Part-Time Students and Performance-Based Funding 2.0 in United States Public Higher Education

Abstract

Meeting the college completion goals set by the United States Government, the Lumina Foundation, and others will require the completion of an additional eight million associate's or bachelor's degrees (Kelly & Schneider, 2012). As part-time students will make up to 40 percent of college students by 2023 (NCES, 2015), educational policymakers will need to adjust their completion agenda to account for the high number of part-time students in higher education. Drawing from the literature on part-time students and performance-based funding, the authors in this chapter propose that better attention to part-time students and factors that signal their success, combined with performance-based funding that acknowledges the need for the success of more part-time students, would be a worthwhile approach for increasing the accessibility of higher education.