More States Tie Money to Colleges’ Performance, but That May Not Work

While the early plans focused on long-term goals like graduation rates, the new versions, which the reformers have dubbed “Performance 2.0,” give colleges credit for intermediate measures such as student retention or transfer rates, or the numbers of students completing remedial mathematics or earning their first 15 college credits, said the report’s lead author, Nicholas W. Hillman, who discusses the findings here. He is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His co-authors are David A. Tandberg, an assistant professor of higher education at Florida State University, and Alisa Hicklin Fryar, an associate professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma.