College Graduation Rate Catastrophe

The NYTimes goes above the fold this morning with an article about catastrophically low graduation rates at urban universities in Chicago. At Northeastern Illinois, 16 percent of students who start as first-time, full-time, degree-seeking freshmen earn a bachelor's degree within six years. At Chicago State, it's 17 percent. For certain student groups, it's even lower. The 2004 graduation for black men at Northeastern Illinois was 3.5 percent.

In other words, for some students, the odds of success are within the margin of error of absolute zero. This is an education system that is statistically indistinguishable from a system designed to prevent students from graduating from college.

The article does an excellent job of systematically working through the two major excuses about why we can't do better.

Excuse #1: We're an open-access urban campus serving a lot of under-prepared, non-traditional students. We're giving them a chance, but of course not all are going to make it.

True enough. Nobody expects Chicago State to have the same graduation rate as the University of Chicago. But there's a difference between many students not graduating and hardly any students graduating. And the article shows that most other urban campuses that have similar students and similar admissions policies do a signficantly better job, graduating up to 50 percent of their students.

Excuse #2: Our students do graduate, but it takes them longer than six years.

This is a common refrain, the idea that the six-year timeframe (for getting a four-year degree) has become archaic, and if only it were extended the numbers would look much more rosy. But here's what the two univerisities have to say on that subject:

The graduation rate at Chicago State after seven years is nearly 35 percent, compared with the six-year rate of 16 percent, Dr. Daniel said. At Northeastern Illinois, where the six-year rate is 17 percent, the 10-year rate is 23 percent, university officials said.

I'm skeptical about that first number. I've never seen a research study about college graduations suggesting anything like a doubling of graduation rates between years six and seven. It's much more likely to see numbers like those at Northeastern Illinois, which basically say that if you extend the timeframe all the way out to a full decade, the numbers go from terrible to...slightly less terrible.

Helping students graduate who arrive on campus with many risk factors, who don't have strong momentum toward completion, is a very difficult job. But that can't be a reason to accept success rates that are almsot as low as they could be--particularly when other institutions with the same challenges do much better.