NYTimes Account of Mobile College Students Inaccurate and Overblown

The cover article for the New York Times Education Life section this weekend dealt with the allegedly fast-growing phenomenon of mobile college students. Like all well-written articles, it makes it's main point succinctly in the first two paragraphs:

ERIN MADDEN laughs a little self-consciously referring to what she calls "my college tour." Not the kind that high school students take to look at potential campuses; hers started after she went to college and discovered she didn't like her choice. She transferred to another, and another, and another, and another, ultimately ending up with five colleges on her transcript when she graduated last year.

It wasn't collegiate life as she once imagined it. But it wasn't so unconventional, either. These days, a majority of students take a similarly nomadic path to a degree; about 60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution, a number that has risen steadily over at least the last two decades.

This is a great example of education journalism that takes a complicated issue and boils it down to a message that's clear, understandable, and mostly wrong.

The biggest mistake lies with the key supporting statistic: "60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution." This is incorrect. 60 percent of graduating students earn credits from more than one institution. This includes students who study abroad for a semester, earn credits at a local college while in high school, or pick up a few classes at a community college over the summer.

In other words, 60 percent of graduates could be characterized as multi-institution students. There are signficantly fewer mobile students who actually transfer from one institution and "attend" another. It is simply wrong to say that the "majority" of students take a "nomadic" path that is any way similar to that of Erin Madden.

For example, the same report that provides the data source for the 60% figure shows that 67% of people who earn a B.A. get it from the first institution in which they enrolled. That includes people who began in 2-year colleges and transferred; if you look at students who, like Erin Madden, began their college careers at 4-year institutions, 80% get their degree where they started.

Moreover, the assertion that the phenomenon of the multi-institution student has "risen steadily over at least the last two decades" is, at best, a broad overstatement. Again, going back to the data source for the key 60% number, here's the percent of B.A. recipients who earned credits from more than one institution in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's:

1970s: 57.2%
1980s: 58.0%
1990s: 59.4%

In other words, the net impact impact of this alleged sea change in the behavior of college students is 2.2 percentage points over 20 years. Why, then, all the attention to this issue?

Partly because it seems so consistent with other pop-culture notions of what those crazy young people are doing these days, offering opportunities for the kind of easy analogies that are too often irresisitable to journalists. The article says:

[It]makes sense for the so-called millennial generation, students famously lacking in brand loyalty, used to having things their way, and can-do about changing anything they don't like. As with other commodities, students are looking for that magic combination of quality, affordability and convenience. They shun CD's to create their own iPod playlists; is it any surprise they shape their own course catalogs? "Everybody can customize it the way they want it," says Ms. Madden, now 24 and working at a Cape Cod media company that runs radio stations and a Web site. "In the world we live in, with the Internet making things so accessible, we try to find what we like."

College attendance patterns and iPods? Really, it's all the same thing, man.

More importantly, higher education institutions have a vested interest in promoting the idea that most students jump willy-nilly from campus to campus, even though that's in no way true. Why? Because it provides a powerful-counterargument against those who want to hold institutions more accountable for whether college students graduate and how much they learn.

If college students start at one institution and either succeed or fail there--and make no mistake, this is still the typical pattern for most people who attend 4-year institutions--then it's reasonable to say that the institution bears some responsibility for that success or failure.

If, however, most students attend multiple institutions, than institutional responsibility is safely diffused. That's why representatives of the higher education establishment love citing the 60% number, it's their way of saying "Students these days, they come, they go--what can we do?"