LEVEL UP. It aims to build this transparency and see more Black student success in postsecondary education.

“So many of these kinds of efforts just end with the report,” Zakiya Smith Ellis, principal of EducationCounsel, said. “And in this one, we really wanted to say, let’s have some commitments. Let’s talk about what we actually need to do, and let’s do it in a way that gets real about what we need to do for Black learners.”

LEVEL UP, which is an acronym for Leveraging Explicit Value for Every Black Learner, Unapologetically, is broken up into four parts.

“One is real transparency and true affordability,” Smith Ellis said. “So thinking about the affordability of programs for students. That means telling them in clear terms, what it will cost them as a bottom line to attend college, but also have that cost be based on, realistically, what can people afford to pay.”

The second key Smith Ellis identified is shared ownership.

“We need to ensure that every part of the system here at the federal level, the state and institutional leaders all have mechanisms for support and shared accountability for the success of Black learners,” Smith Ellis said.

Number three is about ensuring social and academic support are easily accessible.

“That looks like a variety of different things,” she said. “But we wanted to call out, in particular, intrusive advising, clear pathways to high wage and good jobs. And while doing those things, also addressing the mental health, the childcare, transportation, technology and food security needs that students have.”

The fourth key is learner-centered teaching practices.

“Teaching and learning need to really be centered on students’ lived experiences and their perspectives and really using them to guide us to help us figure out how we need to ground their learning,” she said.

Speakers pressed on the need for the country’s higher education institutions to adopt these goals and implement strategies to see success.

President of Compton College in California, Keith Curry, is the chair of the LEVEL UP initiative, and he spoke of ways his school has already “leveled up” to meet students where they are.

“This work is so important to me. It’s a part of my life,” Curry said. “At Compton College, we’ve been able to do some amazing things. Students eat for free, they don’t pay to park, they don’t have to pay for printing. Basic things to provide for our students. Health care services are available on campus. Why do I bring that up? Because we want to ask people to be real, and to level up, we need unapologetic leaders to step up in support of our students.”

To read the full LEVEL UP report, click or tap here.