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To my surprise, a recent New York Times article by David Leonhardt and Sahil Chinoy on “The College Dropout Crisis” has received much less attention in the higher ed press than one would expect.
The article’s key insight — that graduation rates vary dramatically among institutions with similar student profiles — is widely recognized among system administrators, but much less well known among faculty let alone students, parents, and legislators.
The authors draw on research conducted by the Times and the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy to compare the expected graduation rate (reflecting such variables as income, race, gender, age and test scores) with the actual rate at 368 colleges and universities.
The study has some limitations. It focuses only on first-time, full-time students, excluding the part-time and community college transfer students who make up a sizable proportion of students at broad access institutions. It’s unclear whether the study takes into account off-campus work or the proportion of students with dependents.
Data don’t speak for themselves, and this study’s conclusions must be evaluated with care. Boston University is shown to slightly underperform expectations, but the reason isn’t self-evident. Is this because it is especially rigorous or is something else at work? It’s not at all clear why some CUNY campuses perform substantially better (or worse) than others.
Context and campus culture obviously matter a great deal. This may help explain why institutions in the South – especially in cities with rapidly growing economies – underperform on graduation rates. It may be that more students, especially male students, in those areas jump at the opportunity to take a full-time job.
Ironies abound. UT El Paso, one of the schools identified as underperforming, is also one of the schools that brings the most low-income students into the upper-income quintiles.
Some of the authors’ conclusions come as no surprise. Underperforming institutions tend to have more students with low college board scores and more who come from low-income families. They also have a higher proportion of male students and fewer residential students.
Overperforming institutions, we are told, spend more money on instruction and support services. They tend to collect and make use of student data to pinpoint obstacles; enroll students in “pre-majors” to give greater structure to their course schedule; and take steps to encourage a sense of belonging, for example, by placing students in learning communities. Some offer mandatory orientations and study skills classes, encourage a graduate in 4 mentality, and invest in advising, which focuses not just on academic issues but life issues as well.
In discussing graduation rates, we must be conscious of Goodhart’s Law – that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." There are many ways to game graduation rates:
▪ Enroll better qualified students
▪ Increase the proportion of full-time and residential students
▪ Offer more four-credit hour classes
▪ Reduce rigor and eliminate onerous requirements
▪ Pressure faculty to pass students
Still, the disparity between expected and actual graduation rates offers a valuable tool to prod institutions to improve their performance. Nothing is more likely to focus an institution’s attention than the discovery that it is underperforming its peers.
If this country is to successfully address three of its greatest challenges – stagnating incomes, income and wealth disparities, and political polarization – higher education will be a big part of the solution. College contributes to human capital formation, local and regional workforce development, and, yes, improvements in personal earnings, health, and happiness.
When a college accepts and enrolls a student, it has an obligation to take the steps necessary to help the student graduate. Institutional comparisons help lay bare the excuses and rationalizations that stand in the way of genuine improvement.
Steven Mintz, who directed the University of Texas System’s Institute for Transformational Learning from 2012 through 2017, is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
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