Sarah Hood

At a previous employer, admission representatives would receive a graduation bonus for all the students they enrolled, who went on to graduate. For example, if you had 10 students graduate in a particular quarter, this would add $1000 to your paycheck. I am unsure if this practice is still in place, certainly hope not, but I truly understand why in may spark unethical practices. A few of these policy changes hit a little closer to home then I would have previously assumed.

My husband works in collegiate athletics, so I found it interesting that schools need to disclose graduation rate information for athletics. At previous institutions, the programs often touted their athlete graduation rates, and besides the obvious increased responsibility I did not realize they were actually require to submit the numbers. Is financial literacy a requirement as well? Often times student athletes with receive funding in the form of stipend checks, yet have never been taught how to budget.

I found the particular regulation about waiving application fees to be very interesting. I have been a part of many programs that would use this as an active practice to increase application activity. Statistics show that if a student applies to a particular program the likelihood that they will actually attend that program tremendously increases. To my knowledge, at previous employers, there was never any concern as to if this was in violation of any policy.