1. Ability to Benefit Update
Winter AEAC Meeting
William S. Durden
15 January 2019

2. AEAC Work Plan
Goal 1: Foster, support, and advocate the scaling and sustainability of innovative college and career pathways that move Washingtonians to wage progression resulting in vibrant communities and economic stability.
Objective 1.3: Promote increased dual enrollment opportunities.
Strategy 1.3a: Advocate for expanded use of Ability to Benefit option for Federal Financial Aid
Expected Outcomes 1.3a: Increased Basic Education for Adults enrollment in college-level programming.
Good morning to my favorite council of all, the Adult Education Advisory Council (don’t tell CBS!)
I’m here to provide you with an update on the latest with Ability to Benefit.
As you know, the expanded use of Ability to Benefit is a strategy deployed to meet AEAC Goal 1, Objective 1.3 (Read Work Plan info from Slide)

3. Ability to Benefit Overview and Benefits
Federal Financial Aid for students without a high school credential
Students enrolled in Title IV eligible programs who meet eligibility criteria can receive federal financial aid.
Ability to Benefit funds students in career pathway programs. Ability to Benefit can:
Allow students to enroll in college programs and pick up their high school credential along the way.
Allow students to learn English language in the context of their chosen pathway.
Provide students with money for living expenses.
Relieve pressure on state financial aid resources.
Drive enrollments for colleges.
As you also likely know, Ability to Benefit is federal financial aid for students without a high school diploma. If students enrolled in a title-iv (federal financial aid) eligible program meet eligibility criteria, they can have access to Federal Pell Grants and other forms of federal student aid.

4. Ability to Benefit: Equity in Financial Aid
Ability to Benefit is one of SBCTC BEdA’s key drivers for meeting our goals.
Goal 8: Examine pathway programming to ensure equitable and inclusive representation to better support underrepresented and low-income students achieve transition and completion.
In a nutshell, Ability to Benefit is Equity in Financial Aid. SBCTC BEdA aligns with AEAC in that Ability to Benefit helps us meet one of our key goals, goal 8 (read goal from slide.)

5. Ability to Benefit Update
Sluggish initial adoption by the colleges
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request
FOIA results
Dissemination of FOIA results
Integration with Guided Pathways
Ability to Benefit Summit
Benefits of Summit:
Increased adoption
Development of further resources for assistance
HS Completion Tool
SBCTC Data Process for Evaluation of Progress
And now it’s time for our update. Since I last spoke to you all, we knew that Ability to Benefit adoption was slow-going in the state, and we were frustrated by this reality. But we were having a hard time figuring out what exactly the scale of adoption was. We didn’t have any internal mechanisms that allowed us to determine 1) how many colleges were using Ability to Benefit, and 2) how many students were receiving Pell grants through the Ability to Benefit provision.
So we did what any reasonable agency would do: we filled out a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the information. Two months later, we had a list of every college in every state and a total of every Pell Grant given at these institutions.
What we found was that Washington state had awarded 85 Pell grants in the three years since Ability to Benefit was reinstated in of those awards came from 9 colleges in our CTC system. 41 came from the university system, and 13 came from for-profit colleges. This, of course, was very illuminating for us. What was also illuminating was the fact that while WA state had awarded nearly 270k in Pell Grants through Ability to Benefit since 2014, California had awarded nearly $50 million, Florida nearly $23 million, and New York $13 million. Our work was cut out for us.
So we began to disseminate the results to the colleges and to other areas within SBCTC. Our Ability to Benefit savior came in the form of Kristi Wellington-Baker, director of our Student Success Institute and Guided Pathways initiative. Kristi has a big heart for equity and an equally big taste for competing on the national stage, so thanks to her we devised the idea of hosting an Ability to Benefit Summit for our colleges, with powerhouse national speakers, a Q&A with SBCTC staff including myself, and dedicated work time for college teams to come together and figure out what it was going to take to scale AtB use in our state.
The event was a huge success. Nearly 275 attendees listened to Dr. Sara Goldrick Rab of the Wisconsin HOPE lab share her work on making higher education accessible and affordable, with Bryce McKibben from Senator Murray’s office and Lauren Walizer from CLASP rounding out the speakers.
We now know of several colleges who have moved forward with Ability to Benefit thanks directly to the work done through the Summit.
Furthermore, we identified a new resource to assist college basic skills providers make the case for AtB at their institution. Thanks to a request from Bellevue College, we worked with SBCTC research to develop this tool:
And we recently heard back from Bellevue: it worked. They are moving forward with the implementation of Ability to Benefit!
Further, we were able to make the case with our data services to set up a way to begin tracking Ability to Benefit usage statewide on a quarterly basis, so we have better real-time data to assist with our casemaking and continued work with the colleges.

6. Ability to Benefit: Next Steps
Strategic Enrollment Taskforce (SET)
Continued integration with Guided Pathways
Our next steps are to collaborate with the CTC system’s “strategic enrollment taskforce” to encourage their understanding of Ability to Benefit as a driver for equity AND a driver for enrollments. We are hopeful that this will result in the development of a widescale marketing campaign.
And we look forward to continued integration with guided pathways as AtB has now become an official agenda item for how student services can integrated equity and basic skills in their planning and development of guided pathways.

7. AEAC’s Commitment to Equity
Thank you AEAC for including Ability to Benefit in your strategy to better serve more students in college and career pathways!
With that, I would like to thank you for including Ability to Benefit in your strategy to better serve more students in college and career pathways. Your influence and your thinking on this provided a significant boost in our efforts to get colleges’ attentions and make adoption of AtB a priority issue.

8. Questions? William S. Durden
Policy Associate for I-BEST and Pathway Development, Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges |
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me anytime for more information or if I can provide any assistance to you on the topic of Ability to Benefit.
Note: All material licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.