Return on investment, commonly referred to as ROI, has become a prominent talking point among skeptics of higher education’s value. A litany of federal regulations and Congressional bills ensure it is a central component of how colleges and universities operate, says Sean McTighe, executive director of Title IV compliance and data intake operations at the National Student Clearinghouse.
“Regardless of whether or not gainful employment or financial value transparency stay or go,” he says, “this conversation about ROI isn’t going anywhere.”
Consequently, colleges and universities still reeling from the FAFSA revamp are upgrading systemwide student information systems that can analyze how well students fare after receiving a credential. Funneling colleges’ financial aid data and institutional costs into one location will require an unprecedented level of cross-departmental collaboration.
“This work takes a village,” McTighe says. “It’s requiring the financial aid folks to work with IT, the registrar and even the bursar to look at data across the institution and build a new unique data set that can help them comply with these reporting requirements.”
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This work does not come without complication. Boston University postponed its tuition due date after students reported delays with accessing their financial aid information. The culprit: A yearlong project involving the transfer of 11 million records into an advanced IT system, which includes everything from academic records to student employee hiring, according to Boston University’s daily news website, BU Today.
Over one-third (36%) of financial leaders surveyed by BDO, a financial firm, identified updating legacy IT systems as a top challenge for their institution.
“College administrators want to make sure that those numbers are clear and that the value of an education is clear,” McTighe says.
As higher education creates a more comprehensive and integrated system to store student information, a proposed rule may soon hold colleges and universities to the same data security standards as the Department of Defense. Some cybersecurity experts are urging institutions to develop an enterprise-level compliance strategy—ranging from cybersecurity to IT, billing and financial aid—to protect their students’ personal information.
How did we get here?
McTighe tracks the interest in ROI to the Department of Education’s 2014 gainful employment ruling that required for-profit schools to prove that their graduates earned above 150% of the federal poverty guideline for a single individual, among other requirements.
The conversation resurfaced on all sides of the political spectrum following the pandemic. U.S. President Joe Biden and the Department of Education have canceled loans of “defrauded borrowers” and turned up postsecondary program accountability measures, such as gainful employment and financial value transparency. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans also proposed the College Cost Reduction Act that would update the Higher Education Act of 1965 and hold institutions more liable for their students’ success.
“These things are very much linked together around forgiveness, accountability, and what is the ROI on an education—not just for the student and for the institution but for the taxpayer and everybody else involved in postsecondary education circles,” McTighe concludes.
