Monthly Archives: November 2008

I’ve been kind of distracted by that pesky day-job and that pesky election thing lately, but there have been a couple of interesting articles in Inside Higher Ed recently I thought this group might find interesting. Most provocative perhaps is “Colleges as ‘Failure Factories.’” Here is the opening paragraph:

The reality that only about 7 in 10 students earn degrees after four years in high school has been widely deplored, and it helped drive the Bush administration and Congress to embrace the No Child Left Behind law earlier this decade. But if that situation is seen as such a crisis, why aren’t more people upset about the fact that graduation rates in higher education are quite a bit worse?

This is all based on an analysis by Mark Schneider, who is “vice president for new educational initiatives at the American Institutes for Research who was, until a few weeks ago, commissioner of education statistics in the Bush administration’s Department of Education” and “a distinguished professor of political science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.”

Now, “Cliff Adelman, now a senior researcher at the Institute for Higher Education Policy,” dismisses Schneider’s findings on many different many levels. Schneider even notes some of the obvious problems:

Schneider acknowledges, in his conclusion and in footnotes to the report, that the low graduation rates of some colleges may be explained, if not justified, by the fact that colleges “let many students begin who do not have the skills and talent needed to graduate with the expectation that even if many fail, an open access system gives students opportunities to grow and succeed.” Throw in evidence that college attendance, “even absent a degree, can lead to higher wages,” Schneider writes, and “the risks of attending a college at which [students] have a low probability of success may be worthwhile.”

But at the very least, he argues, students need to be much better informed about their chances of graduating, “so that students and their families can choose colleges at which they will have a higher likelihood of success.”

So, I think this is an interesting piece. I very much believe in the “opportunity granting” mission of EMU, but I’m also bothered that many of the students we admit don’t manage to graduate.