The objective is straightforward - by providing Single Stop services (free tax preparation services, full benefits access, comprehensive legal services and financial counseling) at community colleges to students and student households in need, the percentage of those able to stay on through completion (currently below 40 percent nationally) can be dramatically increased. By partnering with community colleges and fully integrating our successful economic empowerment model with student service centers and financial aid departments, Single Stop seeks to harness two of the country's most effective anti-poverty tools: coordinated access to America's safety net and a post-secondary education.
With community college sites in four states and system-wide partnerships with three of the nation's largest community college systems - the City University of New York and the City College of San Francisco and Miami Dade College - Single Stop expects to provide services to more than 8,000 students in 2010, helping them access benefits and services valued at more than $20 million. That's a start. Even more compelling is that initial data shows that students who receive Single Stop services are more likely to stay in school.
Through this initial success, Single Stop is working to transition its community college initiative into a national education and economic empowerment model. To accomplish this, we have partnered with the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) to propose a national strategy to leverage existing federal and state resources and build the capacity of our nation's community colleges to improve post-secondary success.
More young Americans than ever are in college - especially community college. A record high of about 11.7 million, or nearly 40 percent, of Americans ages 18 to 24 attended college in October 2008. And the rise in college attendance is attributable almost entirely to increased community college enrollment. About 3.4 million, or 11.8 percent, of young adults were enrolled at community colleges for credit in 2008, up from 3.1 million, or 10.9 percent, in 2007. Yet amidst this promise lie some sobering statistics: Nationwide, six years after starting at a two-year institution, nearly half of all students (46 percent) drop out without attaining a degree. Only 31 percent of community college students who set out to earn a degree actually complete it. But the low retention and completion rates are not surprising given the many obstacles students confront.
We know that many community college students struggle with barriers such as inadequate child care, housing and financial problems, family illness, immigration issues, and other concerns that make it exceedingly difficult to stay, let alone succeed, in school. Put simply, the path to educational attainment and economic success for America's most vulnerable students runs through community colleges. And because they make post-secondary education accessible to low-income, high-need populations, community colleges are one of the most effective vehicles for moving people from poverty to self-sufficiency. With more than 12 million students nationally, they are also a reflection of our competitive future as a nation.
We need to make it possible for these students to succeed. Thankfully, multiple studies by MDRC and others show a strong positive correlation between financial interventions, increased student services and rates of retention and completion. To date however the majority of such initiatives have been largely financed by private, unsustainable dollars and have been relatively limited in both scope and scale.
Our method is simple. To ensure a holistic approach to the diversity of barriers that students face, Single Stop provides comprehensive social, legal and financial services - all free to the student- and uses existing state and federal resources as a proxy for stipends that have been shown to help students stay in school through completion. As an intermediary, Single Stop also builds the capacity of its community college partners and provides valuable resources, training, and technical support while working closely with existing initiatives to enhance available services and ensure coordinated case management. Using a proprietary technology platform akin to Turbo Tax, the Benefits Enrollment Network (BEN), Single Stop Coordinators (fully funded staff lines at each college with which we partner) verify client eligibility for a wide spectrum of benefits, tax credits and services, thus achieving in approximately 15 minutes what frequently takes weeks or even months to complete. Coordinators then provide comprehensive counseling and supportive wrap-around services to help clients navigate the system and effectively utilize the benefits and services they receive.
Single Stop also understands the perversities of the system - how accessing certain benefits can, on occasion, adversely affect other benefits and resources, including traditional financial aid - and helps students to avoid the pitfalls. It's not surprising that students forced to choose between purchasing books for class or buying groceries for their family drop out. Nor is it shocking that students forced to decide between health insurance for their children or weekly transportation costs have a hard time succeeding.
Single Stop gives students a firmer grip on the economic ladder and a bridge to college completion. In the short term, the benefits and services accessed through Single Stop augment financial aid for students by immediately providing critical supplemental resources and services, thus allowing them to stay in school. In the long run, the credentials earned by these students, with the aid of Single Stop, can yield higher increased lifetime earnings and greater economic mobility.
In partnership with the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT) and a select group of community college leaders, Single Stop proposes a national strategy to leverage existing federal and state resources and build the capacity of community colleges to improve post-secondary success through targeted programmatic interventions, comprehensive case-management services, and fully integrated , holistic wrap-around services. The proposal builds on the strength and expertise of its partners: Single Stop USA, a national not-for-profit organization that partners with community colleges in several states, provides access to resources and services (over $300 million to over 120,000 families last year alone at all sites) to help students and families surmount economic barriers, stay in school, and move towards economic mobility; and the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT), an innovative not-for-profit educational organization of governing boards, representing more than 6,500 elected and appointed trustees who govern over 1,200 community, technical, and junior colleges in the United States.
