Focus Now on Getting Kids to Finish Degree
For decades, getting more students into college has been the top priority of America's higher-education leaders. But what's the point, a growing number of experts are wondering, when so few who go to school finish a degree?
Just 54 percent of students entering four-year colleges in 1997 had a degree six years later—and even fewer Latinos and blacks did, according to some of the latest government figures. After borrowing for school but failing to graduate, many of those students may be worse off than if they had never attended college at all.
Now the question of what to do about the country's unimpressive and stagnate graduation rates is on the agenda, from college presidents' offices to state houses. The latest sign of the trend comes Wednesday, when former Princeton President William Bowen lays out an ambitious research agenda on the question during a speech in New York.
Normally, a scholar's decision to take on an academic topic is hardly news. But Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is the kind of researcher whose work is so influential that his very curiosity about a subject can raise its profile.
His data-driven studies on college athletes, affirmative action and college access for the poor have all sparked nationwide debate in recent years, and he attracted widespread attention last year with a speech at the University of Virginia that called for class-based affirmative action in college admissions.
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Bowen's latest project will examine in detail who graduates and who doesn't—and why—at a group of about 20 varied universities. In an interview, he described the message he will deliver to a Goldman Sachs Foundation gathering on issues facing college trustees as his opening salvo on the topic.
It's known that elite schools have generally higher graduation rates than non-elite schools. But what's less clear is why the graduation rates at seemingly similar colleges vary so much. For instance, the main campuses of Penn State and the University of Minnesota have comparable price tags, student SAT scores, and percentage of students from poor backgrounds. Yet Penn State graduates more than 80 percent of its students, and Minnesota barely half.
Racial gaps are another concern. Overall, the federal figures report 57 percent of white students finish their degree, compared with 44 percent of Latinos and 39 percent of blacks. A 2004 Education Trust report found a quarter of schools have gaps between whites and blacks of 20 points or more.
Sarah Turner, a University of Virginia education economist, has assembled data showing that graduation rates have stagnated over recent decades even as enrollment has climbed.
Explanations range from rising college costs to insufficient academic support to students simply not realizing how valuable a college degree is.
But which factors matter most, and how they overlap, is not well understood, largely because the topic is hard to measure. Tracking enrollment numbers is relatively easy, but tracking what happens to individual students over six years is much harder. (AP)
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Thursday, November 17th 2005 at 10:21PM
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