Every year states hand out more than $11 billion in financial aid to college students with no certainty as to whether they’ll ever graduate.
Many states don’t track the money. They simply hand it over and hope for the best, as one educational consultant put it.
It’s a “one-sided partnership,” according to Stan Jones, the president of the advocacy organization Complete College America. “The states provide the funds, but the expectations states have of students are really pretty low.”