Guest Post: The Benefit Bank Helps Community College Students Claim Work Supports

We’ve looked before at different ways to help students build a safety net that enables them to meet school obligations as well as personal, family, and work obligations, including financial counseling and financial literacy instruction. Today’s post from Michael Schultz, MDC VISTA, details another MDC initiative that helps connect individuals to available financial supports that could make the difference between a completed semester or an early withdrawal.

Consider this: an estimated $70 billion in work supports goes unclaimed by eligible households in the United States each year. Unbelievable, right? Community college students are often eligible for federal work supports beyond financial aid, yet lack of knowledge and barriers to access result in federally apportioned dollars going unclaimed.

Most notably, many community college students may be eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. In order to be eligible for SNAP, full-time college students between the ages of 18-49 must meet at least one of the following criteria:

• They work at least 20 hours a week
• They work any number of hours in a federal or state work study program
• They are a married parent with at least one dependent under the age of 6
• They are a single parent with at least one dependent under the age of 12

Students must also meet the program’s income and asset limits that vary from state to state in terms of definitions, exemptions, and deductions.

Another work support likely available to community college students is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Available to anyone who earns income during the year, the EITC is fully refundable, meaning even households that owe no taxes can still receive the EITC as part of their refund. The greatest benefit is to households with children. The maximum credit for a household with one child is $3,094, with two children it is $5,112; with three or more children, it is $5,751. Households without children are also eligible: a single person without children, over the age of 25, and earning roughly between $6,000 and $7,500 is estimated to receive the maximum $464 tax credit. The IRS estimates that as many as 1 in 5 eligible households fail to claim the EITC. This population almost certainly includes many community college students who don’t realize they are eligible. (Check out the EITC Carolinas website, an MDC initiative, for more information.)

MDC’s Works Supports Initiative seeks to connect eligible populations, like community college students, to the federal and state benefits for which they are eligible. This national initiative uses an online service called The Benefit Bank^® (TBB) in partnership with community and faith-based organizations to help clients fill out benefit applications, e-file taxes, and complete the FAFSA. The Benefit Bank allows individuals to complete multiple applications in a user-friendly format with simple prompts and gateway questions that determine when more information is required. With TBB, a client can receive help filling out benefit or tax forms at a familiar community organization with the trusted assistance of a counselor. With confidence, knowledge of the application process, and the proper forms in hand, TBB helps to make it easier to connect low- and middle-income households to work supports.

Benefit applications can currently be completed using The Benefit Bank in ten states: Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Federal benefits are accessed through state agencies with states having flexibility to shape their state’s version of the program. Thus, to complete benefits applications, TBB requires partnerships with the appropriate state agencies. Affiliate partners in each state help to build the necessary partnerships with state agencies and with the community organizations whose trained counselors use TBB to serve their clients. To receive benefits, the completed applications must be accepted by the proper state agencies that then determine eligibility, including checking the paperwork and identification.

Of immediate use in all states is TBB’s Quick Check feature, a one-minute benefit screener that estimates the likelihood of eligibility for a range of benefits. Also available in all states is TBB Self Serve, a free e-File service for federal taxes paired with a FAFSA application. The key strength of TBB is its ability to take the proper information from one form and pre-populate another benefit form. For example, after completing taxes using TBB, a significant portion of the tax information on the FAFSA will already be filled in when a user completes the application. This “bundling” saves time and is kept secure within each client’s individual password-protected portal.

In a time when community college students are hard pressed to make ends meet, connecting students with financial aid and works supports can help students stay in school. The Benefit Bank makes connecting students to works supports like SNAP and the EITC that much easier.

Michael Schultz is an AmeriCorps VISTA at MDC.

Guest Post: Coordinating State Policy for Completion

Today’s post comes from Michael Collins, associate vice president of postsecondary state policy at Jobs for the Future. JFF leads DEI’s state policy initiative by supporting policy teams in CT, FL, NC, OH, TX, and VA, who are implementing the three-pronged Developmental Education Initiative State Policy strategy. The first of Michael’s three-part series showed how collecting the right data can inform state policy to accelerate dev ed innovation across a system. Part two detailed how states are investing resources in that innovation. The final installment, below, makes the case for a continuous improvement cycle focused on strengthening policy supports.

