THE ADAMS SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM, which rewards top-achieving Massachusetts high school graduates with free tuition at state colleges and universities, may be on the way out.
State officials aren’t enthusiastic about the program, which was the signature education initiative of former Gov. Mitt Romney when he was in office. And a recent Harvard study has cast the scholarships and the University of Massachusetts system in an unflattering light, suggesting students would be better off rejecting the aid and attending school elsewhere.
Students are eligible for the Adams Scholarship if they score advanced on either the math or English portion of the MCAS, score at least proficient in both areas, and have a total MCAS score that puts them in the top 25 percent of their district’s graduating class. Romney wanted to reward the best and brightest students who scored well on the high-stakes test with a means to attend college, and he hoped to get more high-achieving natives to attend state schools and settle down in-state afterwards. Romney touted the program regularly last year during his campaign for president.
A study by researchers from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, however, suggests the program may be doing more harm than good, with scholarship recipients graduating at a much lower rate than they would have had they attended a private college in Massachusetts or an out-of-state college or university.
The study compared students who fell just above and just below the eligibility threshold for the Adams Scholarships, two groups that are otherwise very similar. Those students drawn to a state college or university by the Adams Scholarship lowered by more than 40 percent their probability of graduating on time in four years, the study says. The scholarship “induced students to trade off college quality for a relatively small tuition subsidy,” says the report, which was led by Joshua Goodman, a public policy professor at the Kennedy School.
Department of Higher Education officials disputed the graduation rates in the Harvard study and said the department’s figures show more encouraging graduation rates for the state system. “While the Goodman study offers some provocative data, the author’s conclusion from that data – that students are somehow harmed by their choice of attending one of our public campuses – goes far beyond what we believe the study can actually support,” Richard Freeland, the state commissioner of higher education, said in a statement provided to CommonWealth.
Goodman plans recalculations based on new information provided by the state, but said such adjustments won’t affect the study’s overall conclusions. He said the study showed that trying to boost graduation rates at state colleges and universities by changing “the set of students who go to that campus” is not an effective strategy. “I think the sensible way to do that,” he said, “is to figure out do those universities need better funding, do they need different management?”
The Adams Scholarship covers tuition only, which is modest in the state higher education system, where student fees make up most of the cost. At UMass Amherst, for example, the 2012-2013 academic year price tag for a full-time, in-state undergraduate student is $23,167. A year’s tuition is $1,714, so administrative fees and room and board charges make up the vast bulk of a student’s bill. The Harvard study suggests that students are sacrificing college quality and likelihood of graduating on time for what amounts to fairly modest scholarship help.
Massachusetts public school districts are in the process of transitioning to the new national Common Core state standards that are designed to ensure that all Bay State high school graduates are ready for college and the workplace. State education officials are evaluating a new assessment regime, which would be paired with those standards and would replace MCAS. The new assessment is being developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, a national consortium of 22 states.
Patricia Plummer, a senior advisor to University of Massachusetts president Robert Caret, said the Adams Scholarship “will probably be phased out or completely revised” by the Board of Higher Education when the state moves to the new assessment system.
Plummer raised questions about the Harvard findings, but she said that the Adams Scholarship “probably isn’t very good public policy.” In 2004, then-Gov. Romney wanted to “put a nice, rosy smell” on the unpopular MCAS test and thought that a scholarship program was the way to go, according to Plummer, who was deputy chancellor of the state Board of Higher Education when the Adams Scholarship program was approved.
She said “there was never a really policy discussion” that concluded that “what we need is merit-based scholarships in Massachusetts.” Such a discussion would have prompted a big debate over merit- versus need-based aid, she said. What’s more, she said, tying the scholarship to tuition, which makes up such a small part of student costs in the state system, further diminishes its impact. “It was almost a dirty little secret that [the scholarship] was a small amount of money,” she said.
It’s unclear how a new assessment system to replace MCAS would affect graduation and scholarship requirements. Massachusetts would move to adopt the new PARCC testing only if educators are satisfied that it is equal to or superior to MCAS, according to a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education spokesman. The PARCC assessments are scheduled for field-testing in selected districts in 2014. Any modifications to the Adams Scholarship would require the approval of the state Board of Higher Education.