With the conclusion of Project Win-Win, one of the first Obama-era national nonprofit initiatives designed to help restore the U.S. as the world’s top performer in producing college graduates, its organizers say the campaign bestows a “roadmap” for states and higher education institutions to follow in developing degree completion data systems for tracking past and current students.
Released on Wednesday by the Washington-based Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), the report titled Searching for Our Lost Associate’s Degrees: Project Win-Win at the Finish Line documents how the nearly four-year initiative resulted in 4,550 people being awarded associate degrees they had previously earned but had not claimed. The project, which involved 50 two-year and 10 four-year institutions in nine states, also recruited 1,668 former students to return to school to complete a few credit hours of coursework to obtain their degree.
“Quite frankly, nothing like Win-Win had ever taken place over the 40 years of my work in U.S. higher education, certainly not at the scale of its institutional involvement, let alone with associate’s degree templates,” writes report author and IHEP senior associate Dr. Clifford Adelman in describing the project’s undertaking.
Launched in 2009, Project Win-Win focused on helping community colleges and four-year public institutions identify former students whose academic records qualified them for an associate degree and awarding those degrees retroactively. In addition, the participating schools identified former students who had fallen a few credits short of a two-year degree and sought to re-enroll them so that they could earn their degree. The four-year institutions were chosen as participants because they were authorized to award two-year degrees.
The project required some 200 people who worked in teams at the participating schools and who were tasked to conduct painstaking work to build information databases on former students dating back to the early 2000s. Project schools are in Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia and Wisconsin, according to IHEP.
The IHEP report indicates that a pool of 128,614 students came under scrutiny for the project, and the participating schools focused on 41,710 of them on which degree audits were conducted. The remaining 86,925 of the students had earned degrees or had re-enrolled at other institutions. Out of the 41,710, officials determined that 6,733 qualified as “eligible,” or those able to receive a degree retroactively, and 20,105 were deemed as “potentials,” meaning they were just a few credits shy of qualifying for a degree.
