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June 6, 2007
Challenging the Measures of Success
F. King Alexander, president of California State University at Long Beach, wants to change the way people evaluate what a college contributes. “I like to ask people: Do you want Princeton or Cal State Long Beach in your economy?”
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To those who live by U.S. News rankings, or SAT scores, or prestige, or Nobel Prizes, or graduation rates, the answer is a no brainer: Princeton. But to Alexander, there’s a simple way to change the equation. Instead of thinking about graduation rates, which are an easy proxy for SAT scores, competitiveness, and all kinds of other factors that relate to the wealth or prestige of an institution, he wants people to think about how many students graduated. In other words, focus on the raw numbers, not what percentage met the federal definition for graduating.
“We will have more graduates this year than Princeton has students,” Alexander said. (Long Beach graduates more than 8,000 students a year, while Princeton’s total enrollment is about 6,700.) “And we’re going to have 500 engineers who graduate this year, and 300 nurses, and 1,100 school teachers and they are all getting good strong degrees and are getting very good jobs.”
In contrast, when you look at graduation rates, Princeton comes out on top, with a rate of 97 percent, compared to 48 percent at Long Beach, using the federal definition, which looks at first-time, full time enrollees who earn degrees within six years (or three years for a community college).
While such rates mean something to many people, Alexander said that they actually reflect a specific set of incentives, which even if appropriate for Princeton aren’t appropriate for most places. “If you focus on a rate, you drive public universities away from their public missions. Everyone knows that to get your graduation rate up, the best way to do that is turn away all the academically challenged students and there is evidence of this all over the United States.”
As a result of his views, Alexander is working with officials of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities to try to change federal policy and national perceptions about graduation rates and whether they are a good measure. While the project is still in the idea stage, it comes at a time that other groups are also considering proposals to change the way graduation rates are calculated. And while the federal definition has long frustrated some educators, there appears to be more discussion now about seeking change than has been the case previously.
Alexander’s ideas is to shift away from a single measure of graduation rates and to use a three-pronged approach: total graduates, percentage of students who are eligible for Pell Grants (a proxy for serving disadvantaged students), and the traditional measure of graduation rates.
Needless to say, many college presidents like to look for statistics that portray their institutions in favorable ways. Alexander insists that what he’s talking about would raise the rigor with which all colleges are evaluated. By keeping the traditional measure as one tool, he said, colleges that were graduating hardly anyone would get scrutiny. But it is by combining the measures that a full picture would emerge, he said. If two colleges both have the same graduation rate, but one is graduating many more students and with a larger share of Pell-eligible students, that college is performing better and should be recognized as such.
Generally, he said, the emphasis on graduation rates encourages colleges to make admissions competitive. While institutions like his would benefit from the comparison Alexander is proposing, he is quick to note that others would as well. He cited three private universities, Brigham Young and Cornell Universities and the University of Southern California, as institutions that may be slightly less competitive to get into than their various peers, but that graduate far more students — and from economic bases that include larger shares of Pell eligible students than their peers. Why should they be viewed as having lower quality, he asked?
“Currently all of the pressure flows in one way — to do a good job with the best prepared students,” he said. But given demographic trends — with more of those needing a college education coming from high schools where they may not be prepared — that should change, Alexander said. “If we continue on the path we are on, then we are all going to be competing for out of state women, who score better, finish faster, and will lift everyone’s graduation rates. Is that a good societal direction?”
Edward M. Elmendorf, senior vice president for government relations at AASCU, said “what we’re trying to do is to find a different template, a different way of showing information.”
Elmendorf also stressed that Alexander’s concept would not only benefit institutions like Long Beach. Many historically black colleges, Elmendorf said, pride themselves on admitting students who graduate from poor high schools and who may lack the resources or academic preparation to progress speedily to graduation. Not surprisingly, graduation rates at many of these institutions are lower than they are at institutions that admit wealthier, better prepared students.
By adding in the kinds of factors Alexander is talking about, Elmendorf said, these colleges look very different. They are among the highest in educating Pell-eligible students and they are graduating plenty of students, even if not on a schedule associated with elite higher education.
There is interest in seeking amendments to the Higher Education Act to change the graduation rate formulas, Elmendorf said. And he added that these rates are influential beyond that law, but are relied on by state lawmakers, journalists and others looking for a quick read on an institution — a read that Elmendorf said is currently inaccurate.
