Spring 2004

by Edward B. “Ted” Fiske

Seven months after her high school graduation, Christina Dorman had already dropped out of two colleges. The daughter of Maine potato farmers and the first in her family to continue studies beyond high school, Dorman started out at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire on a field hockey scholarship. She had roommate problems, though, and felt “so lonely that I stopped eating.” Within three weeks she was on the phone, pleading with her father to come pick her up.

Dorman enrolled the following week at the University of Maine at Orono but found it overwhelming. “No one knew me,” she recalled. “I was just a number.” So once again she packed up and applied to Keene State College in Keene, N.H., where she found a niche. She played lacrosse, joined a sorority, developed a close relationship with faculty members and graduated in May of 2003. “I think having friends and becoming involved made the difference this time,” she said. “That and the fact that adults cared about me.”

Stories such as Chris Dorman’s are occurring with growing frequency these days. As she and millions of other children of baby boomers swell the ranks of U.S. colleges and universities, they challenge institutions to deal with increasingly diverse student bodies. Students like Dorman, who enroll in a four-year residential program right out of high school, are no longer the norm — and even many of those who fit this category come to campus with needs and expectations that defy traditional patterns.

For U.S. colleges and universities, the challenge these days isn’t so much to attract more students; rather, it is to help students succeed once they get there — and it’s not at all clear that this challenge is being met. A recent report from the American Council on Education (ACE) points out that only one in six undergraduates is a “typical” student who enrolls at a residential campus as an 18-year old, stays four years and graduates with a baccalaureate degree. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) show that only 55 percent of students who embark on bachelor’s degrees at four-year colleges and universities end up with a degree six years later. Even if you count students who transfer to other institutions, NCES data show, the proportion is only about 60 percent.

“Retention is the Achilles heel of American higher education,” says Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. “With the exception of schools at the top end, colleges and universities are not succeeding in retaining and graduating sufficient numbers of their students. If they were public schools, we would put them in receivership.”

Apparently some politicians think that cracking down on colleges with poor graduation rates might not be such a bad idea. The calls for greater accountability that have been heard at the primary and secondary levels for more than a decade are now being sounded in higher education as well. The Bush administration has sent signals that it wants to find ways to reward colleges with high retention and graduation rates as part of the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Regional accrediting agencies now routinely look at student performance and graduation rates, and the term “performance-based funding” has become common in the lexicon of state legislators. According to a recent report by the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York, 36 states now link some share of their tax-dollar support for public colleges and universities to measures of institutional performance, including graduation and retention rates.

Much of this political scrutiny of student success rates is rooted in the fact that the national economy needs more college graduates in today’s information age than it did during the industrial era (more...). The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that new jobs available to workers with a high school education or less will grow by only 12 percent between 1998 and 2008 — much lower than the comparable growth rates for jobs requiring bachelor’s degrees (22 percent) and associate’s degrees (31 percent).

Americans used to pride themselves on the fact that the United States sent a much higher proportion of its high school graduates on to postsecondary education than did European and other developed countries, where many students were channeled into vocational and technical programs in their early teens. But this pattern no longer holds. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show that in 2001 only 39 percent of young adults aged 24 to 35 in the U.S. had obtained a postsecondary degree — a figure that put the United States behind Canada, Ireland, Japan and Korea.

The growing diversity of the student population means that the very students who in the past have been most at risk of dropping out of college — those from low-income families, students of color, first-generation college students – constitute an increasingly significant proportion of all students in higher education.

U.S. Census data show, for example, that the number of Hispanics enrolled in American colleges has more than tripled since 1980, to nearly 1.5 million, while the Hispanic share of bachelor’s degrees has risen from 2.3 percent to 6.2 percent. The College Board reported that the proportion of minority students taking the SAT in 2002 reached an all-time high of 36 percent, up six points from 10 years ago. Thirty-eight percent were first-generation college-bound students, which is one percentage point above the 2001 figure.

Economics also are driving the new interest in retention. Richard A. Miller, a researcher at the higher education consulting firm of Noel-Levitz, estimates that American colleges and universities lose approximately $1 billion a year in tuition and fees from first-year attrition alone, and that the loss of earnings for each cohort of students that drops out of college totals more than $4 billion.

The costs to individuals who fail to graduate also are becoming increasingly evident. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the wage premium of a bachelor’s degree versus a high school diploma is $900,000 over a working lifetime. The cost is even greater for dropouts who take on loans to finance their college education and end up with debts to pay but no academic credentials to help them do so.

Reasonable people can disagree about how well colleges and universities have risen to the retention challenge. George D. Kuh, a professor of higher education at Indiana University, makes the “glass is half full” case by citing the growing diversity in the student population. “There are a whole bunch of people in college today who in the past would have been summarily dismissed as not belonging in higher education — or at least as belonging in a different type of institution,” he said. “It is an achievement of our time that we have not lost ground.”

That may be so, but the uneven way that dropouts are distributed across U.S. higher education seems troubling by any measure. Studies show that students at certain types of institutions — most notably residential, independent four-year colleges — have a far better chance of graduating than their peers at other types of institutions. Likewise there is abundant evidence that certain kinds of students — members of racial and ethnic minorities, those from low-income backgrounds and those who are the first in their families to attend college — are particularly vulnerable to leaving school without completing their program or earning a degree.

Such inequities raise disturbing questions, not only about educational equity, but also about the ability of colleges and universities to handle the kinds of students now arriving on campus. “From a democratic and economic perspective, there are few areas in public policy that present such profound and substantial returns,” said Miller of Noel-Levitz. “Most campus officials will agree that student success is an urgent issue.”