Thanks to the critical and thoughtful analysis and reporting of organizations like Ithaka S+R and The Hechinger Report, higher education practitioners and policymakers are starting to recognize the role of administrative hold policies in student persistence and completion patterns. An estimated 6.6 million learners are affected by “stranded credits”— credits that students have earned but are not able to access for transfer or re-enrollment due to financial holds placed on their accounts for unpaid balances.
Individual student stories of losing access to credits, and the financial and emotional costs of overdue accounts, interest expenses, collections fees and damaged credit, are providing a fuller picture of the compounding penalizing effects of these policies. And yet, as financial hold policies are necessarily grabbing attention, the path toward reform is complex and warrants thoughtful attention to the entire range of administrative hold policies and their function in higher education.
Earlier this year, Sova and Education Commission of the States had an opportunity to dig deeply into administrative holds, just as a spotlight was being shined on these policies for their effects on students. [This partnership] undertook a landscape scan with the goals of better understanding where administrative hold policies originate within an institution or system, how they are implemented at institutions, and their impact on students. In [the] analysis, [researchers] were struck by the practical and ethical complexity of administrative hold policies — which [authors] believe contributes to the challenge of reform … Three elements of this complexity are highlighted in the full article.
