“David Leonhardt”:http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/david_leonhardt/index.html?inline=nyt-per, with whom I incidentally went to Middle School, has “an interesting piece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/business/economy/09leonhardt.html in the NY Times today about graduation rates at universities. The article has a number of points to mate, but the lead is Leonhardt’s assertion that:
bq. At its top levels, the American system of higher education may be the best in the world. Yet in terms of its core mission — turning teenagers into educated college graduates — much of the system is simply failing.
The data to support this contention is taken from a new Princeton University Press book “Crossing the Finish Line”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8971.html, which demonstrates that large numbers of students are failing to graduate from college. This, Leonhardt asserts, is evidence of the failures of the modern university system. Moreover, since freshmen – who tend to populate larger lecture courses – are cheaper to education than upperclassmen, it may even represent a kind of pernicious cost control scheme.
It seems to me that less than perfect graduation rates, however, can be interpreted in a two ways. The first, as Leonhardt has suggested, is as a failure of educational institutes to provide their students with the resources necessary to graduate. An alternative interpretation, however, is that the numbers demonstrate that universities are casting a wide net for _potential_ college graduates, and then letting students determine on their own once they get there whether they will sink or swim. From a Rawlsian viewpoint, this offers a number of nice attributes for society: we are able to identify our college graduates later in the process than if we restricted admission only to those we knew were guaranteed to be able to graduate from college. Yes, some students will fail, but others will get a chance they might not have had with more restrictive admissions policy. Moreover, one can argue that for a college degree to have any meaning, at least some students will have to fail to achieve it; otherwise, the diploma simply equates admission, and not any accomplishment while at the university.
So what do the data have to say about this? Leonhardt presents the following interesting table:
Two things seem to be apparent here. The better the school, the more likely the student is to graduate, regardless of the student’s skills (as measured by HS GPA and SATs). This could be evidence of Leonhardt’s point that more resources (which one would assume the “better” schools are providing to the students) leads to more graduation. It might, however, mean that the most selective schools do a better job of identifying highly motivated students, even controlling for GPA and SAT scores.
However, the second thing apparent from the table is that no matter what the combination of student ability and school selectivity, we always see some students who do not graduate, but we also see lots of students who do. Only one cell on the table (lowest GPAs/SATs at least selective schools) have <50% of their students graduating in 6 years. These numbers seem consistent with a system that takes a chance on a larger number of students than will ultimately graduate, and provides a degree that has some inherent meaning for what went on once a student arrived in college and not only the potential the student showed before they got to college. It may very well be that schools are failing their students, as Leonhardt suggests, but I’m not sure that these data necessarily demonstrate that this is the case.