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Would this be like the Catholic Church annulling a marriage? The student would appeal to have his transcript annulled, on the grounds he never consummated his learning experience. That is, he never cracked a book. </p>
<p>Would the school be empowered to add a couple of years to the birth certificate, just to further cover the trail?</p>
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<p>From:</p>
<p>[Reed</a> College | President’s Office | State of the College, September 18, 2006](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/president/speeches/state_of_college_06.html]Reed”>http://www.reed.edu/president/speeches/state_of_college_06.html)</p>
<p>“But what is interesting is the relative difference. A far higher percentage of Reed students drop out than at peer schools.”</p>
<p>Dropping out and transferring are two different things. I know that the transfer rate out of Reed has always been high, I’m not sure if the drop out rate is unusually high. I think the comparison between Reed and St. Johns is a good one. They are both unique schools whose student bodies are self-selecting. At least Reed’s used to be self-selecting, their number of applicants has really increased in the past years so that is not the case so much anymore. The graduation rates at both schools appear to be similar.</p>
<p>Also, tk21769 is right, erasing someone’s college years might create more problems than it solves. Those years have to be accounted for to any potential employer. They are better off explaining why their college years didn’t work out for them.</p>
<p>And finally what lantzk said really struck a chord with me
“This little study of Reed represents, to me, the American Dream”
Graduating from a school like Reed was a dream come true for me. A college certificate should mean something. It shouldn’t mean that your last name was Bush so Yale gave you a certificate.</p>
<p>And it’s the six year graduation rate. My sil took six years to graduate from Harvard after flunking several courses as a freshman. She took a couple of years off and went back and did fine. I’ve known lots of people who weren’t flunking they just didn’t finish, another sil is two courses short of graduating from U. of Chicago. At the time she left, she just had incompletes in them.</p>
<p>I also think that Reed’s higher than average number of Pell grant recipients, may play into their numbers.</p>
<p>Thanks to the original poster. The report was eye-opening.</p>
<p>I feel there should be another category for the “non Reed/MIT/elite” type schools where the 6 year grad rates are especially low - mostly the public universities. These figures are often very distorted. Kids are not always flunking out - many stop out to work and support families. Many do not wish to accept loans but would rather pay up front and have to work to be able to do just that. These people are not going to school continuously as a full time student for 6 years yet are included in the stats.</p>
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<p>However, what I would propose is that it would be up to the student. The student can choose whether he wants to have his transcript scrubbed/annulled/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. If he feels that employers will question the hole on his resume, then he can choose to present the transcript. But if not, then he should be able to conceal it. </p>
<p>Secondly, I don’t think you really have to account for those years anyway. After all, most employers won’t know exactly how old you are, and it is actually somewhat dangerous for them to ask (for doing so may open them to charges of age discrimination). Furthermore, few Reed students will have held a real full-time job before they went to Reed. Hence, any “hole” in your resume would be invisible, for that hole would be located before any full-time job you will hold later in your career. Since employers won’t know your real age, and you won’t help them figure it out by not listing when you graduated from high school, they won’t be able to see the hole.</p>
<p>If that seems confusing, then consider the following two resumes of “sakky1” and “sakky2” who are identical twins. Sakky1 went to Reed and flunked out after 2 years, but Reed cancels his transcript as I’ve been suggesting. He then gets a minimum wage job flipping burgers at SakDonalds. Sakky2 never goes to college at all but instead goes to work at SakDonalds right after high school.</p>
<p>Resume 1
Name:Sakky1
College: None
Work Experience: SakDonalds Burger Flipper (2006-2008)</p>
<p>Resume 2
Name:Sakky2
College: None
Work Experience: SakDonalds Burger Flipper (2004-2008). </p>
<p>So let’s say that you, as an employer, receive the resume of sakky1. You don’t actually know how old he is. For all you know, sakky1 went to work at SakDonalds right after high school, and sakky 1, if he’s smart, is not going to help you by telling you how old he is. So you have no way of seeing the hole in his transcript. </p>
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<p>According to other posters, Reed provides for the full financial need for its students. So finances should not be an issue. If it is, then that speaks to problems in Reed’s financial aid process. </p>
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<p>I’m not sure that dropping/flunking out and transferring out are all that different, from the perspective of the school. Granted, it is obviously better for the student to transfer out than to drop/flunk out. But even if many students are transferring out, then it behooves the school to ask why are so many students choosing to leave. Does Reed not have a satisfying selection of coursework and opportunities, such that students find that they are better off elsewhere? Is Reed attracting students who are not likely to fit into Reed’s unique culture? Is Reed simply too hard? These are all legitimate questions. </p>
<p>As a point of comparison, I would point to Caltech, a school that is even smaller than Reed, whose culture is also highly unique and quirky, and whose course offerings and opportunities are highly restricted, being deep only within the sciences and engineering, and whose coursework is notoriously rigorously difficult. Yet you don’t see the numbers of students trying to transfer out of Caltech as you do at Reed; Caltech still manages to graduate 90% of its students. Why is Caltech able to do that, but not Reed? Like I said, what I think Reed should do is simply not admit those students who are likely to later want to transfer out of Reed anyway, and those students could be identified through a retrospective statistical data analysis of the records of past students. I don’t think it is Reed’s job to serve as a mere waypoint for students to discover the school that they really want to attend. </p>