Community colleges have long been frustrated by the federal formula, which generally fails to reflect the large proportion of their students who enroll part time, enroll at multiple institutions or enroll with no intention of completing a degree. David Baime, vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, said that while his organization hasn’t been pushing a specific proposal on the issue, he was pleased to see interest in changing the way people think about graduation rates.
“Our students have so many different goals, and for many of our students, their ultimate goal is not to graduate but to improve themselves economically through getting a job,” Baime said. “All of these considerations make graduation rates for our sector very different to compare. I think that looking at a simple number across sectors conceals more than it reveals.”
Another approach being discussed by some is the idea of replacing the graduation rate with a “success rate.” The National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges — together with AASCU — is working on a new voluntary accountability system that provide new ways of evaluating college quality. One idea being considered is the success rate approach.
David E. Shulenburger, vice president of the land grant group and formerly provost of the University of Kansas, said that the current graduation rate data don’t reflect the way students transfer or take longer than is considered appropriate to finish their degrees. He provided an example of an (unidentified) university involved in these discussions. Four years after enrollment, only 28 percent of students have graduated. But 5 percent have graduated from another institution, 38 percent were still enrolled at the institution, and another 14 percent were enrolled at other institutions. Counting all of those, that’s an 85 percent success rate — very different from a 28 percent graduation rate.
Shulenburger would not go as far as Alexander and thinks there needs to be attention paid to those who don’t graduate or transfer or continue. When he was at Kansas, he said, “I noticed every year that we took in about 4,000 students and graduated about 4,000 students with bachelor’s degrees and we didn’t have a 100 percent graduation rate.”
But Shulenburger said that the current definition of graduation rates assumes that students and their parents care only about one model: where a student enrolls at one institution, stays there and graduates as soon as possible. “Students are different,” he said, and that model will work for some and not others. An institution that provides a solid education and sends many on to other institutions to graduate is doing well, he said.
And he agreed that the traditional measure sends the wrong message to the many institutions whose mission is not to be as elite as possible. “The U.S. News kind of approach has been pretty destructive,” he said. “You certainly can change your graduation rate by changing the type of students you admit,” he said. “There’s lots of evidence of that.”
Some experts on graduation rates fear that some of the ideas being discussed may not focus enough attention on what happens to individual students who enter a given college. Clifford Adelman, a long time Education Department researcher who is now a senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, agrees that there are problems with the current system. He has proposed changes that would better account for the reality that traditional and non-traditional students have different goals and pressures, and that transfer is not necessarily a bad thing.
But Adelman believes that the rates can be made meaningful and he is very skeptical of a move away from the concept of rates. Too many institutions, he said, “will admit any student with a warm body and a test score.” Colleges need to be serious about working with those they admit, and to be accountable for those they admit, Adelman said, and graduation rates — with some tweaks — could do that.
Adelman said that an institution may be healthy if it is graduating large numbers of students. But what of the students who don’t graduate? The proposal to abandon rates, he said, “is at best misguided” and is “very typical of institutional leaders to focus on institutions and not students.”
Others are more intrigued by the approach, even while seeing the difficulty of pulling off a change.
Travis Reindl is running the Making Opportunity Affordable Project for Jobs for the Future. He recently released a study arguing that the United States faces a series degree shortage and needs to increase degree production by 37 percent by 2025 to keep up with international competitors and economic and social needs.
To reach those goals, he said that American higher education will need to rely on institutions that reach out to students who aren’t admitted to elite colleges. “We have to look at metrics that account for the whole sweep of higher education, and not only those that benefit one group over another.”
While the graduation rate “is still a relevant indicator,” it should be viewed “in combination with other factors,” he said.
Still, Reindl warned that change won’t be easy. “Policy makers have really latched on to the graduation rate because it’s easy to understand,” he said. “You are going to have to do some serious education so people understand the changes and see a new valid measure and not some way to give institutions a pass.”
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Comments
Irresponsible
I’ve seldom seem such an irresponsible proposals given a wide forum. You’re suggesting it’s better to lure thousands of students into college and have only half of them graduate, while the rest drop out with debt? Does anyone really believe our national economic competitiveness will improve the sheer number of degrees awarded rather than the amount of learning it reflects? Are you aware that thousands of degree-holding ‘engineers’ in India are not qualified for entry-level engineering jobs anywhere?
