Alabama colleges to report outcomes, earnings for graduates
With college costs continuing to rise year over year, it’s becoming more important to be a savvy shopper. And pretty soon, that’s going to be a lot easier, at least for colleges and universities in Alabama.
Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh, R-Anniston, on Tuesday released a first look at the wide range of measures soon to be made publicly available about outcomes for students attending Alabama's institutions of higher education.
"Taxpayers send over $1.1 billion to Alabama universities every year," Marsh told AL.com through a spokesperson, "and it is important that taxpayers know that their money is being spent wisely and in a responsible manner."
According to information shared at a recent Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) meeting, the median amount paid annually by an undergraduate resident of Alabama in tuition and fees attending a four-year public university has risen from $6,185 in 2009-10 to $10,707 in 2018-19, a 73 percent increase.
Two-year colleges have seen a 75 percent increase in median annual tuition and fees over the same period of time, from $2,700 to $4,740 in tuition and fees.
For the first time in a joint agreement, the presidents of Alabama’s public four-year colleges and universities agreed to report a set of metrics related to student outcomes, called the Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA), according to Marsh’s spokesperson.
While lawmakers consider the new batch of information a must-have, parents and potential college students will find the information helpful, too.
Much of the information is already required to be reported under federal guidelines, and some of it is already being gathered by ACHE, but some of the information will be new to Alabamians.
For example, a report will now be compiled comparing the requirements for each academic program, or major at every college or university that offers the program. The report will be searchable and can help potential college students make decisions about whether their time will best be invested.
Every senior in this high school band won a college scholarship
Every additional credit hour costs money and completing a degree in less time will help keep student debt levels low.
Institutions will also report the number of degrees by program and by school. If programs are below an as-yet-undefined legislative standard, the institution will be asked to perform a review of the program. ACHE currently produces a similar report but there is no standard.
A new report containing the percentage of graduates employed in Alabama one year and five years after graduation will be generated after the state's longitudinal data system is completed. That report will provide wages by major and degree level, giving potential college students clearer information about what that college degree is worth.
Other information, already reported by ACHE or the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systems (IPEDS), includes:
All institutions currently report the percentage of students who take remedial classes in math and English but will also now be required to report the percentage of those students that go on to earn a 'C' or better in a college-level math or English course.
Community colleges will report not only how many students earn associate degrees, but also how many credentials and certificates are awarded.
Community colleges will also report the percentage of students that reach credit-hour benchmarks, allowing college officials to monitor student progress and offer support to keep students on track. Additionally, they will report how many credentials and certificates are earned, not just associate degrees.
Private universities which receive support from the state will report most of the metrics, but not all.
All of the information and reports will be displayed on the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) website, beginning this year, though it is unclear when the first batch will be made available.
Seventeen of the 19 members of the Alabama Council of College and University Presidents voted to accept the framework, while two, Auburn University and Auburn University at Montgomery, did not reply by the deadline according to a Feb. 14 letter to Marsh from University of Montevallo President John Stewart who serves as president of the Council.
Auburn officials could not be reached for comment prior to publication time.
The Alabama Community College System also agreed with the framework.
Another new development is that newly-appointed board members will be expected to complete eight hours of training within two years of taking office. ACHE will develop the parameters of that training, but one hour must be training on Alabama's ethics laws. The number of hours of training each board member receives and a summary of what the training covered will be reported to ACHE.
“Until now there was no measure of accountability,” Marsh said to AL.com through a spokesperson. With the Council’s agreement, he continued, “we now have a way to measure data and accountability for lawmakers to make informed decisions and ensure that everyone’s information being reported is on a level playing field.”
ACHE Presentation September... by on Scribd
Family's agony as they're told six-year-old's tummy ache is stage four cancer
© North Wales Live Doctors are hopeful Aaliyah Route from Wrexham has a good chance of survival
A 'beautiful little girl' who went to hospital with stomach pains was diagnosed with stage four cancer.
Six-year-old Aaliyah Route from Gwersyllt, Wrexham , was told the devastating news just two days after her symptoms began.
