@bclintonk Regarding Michigan, I went back and did another search and it came up 76%. So I don’t know what happened. Perhaps I ended up on some outdated page (it was formatted differently) or maybe I really need to get my eyes checked. I remember looking at the number and thinking - surely that can’t be true? Sorry about the error.
Graduation rates are determined primarily by the students, not the college.
Yale graduates close to 100% of its students because Yale enrolls students who are incredibly well qualified, highly motivated and well supported financially and otherwise. With those inputs, it almost doesn’t matter what Yale does to those kids – they will graduate no matter what.
The kids that go to a public Ivy like UVA are very strong. So they’ll graduate in high percentages. Regardless of whether they attend UVA, Yale or Arizona. But at Arizona, they’ll be significantly above average students.
The grad rates at less selective colleges (public or private) are much lower. Mostly because of the demographics of their students. One good thing USNWR does is try to grade schools based on whether their grad rates exceed expectations based on their student populations. That’s actually the correct way to look at it. Getting an almost 100% grad rate at Yale really isn’t much of an accomplishment.
What would be a concern for me, as the parent of a high-achieving student, would be the possibility that a school can’t get kids out in 4 years because classes fill, aren’t offered frequently enough, etc., as I’ve been reading can be the case at some schools, maybe more publics than privates.
No one wants to spend more time in school because they literally couldn’t register for the classes needed to graduate in their major in 4 years.
Let me fix that for you: Graduation rates are determined primarily by the students’ wealth, not the college.
Arizona Pell Grants = 33%
Michigan = 16%
New Mexico = 39%
Many/most of these poor kids have to work to pay the bills, so graduating in the standard 4-years is a pipe-dream.
Well, just to be clear, the “problem” here may be more one of optics than anything substantial. The University of Michigan’s most recent Common Data Set shows that for the cohort that entered in 2008, 76% graduated in 4 years or less, 89% graduated in 5 years or less, and 91% graduated in 6 years or less. So that’s very few who took more than 5 years to graduate, and of the 13% who graduated in more than 4 but up to 5 years, my guess is a goodly percentage, probably most, graduated in 4 1/2 years, i.e., one semester “late.” This can happen for a lot of reasons. Some people change majors and find they need an extra semester to meet the requirements. Some take a semester off to work, either just to raise money or because, e.g., they get heavily invested in a political campaign. Some take a semester off to travel. Some end up with a serious injury or illness that leads them to take some time off from school. Some fail a class they need to graduate and must re-take it. Some screw up on their course planning and fail to take one or more required courses in a timely way. (This isn’t necessarily a question of poor advising; the adviser can advise the student all she wants, but in the end it’s the student, not the adviser, who is ultimately responsible for seeing that all the requirements are met, and for registering for and completing all required classes. At Michigan this sometimes happens, for example, because the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts has a 4-semester foreign language requirement, and some students who aren’t adept at and/or don’t enjoy learning foreign languages put it off until it ends up costing them an extra semester or extra year, despite earnest counseling to get it done and out of the way early). It’s been a long time since I attended college, but I had friends and acquaintances in all those categories back in my day. In fact, I took 4 1/2 years to graduate after taking a semester off to work because money was very tight. It was the spring semester (“winter” semester they call it at Michigan, being more candid than most). I came back as a full-time student in the fall and needed an extra semester on the back end to meet all my graduation requirements. I’ve never heard of students at Michigan failing to graduate in 4 years because they couldn’t get into classes they need, though it might happen, and you certainly hear about it it some other schools.
Notice that in my case and in many others, the fact that the student graduates in 4 1/2 or 5 years doesn’t mean that student has paid 4 1/2 or 5 years of tuition and fees; it’s often 4 years actually in residence at the college as a tuition-paying student, interrupted for a semester or two. Or, in the case of students who just need an additional class or two to graduate after 4 years, many will simply attend part-time for the final semester, at reduced per-credit rates.
