|
Students, Universities, and Graduation Rates: John V. Lombardi and Elizabeth D. Capaldi Published in Ideas in Action, Florida TaxWatch, (IV:3, March 1997) ©
In the endless search for a single measure of university quality and effectiveness, researchers, newsmagazines, and public officials have fastened on the graduation rate as the key measure of success. This enthusiasm came first from the NCAA where the reporting of graduation rates for student athletes is a long-standing art form. And in truth, the measure has tremendous surface charm. It offers one number (the percentage of those students who enroll in year one who graduate after four, five, or six years). It appears to provide a clear indication of how successful a university is in getting its students out the door with a degree. And it offers an opportunity to engage in that popular American sport of ranking universities by one-dimensional data. Unfortunately, while the measure is popular, and probably will endure for some time, it actually does a poor job of representing what colleges and universities do. All things being equal, the graduation rate might have some interest, but of course in American colleges and universities all things are never equal. For one thing, the graduation rate reflects many characteristics of the university or college that have nothing whatever to do with the quality or effectiveness of education. If we correlate graduation rate to various characteristics that we can measure, the result should surprise no one. The wealthier the student population and the higher the tuition the students pay, the higher the graduation rate. The more of a university’s students who have the funds to attend full time, the higher the graduation rate. The more transfer students the university has, the less representative the graduation rate is of the university’s total performance because graduation rates do not include junior or community college transfer students. Some of the enthusiasm for graduation rates comes from data that a predict student success from SAT or other standardized test scores. College and university admission officers know that the very best predictor of an individual student’s success in higher education is that student’s high school grade point average. The next best predictor of individual success is the standardized test (the SAT or ACT for examples). However, this predictability which allows us to compare individuals does not translate well to the comparison of institutions. We cannot easily predict the graduation rate of institutions simply by adding up the test scores or GPA’s of the individuals who attend. This approach ignores all the other elements in a university environment that affect the institution’s graduation rate in addition to the average SAT. Moreover, predicted graduation rates place far too much emphasis on the determinants of SAT scores (which correlate highly with socioeconomic status). Even graduation rates themselves calculated in the traditional NCAA four, five, and six year method fail to capture the success of part-time or working students or community college transfer students. Part-time and working students may take seven or eight years to graduate. These successful students appear as failures in the data, and the standard methodology does not even count transfer students. Other students enter one university, do well but find that the program they need is offered at another university and so transfer. Traditional graduation rates also count this student as a failure. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| University of Florida | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Comparison of Six-Year Graduation Rates | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
(First-Time-In-College without Transfers vs. First-Time-In-College with Transfers to Other Florida Public Universities) |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
First Enrolled |
Grad Rate First-Time Freshmen w/o Transfers |
Grad Rate First-Time Freshmen w/ Transfers |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
1989 |
60.92% |
68.79% |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Source: SUS Graduation and Retention Study 1984 through 1994 (Nov. 1996) |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Institutions also differ in their academic programs. All other things being equal (which they never are), students in many professional programs such as engineering for example almost always take longer to graduate than students in most liberal arts and sciences majors. Some professional programs require 130 or more hours, so even a full time student will not graduate in four years. Institutions differ in the composition of their student bodies by minority status and by gender, and here too the data indicate different graduation rates.
Tuition and other costs play an important part in student success. It takes little imagination to understand why students who pay ten to fifteen thousand dollars in tuition per year focus carefully on completing their degree within four years. The cost of postponing courses for this student is high. Students who enroll in a university with high tuition and fees must plan carefully and understand clearly what they must do to succeed. Universities who charge these rates also focus on making sure that they select students who can succeed in this time frame, and so the population of high tuition universities tends to reflect higher socioeconomic groups.
Universities with low tuition, mostly public institutions, have students who may choose to stay enrolled in the university for a longer time simply because the cost to continue is relatively low. The public university student may also choose to stay enrolled part time and work part time because this combination provides funds to pay the low tuition and, over a longer period, complete the degree. As we have seen, such students may appear as failures in the graduation rates. Public universities, under intense pressure to provide opportunities to everyone, often choose their students in part to provide as much access as possible, admitting many highly qualified students, but also admitting many whose qualifications may be less impressive, whose financial resources may be limited, but whose need for an opportunity is great. These universities judge that providing an opportunity to high risk student may well be worth the higher risk that the student will fail. Even within public universities, students who have a financial commitment to a four-year experience have a higher graduation rate than those without that financial commitment, so participants in pre-paid but time-limited tuition plans such as the Florida Pre-Paid plan, graduate at a higher rate than the student body at large within the six year period.
Total First-Time Freshmen
Pre-Paid First-Time Freshmen
%
%
Graduated
Graduated
28.51%
33.14%
29.03%
32.83%
28.31%
38.31%
60.76%
55.35%
56.06%
54.30%
66.88%
65.88%
62.15%
76.62%
Does this mean that universities and their many constituencies should not worry about graduation? No. Graduation and degrees represent the primary product of the university’s undergraduate education. The appropriate measures of effectiveness focuses on the resources the university invests in each student to produce a degree. Most university degrees consist of a rigorous program of courses and study expressed in terms of credit hours taken. The distribution of these credit hours comes from the faculty designed curriculum that usually includes a core program and a specialized major program to produce the degree. In many universities the standard liberal arts degree uses about 120 credit hours. The measure of the institution’s efficiency (and the student’s efficiency) is the number of credit hours a student takes beyond those required for a degree.
This measure ignores the calendar. We do not care whether we have a married student with family and job who takes ten years to complete her degree or we have a wealthy student whose family pays all the costs for him to attend full time and complete in three or four years. If both of these students complete their degree in 120 hours, then they have both used the university’s and their own resources effectively. If students use 132 hours or 150 hours, they then consume more university and personal resources than is optimally required for them to graduate. The university or the state may choose, for educational policy reasons, to fund more credits than the students need to support changes in majors, double majors, and enrichment or experimentation. Whatever the mission of the institution, this method of accountability makes the costs clear.
This measure, like almost every other measure that compares American higher educational institutions, is highly dependent on individual institutional characteristics. The wealth and preparation of incoming students, the number of transfer students, the balance of arts and sciences and professional schools, and other such institutional characteristics will affect these numbers.
Legislators who want to contain the costs of higher education will do best by focusing on the reduction of excess credit hours and will do worst by focusing on predicted graduation rate. If a public college or university discovers that the government will pay incentives to graduate students, then the behavior that produces revenue for the institution will be graduation (not quality, not integrity, not access, and not effectiveness). If a public college or university discovers that the government will pay incentives for meeting excess hours standards, then the behavior that produces revenue will be advising, tracking, and availability of required courses.
The greatest strength of America’s universities and colleges is their complexity and diversity. There are colleges for every student’s aspirations, abilities, and financial capabilities. When an enthusiasm for simplicity overcomes our good sense, and when we focus on single measures of productivity, effectiveness, or quality for all institutions, we always do as much or more damage than we do good. What we need are many measures of quality and productivity, we need like institutions compared, and we need an understanding of the differing expectations we have of our different institutions. This is not to avoid measurement and accountability, it is to reject the forced homogenization of all colleges and universities under simpleminded measures. In the end we will find out what we already know: The more money you have and the higher tuition you pay, the more likely you are to succeed in college.
4/10/97