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The recent announcements by some major lenders that companies are withdrawing student loans from colleges based on low graduation rates is likely to impact community colleges the most. Community colleges tend to have lower graduation rates than 4 year institutions. This is an incredibly dangerous and harmful long term precedent.

A personal story about this that may be worth considering, especially for admissions counselors. I’ve been practicing the martial arts for 18 years now, and as a black belt, I regularly sit on our school’s testing panel. We evaluate students for their belt tests based on both subjective and objective criteria – do they know the material, and can they translate intellectual understanding into physical action, etc.

When I first started sitting on testing panels, one of my senior teachers gave this admonishment – do not grade solely on objective items. It’s not just whether or not a student can achieve the result, but as teachers responsible for their growth, has the student demonstrated improvement?

A student with a natural aptitude may objectively meet all standards, but has had to make relatively little forward progress. A student with a natural disinclination towards those techniques may objectively not meet the standards as well, but the distance they’ve traveled, the progress they’ve made, is much, much greater.

This is a lesson for us in the financial aid world and higher education in general. To reward only on hard numbers, such as recent decisions by some lenders to exclude colleges with low graduation rates, may make bottom line sense (and in a downturning economy may be the only course of action one could take to keep the lights on), but colleges with low graduation rates such as community colleges are often the ones whose students are making the greatest strides towards self-improvement.

To cut off community colleges and other institutions from student lending in the long term is harmful to the students and to all of us as a society. The road from no opportunity to great opportunity is a long one, and everyone starts at a different place on it, but community colleges above all others serve to get students over greater distances on that road than virtually any other higher educational institution.

When the economy does recover, we would all do well to remember that the amount of road traveled is as important as the destination.