Nowhere To Go But Up

Readers who don't live in the DC metropolitan area may not know that, in addition to numerous national private universities like Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, Catholic, and American, we the perenially disenfranchised residents of the nation's capital also have jurisdiction over a single public institution, the University of the District of Columbia. Formed some thirty years ago via the awkward merger of three existing colleges, UDC has historically proved to be a typical creature of DC municipal governance, i.e. inefficient, ineffective, wasteful, patronage-driven, possibly corrupt, etc., etc. 

Last year the UDC board hired a new president, Dr. Allen Sessoms, formerly of Queens College and Delaware State. Sessoms immediately vowed sweeping changes, and so far he's been a man of his word, proposing to spin off part of UDC into a stand-alone community college, raise admissions standards (there are currently none) at the four-year institution, shake up the faculty (average age: almost 70) and increase in-state four-year student tuition from $3,800 to $7,000, a level more in line with other four-year public universities in the area. Unsurprisingly, students are unhappy and have mounted protests of various kinds.

Obviously, the prospect of nearly doubling tuition for students who often work full time, raise families, and come from modest financial backgrounds shouldn't be taken lightly. But as Sessoms recently noted, "The graduation rate [16 percent graduate within eight years] is an abomination." And this gives me an opportunity to further ride several personal hobby-horses into the ground revisit several topics of ongoing interest. First, that higher education debates are too often about price when they should really be about value. All things being equal, students are better off paying less for college than more. But they're also a lot better off paying $28,000 over four years for a bachelor's degree than paying $15,200 for no bachelor's degree. Yet there haven't been any massive student protests about UDC's shocking, could-hardly-be-lower graduation rate. 

Which leads to my second point: for reasons that are mostly a function of semi-arbitrary historic distinctions, traditional governance arrangements, and the modern societal consensus about the legal age of majority, everyone seems perfectly comfortable with the idea that, during the three months that elapse between high school graduation and college enrollment, students pass from a state of shared responsibility for educational outcomes (shared between the student and their school) to total personal responsibility for educational outcomes, leaving the institution itself out of the equation. UDC is--sadly, shockingly--not alone in having graduation rates that are within striking distance of absolute failure. You can find them most often at other urban universities, in cities like Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere, particularly when you start to break the numbers down by race and gender. And yet this arouses nothing approaching the concern and condemnation often directed toward high schools in those very same cities, even though the essential problem involves exactly the same students and public educational institutions that fail in very similar ways. (To read more about how colleges can improve graduation rates without sacrificing academic standards, see this report.)