After complaining of stomach pains, her mum took her to Wrexham Maelor Hospital on Friday, where doctors found a mass on her kidney.
The Ysgol Heulfan pupil was immediately rushed to Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool, where she was given chemotherapy just hours later.
But following further tests at the children's hospital, her parents, Louisa Jones, 29, and Matthew Route, were told the cancer had spread from her kidney to her lungs and her liver.
However, doctors are hopeful she has a good chance of survival.
© Daily Post Wales Aaliyah Route with her mum, Louisa Jones and grandmother, Paula Jones
Speaking to North Wales Live, Aaliyah's grandmother Paula Jones, 51, from Cefn y Bedd, said "her whole world fell apart" when she was told the devastating news.
"She was absolutely fine until last Wednesday when she started with tummy ache," she said.
"We just thought it was a stomach bug but by Friday, she was doubled over in pain so her mum took her to hospital. That's when they scanned her and found a mass on her right kidney.
"They sent her straight in an ambulance to Alder Hey, where they inserted a central line for her to start chemo that same day.
"It all happened so quickly.
"We're not sure how long she's had it, doctors said it could have been weeks, or it could have been months.
"In most cases, it is known to spread very quickly, but we are confident she will beat it."
© Daily Post Wales Aaliyah Route from Wrexham who went to hospital with stomach pains has been diagnosed with stage four cancer. Pictured with her mum Louisa Jones.
Doctors have diagnosed Aaliyah with Wilm's - a form of kidney cancer which mainly affects children under the age of seven.
She is now at stage four of the disease, which means the tumour has spread to other parts of her body. She is likely to have to have her right kidney removed following treatment.
However, Ms Jones says there is an 80 per cent chance that Aaliyah can beat the cancer.
She added: "We're all just trying to keep it together at the moment and are praying for the best.
"Our whole world fell apart when we got the news. It's so unbelievable, we've not really had time to process what's happened yet.
"It's just so shocking that this could happen to a six-year-old. It's hard to think about what she will have to go through over the next few months.
"It's like being trapped in a bad dream and you just want someone to wake you up. I've been hoping they will turn around and say they've made a mistake."
© Daily Post Wales Doctors are hopeful Aaliyah Route from Wrexham has a good chance of survival. Pictured with her mum, Louisa Jones.
Aaliyah will now undergo chemotherapy treatment for the next six weeks that will hopefully get rid of the cancer. If that is not a success, doctors can then offer radiotherapy treatment.
Her family have now launched a GoFundMe fundraising page to raise enough cash to buy Aaliyeah a dog once she is better and to help fund expenses to and from Liverpool.
So far, more than almost £1,400 has been raised.
Ms Jones added: "Aaliyeah's strength is amazing, she's in very good spirits at the moment. She's been so brave so far.
"She's such a beautiful, lovely little girl. She's got a heart of gold and she's so cheeky.
"She's so clever and friendly and loves playing with her LOL Dolls - she's just a normal six-year-old little girl.
"Her mum and dad have both been amazing, they've been taking it in turns to stay with her every night and her brother, Blake, has been to stay with her too.
"Everybody has been so supportive, we've had people offering us lifts to Alder Hey and we've had so many donations for a raffle - someone left a bag full of gifts on my doorstep the other day.
"It's given us all a really big lift. It's not until something tragic like this happens that you truly realise how kind people can be."
To donate, visit Aaliyah's GoFundMe page, here .
Parents can't always find the source of benign aches and pains. Maybe we don't need to
"When I was at school today, my chest hurt."
My momma heart lurches. Full stop. Anxiety spikes. "What do you mean? Can you describe it? Is it like an ache, slow and steady, or like a pain, like it's here and then it's gone?" I ask. This isn't the first time my 5-year-old has had this complaint.
"Like when you bump your head on metal," she says. "Like when you have a stomach ache."
In my mind, my body, these two things contradict one another. Then she continues, holding her stomach as if to reenact the pain: "It's around my heart.