Only twenty-five out of one hundred students who take developmental education ever earn an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, a fact that is unlikely to change without more strategic use of state policy. Many community colleges are working to improve completion rates, but successful innovation typically happens in isolation. The lack of coordinated effort reflects that local, state, and national infrastructure for systemic improvement is not up to the challenge of graduating academically underprepared students. This is why the third component of the Developmental Education Initiative State Policy Strategy is policy supports.

Policy supports, admittedly, is a “catch all” term. In the Developmental Education Initiative, we broadly define this area of work as state-level policies that establish the necessary conditions for community colleges to redesign their approach to serving academically underprepared students. Focusing on policy supports can do three specific things to dramatically increase completion rates for developmental education students:

• Facilitate the identification and removal of barriers to innovation
• Secure new policies that make it easier to implement new models
• Establish incentives to serve students that are academically underprepared

Remove policy barriers
Community college completion rates can be improved by a coordinated effort to identify policy barriers to developmental education innovation. The North Carolina Community College System, for example, implemented a listening tour of the system’s 58 colleges to identify policy barriers to innovation. Interestingly, it turns out that state policies did not constrain innovation as much as the colleges thought. Often, policy barriers that colleges thought were state-level were actually college-level policies or rules. Being clear on perceived and real barriers to innovation is critical to improving completion.

Secure new policies
Sometimes new policies can clear the path to innovation. In Texas, for instance, until recently, community colleges were required to provide developmental education through semester-length courses. This requirement presented a barrier to colleges that wanted to implement interventions that were not course-based, such as open-entry/open-exit models, advising, or tutoring. New legislation changes that. A bill was passed that allows community colleges to submit non-course-based developmental education interventions for funding, allowing the colleges to design more nimble and targeted interventions.

Establish Incentives
Incentives can keep community colleges focused on serving students who are academically underprepared. Momentum points-type models, such as the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges’ Student Achievement Initiative, provide financial rewards to colleges that successfully move students to and through key milestones, including basic skills and developmental education. These performance-incentive models are worth watching. Preliminary results suggest that the process and consensus on desired outcomes is as important—maybe even more important—than the money.

Continuous Improvement
Ultimately, policy supports are about continuous improvement. Policy supports, properly leveraged, can assist colleges’ efforts to design newer, faster, and better ways to ensure that developmental education students get the support they need to earn credentials and degrees that provide family-supporting wages, and not only survive in today’s economy, but thrive.
 

Michael Collins is associate vice president of postsecondary state policy at Jobs for the Future.

Fa-La-La-Links!

It’s December 1 (not sure how that happened) and there are already radio stations playing holiday music 24-hours a day. Here’s a few interesting pieces to help you forget that year-end is right around the corner and that you’ve already heard “Jingle Bell Rock” nine times too many.

• The student loan landscape is a tricky one. Take everything you qualify for? Take as little as you can? What’s the right amount? Joanne Jacobs at Community College Spotlight comments on the rock and hard place where students find themselves: those that are debt averse may reduce the likelihood of graduating, but many who borrow and never graduate won’t be able to pay back their loans. Jacobs’ answer is providing students with financial literacy training that helps them balance reasonable debt against future incomes.
• Today, Inside Higher Ed has a great overview of the American Association of Community College’s (AACC) new Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA) standards. AACC is lifting VFA up to the field as rigorous and fair measures of what works at community colleges. You can download the vetted and pilot-tested Metrics Manual here.
• Today’s Inside Higher Ed also included a counterpoint to the call for standardize success measures. Susan Bernadzikowski and Jennifer Levi, faculty at Cecil College, argue that such standards ignore the success of students who take much longer to graduate, but who are doggedly determined and do complete. We’d like to know what you think about how colleges can accelerate students’ progress through developmental education, without punishing those who, out of necessity, go at a slower pace. Bernadzikowki and Levi would like to hear from the students, faculty, and anyone else on the college front lines about what’s missing from the completion agenda discussion. They’re collecting them at Stories from Higher Ed—get your 200-300 words in by December 30 and you could be included in their book. 
• This EdWeek blog post might suggest a new topic for student success courses: sleep management tips, because not enough sleep can decrease academic performance and increase the chance of car accidents, illness, depression, and anxiety. Lesson #1: put your phone on silent when you are sleeping.