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Lorain County Community College (LCCC) was designed for access, however, not necessarily completion. The college was unprepared for students who wanted to earn a degree but then often didn't make it to graduation. In 2011, LCCC retained fewer than six in ten students. Its three-year graduation rate was 8 percent. For African American students, it was only 1 percent. At first, the college defended itself against criticism of its graduation rates, saying federal graduation statistics measured only full-time, first-time students--less than 10 percent of its enrollment. But even under that definition, the college struggled to get students a degree. At the same time, the two-year college was confronting an uncomfortable reality in its home county: a growing economic and educational gap. Nearby affluent suburbs were filled with college graduates while high-school graduates clustered in low-income urban centers. While Lorain's administrators had many ideas about what needed to be done to improve student success, they got stuck where leaders usually do when trying to transform their institutions: how to do it. The simplest solution was to copy the playbook of other institutions or take ideas gathered at higher-education conferences. But such strategies usually lead to disappointing outcomes. For one, college officials lack a larger appreciation for the diversity and complexity of the underlying challenges they face. Second, they find it difficult to easily translate the success of other institutions to a campus with different administrative and faculty structures. Instead, Lorain County Community College, with an enrollment of 11,000 students, drew up an original blueprint to solve its particular set of issues. While the plan was informed by what worked on other campuses, LCCC's strategy was rooted in data on its own students and assisted by a network of other higher-education institutions. The result? The college's three-year graduation rate is now 23 percent. Lorain's impressive gains, which have garnered national attention, suggest four key approaches that institutions could follow to jumpstart their own student success efforts: (1) Develop a network of institutions to share strategies and tactics; (2) Examine institutional data to determine when to scale successful strategies; (3) Champion student success efforts on campus with the president as the leader; and (4) Assemble a core college-wide team focused on student success efforts with clear goals.

Despite the changing demographics of high-school graduates with an ever increasing number of low-income and first-generation students in the pipeline to higher education, the college admissions process has, for the most part, remained stuck in a previous era--when far fewer Americans went to college and the price of a degree was much less expensive. The result is a college search and financial-aid process that is often out of sync, overly complicated, and needlessly angst-ridden for students and parents. Unlike other major purchases in life, many families know little about what they will actually pay for college and, more important, exactly how they will finance it until a few weeks before a final decision needs to be made. Emotions have long steered students' college choices, and under time pressure, families sometimes make bad financial decisions. First-generation and low-income students, in particular, are often the most uneasy with the admissions process and typically lack the high-school counselors or the family know-how to navigate the myriad of paperwork and deadlines. Subsequently, they miss out on eligibility for financial aid, or worse, college altogether. Two key changes to federal policies that went into effect for the 2016-17 admissions cycle and streamlined financial-aid rules have already paid off and show the potential of further simplification. The first change is that families can now submit their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) in October of their child's senior year of high school, three months earlier than in the past. Second, families can use tax data from the previous calendar year, rather than estimating their earnings in January for the year that just finished. This seemingly small tweak in the calendar produced somewhat dramatic results in the first year--most of all, reversing a decline in FAFSA filings nationwide. Extending the window to file the FAFSA by three months seems to have encouraged more high-school seniors to submit the form.

As a knowledge-based workforce has transformed the American economy over the last several decades, few people have questioned the value of higher education. Enrollment has surged at all types of colleges--up by more than one-third in just the last decade--as the college credential has become the ticket to a better life. From a purely economic standpoint, the numbers back up the prevailing wisdom that college is worth it: College graduates earn more and are less likely to be unemployed than those with only high school diplomas. But with the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, the perimeters of the value debate in higher education began to shift. Higher debt, along with stories of college graduates living in their parents' basements or working as baristas at Starbucks, is leading prospective students and their families to increasingly ask the value question: What will we get in return for our investment in college, especially if we are taking on significant debt? Often it's not that students and families are questioning the value of college per se, just the value of attending certain colleges. The answer to the value question is ambiguous, often dependent on factors unique to each student and college pairing, such as campus preference, location, or fit. Graduation rates and earnings data are helpful, but in their current state, incomplete and difficult to access and interpret. Students need simpler tools that allow them to pull up the information they need--from graduation rates that account for all students (or students like them) to lifetime career earnings that go beyond the first, often poorest, year-after-graduation salaries. With more comprehensive, accessible data, institutions will have a clearer picture of their outcomes, and prospective students and their families will have a better chance of answering the value question. For decades, higher education has been selling its economic returns as the primary reason students and families should pay ever-increasing tuition prices. Colleges can no longer simply cite the national averages that they have relied on since the 1970s to sell their degrees at nearly any cost. Higher education has been selling the degree premium for decades as a reason to pay its ever-escalating prices. Now the time has come for colleges and universities to help build a system that gives better information on the value of a college education.