Things have been quite around here lately for basically two reasons. First, this is an incredibly busy time of the year, at least it is for me– lots of grading, lots of reading, lots of teaching, work on a project called “The National Day On Writing” (I’ll post about that soon), a few scholarly projects I’m way behind on, not to mention various chunks of paperwork. Second, there hasn’t been much news as of late, right?
But this morning, I came across “State Universities’ Tradition of Attrition” in Inside Higher Ed by John R. Thelin, who is a professor in the history of education and public policy at the University of Kentucky.
The finding that few state universities graduate more than about 65 percent of their undergraduates in six years is particularly problematic because it indicates a decline from the retention and graduation rate at the same institutions twenty ago. What’s important about this last point is its suggestion that history matters. “How we are doing” in graduating students means at least in part, “Are we doing better or worse than in the past?”
One difficulty, though, is that the data bases on which economists and social scientists usually rely in studying higher education issues today do not extend far back in time. IPEDS and its predecessor, HEGIS, were first compiled in the late 1960s. So, we are left with the question of historical context: How do college graduation rates of today fare when compared with, let’s say, about a century ago?
It’s an important question because one temptation for academic leaders today is to presume that in the early 1900s college students enrolled full time and then graduated in four years. But was that so?
Thelin then goes on to propose an answer (“no”), but it is based on very limited data– a handful of schools and a few years of enrollments. What is perhaps more interesting to me is the tiny numbers here. According to Thelin, the freshman class at the University of Kentucky in 1907 was 124 students. 124, at a big school like U of K? I’ll bet the number now is closer to 12,000.
In any event, it’s an interesting piece, and one that raises some thought-provoking questions on studies like Crossing the Finish Line, which I might actually be able to read if I return to and finish up some of the work I’m behind on….