Our business is not simply producing a total numbers of graduates. Nor is it graduation rates, but at least that measure serves as a better proxy for detecting whether or not a college offers an environment where students can learn. Colleges that jam hundreds of students into class after class—colleges that award extensive credit for work completed while in high school—colleges that substitute online activities for personal interaction—all may look like productive degree-factories, but the educational connection—what Plato described as “the spark that travels from each to each"—is sorely lacking.
Arguing that large institutions are doing ‘just as good a job’ as places that offer small classes and close interaction is simply an extension of the widespread American fallacy that education can be achieved on the cheap. Now that California celebrates having spent a generation eviscerating high school infrastructure with a regressive property tax structure, it’s time to destroy higher education too? The statistics show that even lower-income, less-prepared students do better in more supportive learning environments, so arguing that Princeton etc. are simply places that help the elite become more elite is becoming a tired and delusional canard. A ranking system designed to confuse a low-income student with choosing between Princeton and CSULB would be a disservice to everyone.
I agree with the call for including the percentage of Pell grant recipients as a factor in evaluating colleges, because that demonstrates institutional commitment, and tough choices for both public and private institution alike. The rest of this attempt to drape worthy but under-resourced state universities in faux-ivy is worthy of Potemkin.
Jon Burdick, at 7:25 am EDT on June 6, 2007
While mass production of college graduates seems to be desireable, grade elevation and “passing through” students in order to meet those targets is a poor way to influence the statistics. American Colleges are graduating students who can’t read or write, more less perform at minimum standards in their areas of study.
A university with high graduation rates is a red flag that they are passing students through. Where is the quality factor?
Steve, at 9:30 am EDT on June 6, 2007
Both methods are shallow
Measure what do they know and how do they apply what they know.
For every graduate that vetoes Federal money for embryonic stem cell research, the rankings would go to the tank.
For every attorney general that needs immunity to testify before Congress, all accreditation would be stripped.
For every person who thinks they know more about what god thinks than other people or use texts written by humans to provide direction, no credibility. Particularly, penalize the higher educated who would molest children and withhold sex education that would prevent the spread of AIDS.
Find out where Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers, Howard Zinn, and others like them went to school. Raise those ratings.
Let the search for quality begin.
William Sumner Scott, J.D.
Judicial Equality Foundation, Inc.
William Sumner Scott, J.D., at 9:45 am EDT on June 6, 2007
true
Should this be surprising to anyone? Princeton, Harvard, and Yale do not do a good job of educating students (in fact, they do a very poor job). All they are doing is just not “messing up” a group of bright and talented people who would be successful in any context, whether it be a campus, boot camp, or prison.
Show me a college or university that takes a group of individuals, like first-generation, minority, and low-income students, gives them a quality and well-rounded education and then provides them with a degree. That is a good college.
Why we as a society continue to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the very selective institutions — when other institutions are struggling to find resources and where the money would have much higher returns — is beyond me.
PS, at 9:50 am EDT on June 6, 2007
another way
Might I suggest the other way to raise those graduation numbers is to not allow faculty to award deserved grades. Too many schools allow no F or D grades warranting repeating a subject until it is learned. These schools graduate “all” their students, but far too many of those students are not prepared to enter the work force, let alone graduate school. This notion of measuring an institution of higher learning on its graduation numbers is smoke and mirrors. Academia must return to the goal of providing quality education, not quantity of names on a roster.
lucy b, at 10:00 am EDT on June 6, 2007
Steve, Really, what schools are graduating students with BAs or BSs that are functionally illiterate? Just curious. I have met a lot of college graduates, and all of them could read! (On the other hand, people delight in accusing each other of not being able to right, especially as a way of avoiding addressing an issue.)
Alexander’s comments are sort of funny, because he singles out the engineers and nurses, who, together make up 11% of the grads as getting “good” jobs. He also claims that there are 1,100 teachers, alas, in many family, being a primary school teacher is considered a sign of failure.
Whatever the case, I don’t think his efforts will amount to much unless he actually takes a considerably more nuanced approach.
Larry, at 10:20 am EDT on June 6, 2007
Which Random Sample Are We Talking About?
Truthfully Scott, I think reports like this are just so far-fetched they’re not worth doing. Please allow me to make three points.
