An Unusual Midterm With Some Surprising Results

By Shrutika Sabarwal and Torie Ludwin
 

Juliette Pacheco entered Westchester Community College (WCC) with a full plate of responsibilities: As a mother of three, she felt overwhelmed. However, she applied to the Viking ROADS scholar program, which provides academic, personal, and financial student support. Once she was accepted, her path cleared. 
 

“Thanks to the Viking ROADS program, I graduated from WCC with confidence, a 3.8 grade point average, and a full scholarship from PepsiCo,” Pacheco said. ​“The support I received from Viking ROADS taught me to be my own advocate, and it built confidence in myself that I never knew I could have or was worthy of."

What's Happening: Westchester Community College in New York state launched Viking ROADS to help its students overcome financial, personal, and academic obstacles — which only worsened during the pandemic. The program is based on the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), a student support program that has been shown in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to nearly double graduation rates. The interim findings from an RCT of Viking ROADS found that the program produced a 15 percentage point increase in full-time enrollment and a three-credit increase in credits earned measured 12-18 months after random assignment.
 

Why it Matters: The interim findings put the program on track to replicate the large impacts on graduation found in two prior studies of the ASAP program, suggesting the program may be equally effective for students under different settings and circumstances.
 

What’s Next: A final report with three-year findings will be released in 2024 measuring the study’s long-term primary outcome – degree attainment. 
 

Read the interim findings brief from MDRC, learn about the Viking ROADS program, and hear from Pacheco in the video above.
 

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers recently asked for advice on how to increase value in our health care system — specifically around how physicians are paid in Medicare, which provides health insurance for people over 65 as well as some younger people with disabilities. 
 

We have ideas. 

What’s Happening: The status quo is a “fee-for-service” payment model, which reimburses physicians based on the number and type of services they provide. (It is also the predominant model for private insurance.) Paying for a service may make sense for buying most goods, but it does not always work well for medical care. “The problem is that the fee-for-service system incentivizes physicians to deliver more and higher-priced care even when services have no benefit to patients or could harm them,” says AV's Mark E. Miller, executive vice president of health care. “Too often this results in unaffordable, low-quality care for patients.”  
 

What’s Next: AV’s Provider Payment Incentives team has recommended a range of policy solutions that would create a more affordable and sustainable health care system that truly meets patients’ needs.  
 

Bottom Line: We spend more per capita on health care in the U.S. than any other high-income country. Yet our nation ranks poorly on population health outcomes. It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Read the story >

Criminal Justice 

• Election results made it clear that a "bad-faith 'crime wave' narrative" fell flat in political campaigns across the country, according to The Appeal.  
   
• The Trace documents how a new generation of candidates running on gun violence prevention won races across the country. 
   
• Bloomberg reports how a surge of police in New York City's subway system failed to dent crime but did result in "more arrests for low-level crimes like fare evasion, particularly among people of color." 
   
• The Crime Report covers the "anomaly" that is Brian Middleton, a reform-minded district attorney for Fort Bend, Texas, who faced no opposition in his first reelection campaign.  
  
  Related: Arnold Ventures is providing $7.4 million in support for 14 grants across 40 prosecutors’ offices across the country, including the one now led by Brian Middleton. Researchers will analyze the effectiveness and cost associated with the office’s pretrial diversion programs. 
     
• Federal prosecutors are bringing charges against corrections officers for smuggling in drugs and weapons to Rikers Island, where 18 people have died so far this year, reports The New York Daily News.  
   

Higher Education 

• In The Hill, Javaid Siddiqi, president and CEO of The Hunt Institute, suggests three ideas to assess return on investment in higher education; one of them is passing the College Transparency Act.  
   

Health Care  

• Better government data is one of the keys to improving care for low-income older adults and people with disabilities enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid – more than 12 million people across the country. A new health policy brief in Health Affairs explores how. 
   
• Voters in Arizona stood up to excessive hospital prices and aggressive debt collections by approving a ballot measure that limits interest rates on medical debts, among other protections. Arizona ranked almost last for health care affordability in 2022, with some of the highest hospital prices and family premiums in the nation (Arizona has the eighth-highest hospital prices and fourth-highest premiums in the U.S.) Forty-one percent of adults in the U.S. have some form of medical debt. 
   

Democracy

• Salena Zito looks at the issues with party primaries in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and how advocates are pushing for open primaries in Pennsylvania.
   

• This week, delegates from around the world will gather in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt for the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27). Among them will be a delegation of House Republicans led by AV grantee Conservative Climate Foundation (CCF). Members attending COP27 are also members of the Conservative Climate Caucus, chaired by Rep. John Curtis, which works to educate and engage House Republicans on climate solutions that will support our economy, American workers, and national security.
   
• AV partner ClearPath’s newest report, All Queued Up and Nowhere to Go: The Massive Interconnection Challenge Facing Net-Zero Electricity Deployment, was featured in RTO Insider. 

• “A Tree of Life,” the HBO documentary shaped by the stories of those who survived the 2018 mass shooting at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha synagogue, the deadliest attack on Jewish people in the U.S. For the viewer, this film feels like an intimate conversation with a close friend or neighbor, as survivors and family members offer details of their connections to the synagogue, the close-knit community that surrounded it, and the unthinkable events of that day. Many scrambled to run for cover and call for help; others came face to face with evil. A doctor and nurse both moved in the direction of the gunfire, driven by their moral impetus to help. One of them did not survive. The film touches only briefly on the shooter but does explore the roots of antisemitism and the disturbing rhetoric that has allowed it to flourish, as well as the city's ensuing debate over regulations to curb gun violence. It spends more time on healing, empathy, and the humanity of its subjects. Watch long enough to hear the story of David and Cecil Rosenthal, who felt to me like the heart of this film. As survivor Joe Charny reads aloud to us: “To love God truly, one must first love all humanity.” 

• CBS Mornings did an in-depth report on the country’s organ donation and transplant system, based on bipartisan House and Senate investigations into the failures of organ procurement organizations (OPOs) to adequately track, transport, and take care of organ donations — to the cost of thousands of lives. This week, the House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, chaired by Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, raised questions about inaccurate and incomplete data provided by OPOs. Krishnamoorthi tells CBS: “If you don’t have proper data, then you don’t know what organs exist and are usable to go to people who need them.” The CBS piece also profiles LaQuayia Goldring, one of more than 100,000 people in the U.S. waiting for an organ transplant: “The longer that I wait, the closer I am to death.” Read more about her story and the urgent need for reform.
   

• Take 100 seconds to watch a video from the Institute of Higher Education Policy's (IHEP) new series, #HigherEdIsHow, on degree completion. 

• Keeping the promise of "no man left behind," veterans and scientists work to return long-lost American remains from a remote Pacific WWII battlefield.
   
• Meet the history-makers of the 2022 midterm elections. 
   
• Check out these photos from around the world of Tuesday's lunar eclipse, the last one for three years. 
   
• I love this dissection of how the most subtle cinematic performances can often be the most powerful. (It's also a great source of movie recommendations.) 
   
• ICYMI (but I know you didn't): The Astros, our beloved hometown team, won the World Series. And the team's iconic manager, Dusty Baker, got yet another first to add to his list of achievements.