The Joint Senate and House Universities and Colleges Committee heard a series of briefings Dec. 12 on aligning higher education with workforce demand and the mechanics of outcomes-based funding.

Patrick Sullivan, chairman of the State Workforce Investment Board, told the committee Mississippi's primary challenge is a misalignment between postsecondary outputs and employer demand. "The most important education success metric should be work outcomes for our students," Sullivan said, arguing that funding and policy should steer students toward high-value pipelines that lead to higher wages.

Nathan Akeley of the national nonprofit AccelinEd described outcomes-based funding (OBF) as a formula that ties a meaningful portion of state higher-education allocations to measurable student outcomes — employment, earnings, continued enrollment and military enlistment — rather than enrollment alone. He cautioned that incentives must be large enough to change institutional behavior and that OBF must include higher weights or premiums for high-need students because those students require more resources to reach outcomes.

Akeley presented examples from other states: Texas, Tennessee and Florida all use outcome premiums and higher multipliers for adult, low-income or academically underprepared students to prevent perverse incentives. He also noted federal accountability provisions discussed in testimony that can restrict Title IV student-loan access to programs that repeatedly underperform on earnings benchmarks; the transcript referred to the federal measure during testimony.

Steven Gentile, commissioner of higher education in Tennessee, outlined Tennessee's 15-year experiment with OBF. Tennessee's model emphasizes outcome counts and year-over-year growth rather than absolute rates, weights outcomes to an institution's mission, and applies "focus population" premiums (for adult learners, Pell-eligible students and academically underprepared students) of up to 80% or more to account for higher cost and effort. Gentile said Tennessee's four-year graduation rate has doubled in 15 years, though he acknowledged multiple supporting reforms and cautioned about unintended consequences such as proliferation of low-value short-term credentials.

Committee members pressed presenters on several recurring concerns: how to measure outcomes for part-time and transfer students; whether OBF would force closure or consolidation of small programs that serve critical local needs; how quickly enrollment growth is recognized under an outcomes model (several witnesses said multi-year lags can occur); and what guardrails can prevent institutions from avoiding high-need populations.

Sullivan urged stronger state-level data collection and routine engagement among the Legislature, IHL and community college leaders to steer funds toward programs demonstrably producing better workforce outcomes. Akeley recommended careful choices about which outcomes to weight and how large the incentive portion should be; he said incomplete or low-quality data should not be the reason to delay policy, but that OBF requires robust SLDS (state longitudinal data systems) to function fairly.

No statutory change was voted on during the hearing. Committee members requested written materials and modeling from presenters, including Sullivan's recommendations and AccelinEd's example analyses, before any committee-level proposal is drafted.