First, there’s Henry Ford Community College (HFCC) ... then there’s the University of Texas – Pan American (UT-PA) ... then there’s Cal State – Long Beach (CS-LB) ... and then there’s Princeton. These are not only different public institutions, they are remarkably different ... incredibly different. Now pretend Alice is the only graduating high school senior in the entire United States this year, and she is confronted with a decision about where to go to college. Frankly, choosing between these four would be a tough job and that’s because you’d have to know a Hell of a lot about these four institutions and even more about Alice to help her make an optimal choice. [Before reading on, think about that for a few seconds.]
Now, fortunately for the four institutions mentioned above, Alice is not the only high school graduate this year ... there are approximately 2.7 million others just like her.” NOOOOO!!! and that’s the point. They are not at all like her. Some are wonderfully suited for HFCC and wouldn’t last a week at Princeton, and some would just love it at Princeton and really be out of their element at UT-PA.
And that’s my other point. To extol the comparative virtues of these four institutions vis-a-vis a randomly chosen student from Alice’s class and doing so by “manipulating” the data – as F. King Alexander wants to do it – is just absurd.
[Aside: If this guy has been sitting around his office dreaming up ideas like this, it serves to reinforce my prejudice of who leap-frogs the ranks of scholars to become academic vice presidents and presidents.]
For certain specific students (not a randomly chosen student) deciding between Yale and Princeton may be a really tough call, while a choice between either of those universities and CS-LB would be a no-brainer.
Second, Alexander said “Everyone knows that to get your graduation rate up, the best way to do that is turn away all the academically challenged students and there is evidence of this all over the United States.” Truthfully, in my experience, just the opposite is the case. I have gotten the impression that the only reason graduation rates are even mentioned is because there are so many numbers-driven and tuition-driven institutions in the United States whose admission requirements amount to passing a “foggy mirror test.”
My third point is a personal experience. Many years ago I taught at UNC-Asheville (which, in those parts, was known as “little Harvard on the hill”) and before that at Princeton. While at UNC-A, there was a local high school youngster – think of her as Charlotte Simmons – who was accepted at both UNC-A and Princeton ... and subsequently opted for the former. It cause a big hoopla in those parts with some using it as evidence that UNC-A was superior to Princeton ... silliness like that.
I admit that I just wanted to take that girl by the hand and say, “Charlotte, I don’t know what these folks have been telling you, but ...” On the other hand, the “real” Charlotte Simmons went on to Dupont (or was it Duke? ... Princeton?) and we all know what a bad choice that was ... or was it?
No matter. It does make you wonder how Laurence J. Peter would revise his principles in the face of a data set containing more than a few F. King Alexanders.
Frizbane Manley, at 10:35 am EDT on June 6, 2007
Opportunity is an important Test
It is no accident that the last three Presidents of the United States went to Yale.
Opportunity to achieve is awarded to some graduates while some school grads never have a chance.
The ranking should reflect that truth.
Any child who would select NC — Ashville over Yale would disregard name recognition to their detriment. 8,000 working stiffs have value to society, but are not relevant to rankings.
Quizzical, at 11:10 am EDT on June 6, 2007
Silly people
Oh my, what silliness!
We have a president ...got that, president, that went to Yale and Harvard and can’t speak a lick of English, can’t put together a coherent sentence, needs cue cards and talking points to engage any semblance of a dialogue, and you folks are taking sides about educational institutions?!
Is there anyone else out there that chuckles at the absurdity of all this?
Michael Chiaradonna, at 11:20 am EDT on June 6, 2007
In Response to Michael Chiaradonna
Michael, you ask, “Is there anyone else out there that chuckles at the absurdity of all this?”
Answer: At least everyone who has written a response to this article.
P.S. You forgot to mention that he has an MBA from Harvard. I have heard from a reliable source that his first choice of undergraduate institutions was Grand Lakes University, but they did not realize his father was destined to be president and did not admit him.
Frizbane Manley, at 12:30 pm EDT on June 6, 2007
responses on literacy and Yale
Mr. Chiaradonna, I find it strange that you assert that the president can’t speak a “lick” of English. First of all, the president is a native speaker. Secondly, he graduated from high school, college, and graduate school. Nobody ever indicated that he was illiterate. Indeed, he married a librarian and went on to run businesses and be governor of a state. (Laura Bush, from a prominent Texas Democratic family has never insinuated that her husband is illiterate.)