Collectively, this leadership makes decisions that affect more than 1,200 colleges and over 11.7 million students annually. Through its extensive access to and interaction with the association's member colleges and trustees, the ACCT provides Single Stop with critical guidance, support, and information as we work to implement the program and develop institutional buy-in and support for the project. Over the course of the next several years, Single Stop and the ACCT propose to expand this partnership to encompass as many as two dozen systems in more than a dozen states while laying the groundwork for greater scale and long term systemic change. We are presently engaged in a selection process to identify the key college partners at various stages of this tiered national rollout.
Consideration for selection of potential site partners includes, but is not limited to, the following factors: geographic distribution, size and demographic of student body, and college leadership. To increase local buy-in and to institutionalize the initiative on the ground over the long term, preference will be given to colleges that are able to help support the partnership. Final selection will be done in collaboration with the ACCT, the Department of Education and will be guided by additional considerations relative to funding support and the commitment of local institutional leadership. To succeed in times of increasing need and contracting resources, successful antipoverty and academic success strategies must seek to marry innovative ideas with scalable systems and mechanisms for support. The integration of Single Stop's successful service delivery model into community colleges and our partnership with the ACCT to facilitate a national expansion represents such an approach and presents a unique opportunity to reach millions of students and families.
Single Stop USA works closely with its community college partners to track outcomes at our sites and to evaluate the efficacy of the Community College Initiative. Simply put, Single Stop works with colleges first to monitor the amount of benefits and services accessed through Single Stop community college sites, and then to assess the impact of these services on retention and completion by comparing rates of persistence for Single Stop clients with data from comparison groups. In the initial years of a partnership, Single Stop is working with its community college partners to track short and medium-term outcomes including direct service outcomes such as increased access to benefits and services (free tax preparation, legal assistance, and financial counseling), and improved rates of semester-to-semester and annual retention.
Using rates of drawdown at current sites as a rough proxy, we expect to increase access to benefits and services for a minimum of 30 percent of all clients and anticipate a noteworthy increase in both semester-to-semester and annual retention rates among students served. Single Stop will also work closely with college partners over the life of the partnership to support, implement, and coordinate increasingly rigorous evaluation and expects the intervention to yield measurable improvements in rates of completion, lifetime earnings, economic and labor mobility, and health outcomes for students receiving services over the long-term. Single Stop anticipates that the short-term drawdown of benefits and services combined with the long term impact on rates of completion and earnings will yield a return on investment of approximately 23:1.
For our current evaluation of the impact of the program on the lives of students served, Single Stop uses a methodology developed by the Robin Hood Foundation that establishes monetary values for each benefit and service. We thenutilize social science literature to estimate the long term impact of increased retention and completion. Whenever possible, Single Stop uses the actual cash value of a benefit as the metric: for example, the actual food stamp benefit dollar amount. However, when monetizing non-cash services and benefits that Single Stop helps clients to access, values are based on a combination of published academic and in-house research, and the experiences of Single Stop partners taking into consideration a range of factors including the projected impact of a service or certification on future earnings, improvements in living standards, and resources saved that would otherwise be expenses. For example, research shows that having health insurance improves quality of life, and each year an individual lives with better health has a monetary value (based on analysis from Robin Hood and consultants from Columbia University). Taking this information into account, and the likelihood that a client will retain health insurance over multiple years, helping a client enroll in a public health insurance program is given a value of $16,000 for each insured individual. As noted above, access to benefits and social services is only part of the equation.
Public benefits are a powerful and effective tool for lifting families out of poverty, particularly when accessed in concert - and in conjunction with - comprehensive social services including legal counseling, financial advice, and free tax preparation services. Compelling research demonstrates that benefits promote family stability and job security, increase disposable income and improve long-term educational and health prospects.
Every dollar of food stamps translates to increased purchasing power for families. Children enrolled in health insurance programs are 80 percent less likely to have untreated medical needs. Access to health insurance has been shown to double a family's ability to save. Child care subsidies give a parent time to look for a job. A $1,000 increase in family tax credits correlates with increased test scores for children. Because these benefits and services also have the potential to help students to stay in school and graduate, the Single Stop Community College Model constitutes a remarkably powerful intervention and works to alleviate poverty in two ways: first, in the short term, by providing students and their families with immediate access to critical benefits and services proven to alleviate poverty, and in the long run, by helping students stay in school through completion and thus increasing lifetime earnings and, ultimately, facilitating intergenerational change.
By tapping into existing public resources, Single Stop's community college sites are achieving remarkable outcomes. In their first year of operation, these sites drew down an average of $1,500 per student served in tax refunds alone - a staggering 15 percent of that same cohort's average gross income. At the same time, approximately 50 percent of students served during this time period confirmed receipt of public benefits; received legal services; or were referred to on-site Single Stop financial counselors to address issues like debt management, budgeting, and credit improvement. In 2010, Single Stop's community college sites filed taxes for more than 4,500 student families nationally at an estimated value approaching $6 million. Anecdotally, we know that these services have already had an enormous impact. Even more compelling: preliminary data from select sites indicate dramatic semester-to-semester retention rates of students who received Single Stop services.
