Defense Of Current Procedure For Measuring College Graduation Rates

By Robert Shireman

• From Huffington Post

The way college graduation rates are measured is not perfect. But the claim that colleges enrolling a lot of part-time students are treated unfairly because these students are “overlooked” or “left out,” as a recent article claimed, is pure bunk. The erroneous claim is not new. Officials at colleges with low graduation rates have for years defended their rates by falsely asserting, perhaps mistakenly believing, that their part-time students who eventually graduate are “counted as failures.”

 

With the federal government poised to reveal college comparisons that will likely include use of the graduation rate, it is time to set the record straight. Students who start college as part-timers are in neither the numerator nor the denominator of the graduation rate, so their existence on a campus has no effect on the calculation. They are not counted, period. The graduation rate is, quite logically, a measure only of those students who could, theoretically, finish in the prescribed amount of time because they started as full-time students.

To be sure, more robust data on student success would be useful, such as the systemdeveloped by the California community colleges, allowing for much more refined analysis based on the characteristics and interim progress of the students. Even better would be a federal data system that allowed for a variety of analyses across institutions and states. But the current graduation rate measure is neither unfair nor fundamentally flawed. And it would not make sense to include part-time students in the rate as currently designed: Doing so would lower rather than lift the graduation rate, both because part-timers take longer and because fewer of them ever make it to the finish line no matter how long you measure it.

 

Valid cautions about the rate

Policy makers focus on the graduation rate as an accountability tool because there is little else available, and they want to make sure that colleges and universities are doing everything they can to keep students engaged and learning. They are right that a college can improve its graduation rate by:

• Helping students figure out what they want to study, and guiding them to courses that are challenging enough academically but are not overwhelming;
• Reaching out to assist students who exhibit signs of struggle, before it’s too late; and,
• Making sure students feel connected socially, so they feel that they’re a part of the campus, that they belong.

But policy makers need to be careful about placing too much value on a college’s graduation rate, because there are some less noble ways that the number can be increased. One is to lower standards. The easiest way for a college to have a high graduation rate — 100 percent — would be to hand the sheepskin to every student who walks in the door. Of course, no college goes quite as far as being an obvious degree mill. But it is worth remembering that colleges themselves decide whether someone deserves a degree; we must trust that the people running the colleges will not make decisions that defeat the very purpose of the degree.

A bachelor’s degree is like the carrot hanging in front of the horse, a lure invented by society to encourage people to explore, to discuss, to question, to perform, to fail, to enjoy, to invent, to connect, to disappoint, to achieve. We rely on colleges to maintain the value of the degree by ensuring that it is conferred only upon a student who has traveled far enough academically to deserve it. Already there are a lot of questions about the skills of college graduates. We would be well-advised not to make it even harder to trust that colleges are maintaining the integrity of the degree.

If we start paying colleges based on the number of degrees they hand out, it is not hard to imagine what will happen. Just look at how universities lower standards in response to the financial pressure to keep star football players from flunking out.

Another danger is that colleges will shun needy students in favor of more academically focused, wealthier students. Given that most colleges already salivate over well-prepared and well-heeled high school graduates it is hard to see how highlighting the graduation rate could make that hazard worse. But it is a useful reminder to policy makers that a college may seem great because of the students who enroll rather than because of the teaching and support that the institution offers.

For consumers, the fact that the rate may be high in part because of the students who enroll is no reason to dismiss the measure. Much the opposite. Peers can be as important a factor in student success as the inspiration that can come from excellent instructors and support staff. Because of the infectious nature of learning, it is not always evil for a college to make an effort to enroll a critical mass of well-prepared students, even plying them with scholarships.

At community colleges, it is important to combine the graduation rate with the separate transfer rate, since transferring is one of the primary purposes of a two-year college. Four-year colleges also have the option of reporting a transfer rate, as explained in this useful article (full text available to Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers).

While there is no single piece of information that adequately measures what a college does, the graduation rate is one of the more useful indicators available, despite its imperfections.