<p>But again, none of this discussion should be taken as a singular criticism of Reed. Reed is just being used as an example, albeit a drawn-out one. Reed is clearly a far better school in terms of graduating its students than are the vast majority of other schools. The true take-home point is that most schools have problems with graduating their students, for which I have advocated that those schools should simply not have admitted those students in the first place. After all, attending a school without graduating is not costless. It costs time, it costs money, and it often times also involves damage to your permanent academic record - costs which are all unnecessary.</p>
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<p>The real problem would then be that Reed has excessive facilities and should be looking to dispose of them. I would argue that it is simply unethical for a university to build facilities for which no successful student base exists to amortize them such that, for financial reasons, it now needs to bring in extra heads who it can predict will be unsuccessful. {I’m not saying that Reed does this, but if it did, it would surely be unethical.} That would simply mean that Reed would be funding itself on the backs of students’ shattered dreams. </p>
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<p>So look at the holistic picture - the entire holistic picture, by looking at past data. I gave the example before that, if it is shown that, say, former Reed students who come from Dallas seem drop out at an unusually high rate, perhaps due to culture shock, then the answer is to be more careful in admitting students from Dallas in the future. Note, that’s not to say that you admit no students from Dallas. It just means that you be more careful about them, and in particular, that a Dallas student would have to do more to assuage Reed of the concern over whether he truly fits in the Reed culture than, say, a local applicant from Portland. </p>
<p>If this strikes some as being somewhat unfair in that the performance of past students will affect present chances of admission, well, I would say that that’s already pervasive within the college admissions systems anyway. For example, SAT scores are used in the admissions process because studies have shown that SAT scores do correlate with college performance - an inherently retrospective analysis. The correlation is obviously not perfect, or in statistical parlance, the correlation coefficient is not 1, but the correlation is positive and significant. Hence, since students are already being judged on attributes such as SAT scores, why not also judge them on a wide range of holistic characteristics?</p>
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<p>That’s the Spence argument, of which I would completely disagree. To be fair to Spence, he never argued that it was correct either, he merely analyzed a market where he assumed that it was correct and then discussed the outcomes. </p>
<p>But to your point, a college degree does not have to be costly to be valuable in the business world. You can shift and encapsulate the ‘cost’ into the admissions process. That’s what most of the other top private schools do - the hardest part of getting a degree from Harvard, Stanford, or other such schools is simply getting admitted, but once you’re in, it’s relatively easy to graduate. The ‘cost’ has been front-loaded. Works too - top employers have no problem hiring scads of Harvard and Stanford grads. </p>
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<p>I disagree. I wish what you were saying was true. But it isn’t. You don’t just return to your previous station in life. You are relegated to a lower station. </p>
<p>Like I said before, I know a guy at Berkeley who flunked out and, as a result, couldn’t even get into UCDavis - a school that he was easily admitted to right out of high school. Hence, flunking out of Berkeley actually made him worse off than if he had never even gone at all. For example, if he had simply gone straight to the work force right out of high school and decided to apply to Davis now, he would have been admitted purely on the strength of his high school record. But because he went to Berkeley and failed, now he can’t even go to Davis. He is worse off. </p>
<p>Which is why I advocate that Reed (and Berkeley) should wipe the records of all the students who flunk out. He’s not going to graduate from Berkeley anyway, so who cares what his Berkeley grades are? Let that guy apply to Davis with a clean slate. Or, if the schools aren’t willing to do that, then don’t admit those people in the first place. </p>
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<p>Then here’s another option. Have Reed run tighter freshman admissions, but coupled with a more extensive transfer program. It’s not like those people with imperfect high school records who would now be rejected from Reed under the tighter admissions policies that I have proposed would have nowhere to go. They could still go to community college, and if they do well there, they could then apply to Reed as transfer students. Hence, those students would still have the chance to enjoy the intense education that Reed has to offer. But they would have to earn that chance by a strong community college performance. More importantly, Reed would have more information to determine whether the student was strong enough to merit admission. For example, maybe some students are smart, but lazy. If they pick up the slack and excel in community college, then they should be admitted to Reed. But if they continue to be lazy, then they shouldn’t be admitted. </p>
<p>Hence, I would not be leaving anybody ‘out to dry’. Community college would serve as an extra chance.</p>
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<p>Then have those marginal students go to community college instead, as I explained above. Those who do well will be able to transfer to Reed. Those who don’t will be rejected. </p>
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<p>You’d still be able to get in as a transfer student, under my proposal. You could go to community college. You could go to a regular college who admitted you. If you do well there, you could transfer to Reed.</p>
<p>Just thought I would add in my knowledge of Colorado Christian University – it is located where I live and I looked into admissions when I was looking at going back to school.</p>
<p>Admission to the school is competitive – but not in the normal sense we use here at CC. You are required to document your involvement in religious activity for the previous 4 years (what church do you belong to, how long, do you participate in Bible Study, do you volunteer with your church, etc) and provide multiple references from members of your religious community. </p>
<p>The graduation rate doesn’t surprise me – the classes are actually more like University of Phoenix (online, short session, etc) and more than twice as expensive as the University of Colorado here in Colorado Springs. On top of that, they encourage students to take out massive loans right from the beginning and once they can no longer pay they move on to their next victim.</p>