"It will last for two or one minutes," she finishes, authoritatively. Like most kids her age, she has an absurd relationship with time. Last night she was sobbing that she needed to make more art before bed, then actually negotiated for less time as I set the timer.
I decide to email the doctor, knowing what he will say. And I'm right: "Ninety-nine percent of chest pain in small children is benign. If you don't have a family history of sudden cardiac arrest, I wouldn't worry."
We don't. I'll worry anyway.
This is the dance that my daughter's doctor and I do. I'm not one of those hovering, symptom-Googling mothers (at least not anymore . . . after five years of endless germs and a few ER visits, I've grown sturdier). But when I reach a certain threshold of confusion about my daughters' bodies, I send him the obligatory email so he will tell me that children are wildly unreliable narrators of their own bodies.
Which has me thinking: Perhaps this is the more honest way for all of us to relate to all of our bodies.
I get migraines. Or at least that's what I call them. I have no clue if that's what you would call them if you had the same tightness spread across the back of your skull, the same nausea, the same sense of creeping doom. Like our perception of color, I sometimes wonder if my pain is the same hue as other migraine sufferers' pain, or if what I call brown they actually call green. My dad gets migraines. My grandmother got migraines. She's dead now. The story we tell in our family is that we are all sensitive souls with a shared constitution that makes us vulnerable to migraines.
I have strong memories of holding the palm of my little hand on my dad's forehead and imagining that I was vacuuming all the pain out of his head and into my arm. Then I would shake my hand to get the pain out of my arm and into the air. I must have seen my mom do it. He swore it made him feel better - that I had a magic touch. When my daughter was a baby, I used to sometimes hold the tiny heels of her pudgy feet on my closed eyelids when I had a migraine. It felt as if it steadied something inside me.
So now I walk around in the world telling people, when it comes up, that I am a person with migraines. I have never told anyone that I have a magic touch. Are both true? Or partly true?
I never paid attention to human bodies this carefully before I became a mother. Not even my own. I had never tried so hard to solve the puzzle of them.
When we visit my husband's huge family - he is one of six kids, most of whom have reproduced not infrequently - Maya complains about stomachaches. I let her hide in an upstairs room, flipping through the pages of a "Curious George" anthology, the dull roar of her cousins detectable but distant below. Eventually she closes the book and extricates herself from the tiny bed (Nana has enough tiny beds to compete with Snow White), and creeps back downstairs. So the stomachache, I decide, is actually her being overwhelm. When she says, "My stomach hurts," she means "I'm overwhelmed."
And then she says, "My stomach hurts," and I smile knowingly, and five minutes later she turns white and then throws up repeatedly. So maybe "my stomach hurts" sometimes means "I'm overwhelmed," and sometimes means "I'm about to throw up my Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes."
"Why can't she be more clear about what's going on?" I think, with no small amount of irritation. But then I think of my migraines. Sometimes I get them and decide that it was because I was dehydrated. Or hormonal. Or maybe some sort of "energy" (adrenaline?) got stuck in my head instead of flowing to other parts of my body. I should walk more. I should drink more water. I should watch more funny movies. I should get the doctor to take out this IUD. I should tell a different story?
I'm afraid the truest story to tell is that none of us could justifiably claim to be a reliable narrator of our own body. Not that we are lying. Not that we don't have important instincts and insights. Just that, like the universe itself, our bodies are partly knowable, but also mysterious conundrums - a complex collision of emotions and sensations and stories. Our bodies are unpredictable weather. Our attempts to anticipate or describe that weather are mostly unsatisfying.
So what are we left with?
Compassion, I guess. Maybe grace? I can't predict or control my daughter's aches and pains, but I can comfort her when something hurts. Whether the "chest pain" is sadness or a bruise, I can scoop her up in my arms and hold her. I can say, "I'm so sorry, sweetie, that sounds like it hurts." I can find a quiet corner in the house for her to make a nest of blankets and seek the distraction of that curious little monkey.
I can meditate on the word "benign," typed by a person in a white coat, when my own anxiety rises. I know so little. So I might as well just lay tender hands on my sweet little girl, as I did my sweet old dad, and wish the pain away.
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