John ‘Hannibal’ Smith, The A-Team

When Augustana implemented Augie Choice several years ago, the goal was fairly straightforward – increase the proportion of students who participate in study abroad, internships, or undergraduate research.  Not surprisingly, Augie Choice worked.  The proportion of our students who participate in one of those three ventures has increased dramatically. Also not surprisingly, the majority of the students using Augie Choice have put those funds toward studying abroad.

But the measure by which we evaluate Augie Choice shouldn’t be restricted to mere increases in participation.  There might be other factors, like the increasingly emphatic public rhetoric about the best ways for students to prepare for a competitive job market, that are driving participation in experiential learning opportunities.  Instead, the ideal way to evaluate the effectiveness of Augie Choice is to examine the degree to which it has driven an increase in participation among students who would not have participated otherwise.  Obviously, in actuality this is sort of impossible (stats people call this the problem of the counterfactual – most of the rest of us call it the allure of the alternate universe), so the next best way to get at this question is to look at participation patterns among those who historically did not participate and see if these numbers have changed since the implementation of Augie Choice.

In the case of study abroad, one historically under-represented population is students who come from lower-income backgrounds.  So as a part of our recent program review of international programs, Allen Bertsche and I looked at several years of study abroad participation data to see if the proportion of low-income students studying abroad had increased significantly since Augie Choice was implemented.

Here are the actual numbers.  The percentages (in parentheses) are the proportion of all study abroad participants in the corresponding year.

Year	Pell Recipients	Gov’t Subsidized Loan Recipients	Total Study Abroad Participants
Before Augie Choice
2009-10	16 (5.6%)	76 (26.4%)	288
After Augie Choice
2011-12	32 (10.8%)	105 (35.4%)	297
2012-13	49 (15.8%)	122 (39.4%)	310

As you can see, Augie Choice seems to have contributed to a substantial increase in study abroad participation rates among lower income students.  Between 2009/10 and 2012/13, the proportion of study abroad participants from the lowest income group (Pell qualifiers) nearly tripled, and the proportion of government subsidized loan qualifiers jumped by about 50%.

Pretty cool, eh?

Of course there are many more questions to pose regarding Augie Choice.  For example, since we know that participation doesn’t automatically produce learning, what exactly are we doing to make sure that students make substantive meaning out of their experiences?  What are we doing to ensure that they integrate that meaning into their continued growth and development?

This is a deeply complicated question – albeit not beyond our capability.  As we have done with other complex initiatives like re-envisioning general education and introducing senior inquiry, we have already proven our ability to grapple with complicated challenges and produce results that demonstrably improve student learning.  But in order to make the most out of these experiential learning opportunities, we had to create a mechanism that spurred all students to participate.  Augie Choice did that.  Well done, everybody.

Make it a good day,

Mark