Why is there more of this at public universities than at privates? Well, the publics make it easier. Most publics allow students to attend on a part-time basis, paying tuition per credit hour rather than the full fee; at many privates, it’s all-or-nothing, i.e., if you’re enrolled you pay full tuition regardless of how many credit hours you’re taking. Most publics have graduation at least twice a year, making it easy to tack on an extra semester; many privates don’t, so if extra time is needed, it may be a full year rather than a semester, and that, coupled with high tuition and no part-time option, places a premium on graduating on time. Many privates also say they guarantee financial aid and/or merit scholarships only for 4 years (though they may make exceptions for, e.g., illness or injury). My impression is publics are more accustomed to the 4 1/2 to 5 year student and their FA policies are more flexible. But it does happen at privates, too. At Brown, for example, the 4-year graduation rate for the 2007 cohort was 84%; the 5-year rate was 93%; and the 6-year rate was 94%. At MIT the figures for the 2008 cohort are 81% in 4 years, 89% in 5 years, and 91% in 5 years. That’s still a significant fraction of the class who are stretching their undergraduate education beyond 4 years, but very few taking more than 5—essentially the same pattern as Michigan.
Publics make it easier to take longer in many ways. Having been faculty at 3 publics, I think neglect is the most common way.
My current campus had too low a 4 yr. grad rate, given the quaity of student and their socio-economic status. This threatened their AAU ranking, and so the administration started a program promising “finish in 4” through contracting with students about responsibiliites on both sides (meeting with advisors, offering courses, etc). It moved them from about 60% to about 70% fairly quickly. There is more awareness of graduation rates than ever before, which is great, but really understudied. As I consider publics for my younger, I will have to spend quite a bit of time analyzing, such as possible, the rates.
A program like this @mamalion ? http://fly.temple.edu/about
Yes, there are a number of programs promoting finishing in foir (my typo was fishing in four), all relatively new because of increased attention to the topic.
Yep, traditionally, there has been less hand-holding at publics (compared to elite privates). For a motivated kid, this should not be a concern.
“Let me fix that for you: Graduation rates are determined primarily by the students’ wealth, not the college.”
Sure.
We all know that the high academic stats needed to get into extremely selective colleges correlate very stronlgy with high SES.
“I have no idea what planet Mr. Quest lives on if he thinks it is somehow the obligation of these public institutions to provide a cut-rate price to OOS students. That’s just lunacy.”
Those days are long gone and not coming back. But many of the public Ivies did used to be screaming deals for OOS students too.
When I went to UVA back in the day, tuition was just slightly more than half of what fancy private colleges charged at that time. Plus the school allocated one third of the seats to OOS. Quite the deal.
You also heard stories about how anyone attending Cal or UCLA OOS could get in-state tuition after attending for a year.
Barring illness, lack of funds or switching majors your junior year…Back in the day it was not all that hard to graduate in 4 years from my public state u. I actually graduated in under 4 years. 3.75 to be exact and that was with a failed class or two and a quarter of study abroad that did not count toward graduation. I made up failed classes over the summer at universities close to my home and double upped classes my senior year to make up for the study abroad that did not transfer. I knew my parents were only paying for 4 years. I had to pay for the summer school classes out of my own pocket, so basically I worked 2 summers to pay for my failing economics and math classes. It is amazing how much kids will buckle down and get it done if it is on their own dime.
I think not graduating in 4 years or 4.5 if you don’t have extenuating circumstances is on the shoulders of the student more than the fault of the university. It can be done in 4 even if you fail classes, change majors or take a break.
and don’t forget, the public Unis tend to be extremely generous with AP/IB and community college credits. It ain’t all that hard to graduate in 3 years in many majors – not Engineering, of course.
Some years ago my spouse read an article implicating UVA as the headwater of the rise in public u tuition. I wish I could find the article. It had to be in Barrons or Scientific American because that it all he reads, lol. It was an enlightening article at the time.
Graduation rates are indeed something to be concerned about, and worth investigating prior to applying. But I think it’s a mistake to assume that low graduation rates are a problem unique to publics. Here are the 4-year graduation rates for some leading (top-50 USNews) public and private colleges and universities. Notice that the very top ranks are dominated by exclusive private LAC more so than research universities, and that the 4-year graduation rates at the top publics are within the same range as many leading privates. UVA’s 4-year rate is the same as Amherst, Chicago, Cornell, Duke, Penn, and Yale. UNC’s is the same as MIT’s. Michigan’s is the same as Stanford’s.
