The College Opportunity Fund (COF), Colorado’s unique way of funding
higher education through student stipends, is about to be assessed.
The Colorado Department of Higher Education (DHE) announced last
week that it has contracted with the Western Interstate Commission for
Higher Education (WICHE) to conduct a study of how well the College
Opportunity Fund is working for Colorado students, colleges and
universities.
When the Colorado Legislature and then-Gov. Bill Owens created the
COF in 2004, they set a requirement that the DHE evaluate the program
and report back to the legislature by 2010.
“This method for funding higher education is unique to Colorado, and
the legislature wisely directed an evaluation after the first few
years,” said David Skaggs, executive director of the DHE. “We need to
better understand both the positive and any problematic aspects of the
current COF system in order to see if any changes are needed.”
The COF method of allocating funds for higher education has come
under criticism for being cumbersome to administer and insufficiently
known to students. Metro State President Stephen Jordan has cited
inadvertent inequities in funding that have resulted from COF (see
“Jordan tackling Metro State’s funding inequity,” http://www.mscd.edu/~collcom/artman/publish/budget_twv3013106.shtml). An in-depth article on the COF, quoting Jordan, was published in the Winter 2007 edition of National Cross Talk, a publication of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education: http://www.highereducation.org/crosstalk/ct0107/news0107-colorado.shtml.
WICHE’s review is expected to examine how the COF has affected
student participation in higher education, how the colleges and
universities administer it and whether the original objectives of the
program are being achieved. David Longanecker, president of WICHE, says
of the study will also examine “how (COF) intersects with other
components of public funding for higher education.”
The study will cost $79,000; the Donnell-Kay Foundation is providing a $40,000 grant and the DHE will pay $39,000.