Sure, he might not be as eloquent as some of you folks would like, but I suspect that you are a bit tad biased because of various foreign policy failures. I was anxious to know if there were really illiterate graduates of colleges, but it seems the best you can do is give me a political rant. I am sure you wouldn’t like it if someone call you 1) illiterate; and 2) a bad writer because of your politics.
Quizzical, “Opportunity to achieve is awarded to some graduates while some school grads never have a chance.” I beg to differ with you there. People at Yale and similar schools are immersed in a culture of “excelling.” (Not necessarily “excellence.”) That is, at an Ivy or similar school, there is an understanding that most students will go on to graduate school or spend a few years working at a good job before going to graduate school. The students and the professors know this, and the infrastructure supports them. At other schools, students don’t come in expecting to do this. Professors don’t instill these values. Instead, students are just expected to get drunk for four years and then get a crappy job. But, students can, and do make it from lowly undergrad institution to real graduate institutions. They just have to know how to do it in advance.
Larry, at 1:05 pm EDT on June 6, 2007
Absurd indeed
Some students apparently know that a trip to “a top” university will get them Teaching Assistants, little contact with top professors, lots of stress in competing with other “top students,” and maybe a suicide attempt or two.
Out-of-control capitalism just keeps getting faster and faster; more smoke and more mirrors. More supervisors from legacy families (often with less knowledge of anything worthwhile) go George W.!
The bean-counters have taken over U.S. education and the philosophers have been forced into small, dark corners. (a few conservative theologists have moved into the boardrooms, but that is a different blend of Sophist political science, marketing, and theology). Hang on tightly “Americans” — soon begins the damp, downward swirl.
Dr. F. Gump, at 1:10 pm EDT on June 6, 2007
The Value of a Princeton Education
I’m curious as to why PS thinks that Princeton, Harvard, and Yale do “a very poor job” of educating students. How does he know? Did he attend one of these institutions? I think I got a firtst-rate education at Princeton, in part because (unlike many of its peers) every professor at Princeton no matter how senior or exalted is required to teach undergraduates and the university places a high premium on the importance of undergraduate teaching. I had courses from stellar figures like Stuart Hampshire and Gregory Vlastos in philosophy, Ira O. Wade in Enlightenment history, Michael Walzer in political theory, etc. In calculating the value of an education, I would also consider it important to weigh such factors as where your fellow graduates end up later in life. Among my classmates were a U.S. Senator and the TV anchor for the ABC Evening News. Or consider that the current CEOs of Amazon.com, eBay, and Google are all Princeton grads. Probably the network one gets involved with at such a school is as valuable as the pure educational experience itself over the long haul. One of my other classmates, by the way, was a pioneering scholar in the sociology of networks, Mark Granovetter.
Sandy, at 10:40 am EDT on June 7, 2007
Interesting
It’s great to see that we are all so open to new ideas. That’s why I joined academia!
Joseph Aubele, at 11:45 am EDT on June 7, 2007
Another Aspect
While of course valuing an institution of higher learning involves (or should involve) taking many factors into account, it’s hard to believe that the quantity of graduating students should be one of them. What I don’t see mentioned in the article or the blog is the value of going to elite schools and meeting other selected high quality students. Yes, they are that way when they show up and, yes, schools like Cal State LB have some students like that, but the elite schools have more of them, much more. And it is in the value of interactions with other high-performing and, if I dare say, interesting-thinking students that one of the big values of such an elite education occurs. Also, schools such as CSLB are principally commuter schools, which is a very different quality experience than walking around in your college (at Yale) or house (at Harvard) or eating club (at Princeton) and engaging in ongoing discussions with other people who are intellectual like you are and who don’t have to spend time working at boring jobs to pay for a CSLB education and the car they need to maintain in order to drive there. These are actually more important factors about the success of the elite schools even in terms of providing a product for those who, for one reason or another, have been lucky enough to receive it. So, why don’t we add that factor: the number of jobs that students at a university have to work that don’t involve interesting and educational work related to your coursework of interest (such as in labs, etc.) but instead involve bagging groceries or serving up fries.
Gary, at 3:20 pm EDT on June 7, 2007
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A more complex evaluation of institutional success than just graduation rates makes sense. In the current environment, that should kill it right there.
Adequate assessment of educational processes and outcomes on large or small scales is devilishly difficult work. Oversimplification, whether for lack of money or insight or courage or intelligence, turns it into the work of the devil.
Greg Tropea, CSU Chico, at 6:40 am EDT on June 6, 2007