Carleton 91%
Columbia 90%
Davidson 90%
Pomona 90%
Princeton 90%
Middlebury 89%
Swarthmore 89%
Dartmouth 88%
Haverford 88%
Johns Hopkins 88%
Williams 88%
Amherst 87%
Chicago 87%
Cornell 87%
Duke 87%
Penn 87%
UVA 87%
Yale 87%
Bowdoin 86%
Harvard 86%
Northwestern 85%
Brown 84%
Wake Forest 83%
Barnard 82%
Rice 82%
Smith 82%
MIT 81%
UNC Chapel Hill 81%
Boston University 80%
Claremont McKenna 80%
NYU 77%
Bryn Mawr 76%
Oberlin 76%
Stanford 76%
University of Michigan 76%
USC 76%
Lehigh 75%
UCLA 73%
U Rochester 73%
Carnegie Mellon 72%
UC Berkeley 72%
Case Western 64%
RPI 61%
As you go down the selectivity scale below the top 50, 4-year graduation rates fall off. But this is true at many privates as well as at publics.
Great list, but I wasn’t aiming at top 50 for her. Still we were looking at difficult majors, the kind of majors where students get in trouble with graduating in 4 years (engineering, for example).
I am well aware it is a problem in some privates; some low ranking private LAC are among the worst for students losing their way (at high cost). This is a bit off topic and premature for my family, but I will return to it someday.
This is silly. Most public schools are designed to retain talents in state. They were never designed to educate OOS or International students. So the main competition here is between in-state tuition and top private elite tuition.
Most top students, except for the exceptionally wealthy or exceptionally poor, are probably evaluating between their in-state flagship (most likely an honors program) and top private elites. Where they go will probably be largely determined by the amount of financial aid received. I think most parents earning between $150k-$300k a year will not shell out $70k a year in undergrad tuition for a private elite when their children can go to a top flight in-state flagship for next to nothing. Not only do these public ivies remain relevant, but they are more relevant than ever.
I suspect that this claim is more of an excuse by students who do not want to take the class during the 8am section where there are plenty of spaces, or those who voluntarily take 12 credits instead of 15 or 16 credits per semester because they cannot handle the full 15 or 16 credits, or those who do not pay attention when class registration time approaches, so that they register later than they could have registered and find fewer choices.
A more legitimate issue is that some students’ schedules are constrained by the need to work to earn money to pay for college, so they may not be able to take the classes they need if the available times conflict with their work schedules. This is probably more of an issue at public schools (particularly those in states where in-state financial aid is poor) than at elite privates where half of the students come from top 2-3% income/wealth families, and those on financial aid get generous grants that mean less need to work.
But it is likely that the low graduation rates at many colleges are student-related, rather than being due to anything that can be construed as lack of class space. Examples include needing remedial courses, failing courses, taking lower course loads, etc… Note that many colleges have four year pledge programs like these:
http://undergradstudies.csusb.edu/advising/fygp.html
https://www.cpp.edu/~academic-programs/graduation-pledge/
https://www.fullerton.edu/aac/Current_Students/Finish_in_Four/index.asp
http://www.csub.edu/academicprograms/Undergraduate%20Studies/Four-Year%20Degree%20Pledge/
http://www.fresnostate.edu/academics/facultyaffairs/documents/apm/202.pdf
But the actual four year graduation rates at the above schools are low, indicating that few students fulfill the conditions for the four year pledge programs.
Exactly. I was once at a lunch meeting with a Cal State Chancellor of one of the impacted – maxed out campuses, and he was speaking to that very thing. Every time someone mentioned the inability to get classes, he said that he pulled up his course schedule and noted all of the open slots at 8:00 am on Friday. 
The study is old, and I can’t source it now, but one of the main reasons for low 4 year graduation rates is economic. The study looked at dropping/stopping out to acquire the money to continue. The upper economic quartile graduates pretty much in 4 years, and the bottom in 6 or more. Much of what was seen as dropping out 10 years ago is known as stopping out now. There is an exception. Freshmen do not tend to stop out, but rather to drop out.
Schools have gotten better about attending to freshmen (pressure on graduation rates), but they still tend to be taught by TAs and part-timers.
Can’t get classes: I don’t have any statistics, just anecdotes, but schools do not have seats in growing majors, and they can’t add upper-level seats quickly. Pharmacy is booming, for instance. At least one university I know accepts 8X the number of potential pharmacy students as they have seats for. Now maybe 4X would make sense as many students will fail organic chemistry or decide they want to be film makers, but the university has found itself in the position of having more qualified students than seats. Obviously they try to shove as many down the pipeline as possible, but . . . The same can be said of engineering, nursing, CS, etc. The rapid move to wanting STEM degrees plays havoc with planning courses.