Interactive Dashboard
This dashboard was created to catalyze Medicaid use by community colleges by providing college leaders, policy makers, and advocates with data; increasing awareness of the potential for new revenues; and inspiring action to expand and sustainably fund on-campus health services.
Community college students are experiencing a health crisis made worse by the pandemic, resulting in high rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, suicidal ideation, food insecurity, and more.
However, student health needs often exceed the resources available on campus, forcing many community colleges to cut or deny services. The funding shortage is particularly acute now, as federal COVID-relief funds begin to expire.
Despite the urgent need and scarce resources, the vast majority of community colleges do not leverage an available and recurring source of funding — Medicaid.
In the United States, 84% of community colleges offer student health services that are eligible for reimbursement through Medicaid, but only 3% of community colleges actually claim reimbursements.
We hope that this dashboard can help change this dynamic. With access to the data in this tool, colleges can begin to identify new resources to provide robust health supports to their students and eliminate health care access as a barrier to college completion.
Data Sources
Data for this project was gathered from the following sources:
Colleges
- Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)
- A review of the websites of each state’s higher education system or community college system
College enrollment and demographic data
- Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)
Medicaid participation and reimbursement data
- National Plan & Provider and Enumeration System’s National Provider Identification (NPI) Registry
- Public records requests to state Medicaid agencies
- Public records requests to community colleges
Community college health services offerings
- Health services survey distributed to all community colleges reviewed in the study
- A review of the websites of each community college
Nearby school districts
- National Center for Education Statistics’ School & District Navigator
Projection Methodology
The dashboard allows users to create a revenue projection for each college based on the college’s student demographics, the health services currently offered by the college, and each state’s unique rates for Medicaid reimbursement.
In general, the projections are generated by creating an estimate of Medicaid-eligible students enrolled at each college (based on the college’s enrollment and percentage of students receiving Pell grants), identifying the health services offered by the college, estimating the numbers of students receiving each offered service, and applying a state-specific average rate of Medicaid reimbursement per recipient.
The projections are meant to provide a general sense of the magnitude of the revenue potential for each college. Given the many variables involved in determining Medicaid revenue potential, colleges should use the projections as a starting point to conduct their own analyses of revenue potential from Medicaid. The projections should not be viewed as precise indicators of future revenue.