“David Kirp says the graduation rates of most American colleges and universities are unacceptable – they are simply too low. In The College Dropout Scandal (Oxford University Press), Kirp makes the case for dramatic improvements. A professor at the Graduate School of the University of California, Berkeley, he outlines his views in this email interview.” …
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/08/01/author-discusses-his-book-college-dropout-scandal
Note: Kirp is an Emeritus Professor of Public Policy: https://gspp.berkeley.edu/directories/faculty/david-kirp
The interview and presumably the book go beyond the usual superficial view of graduation rates (where student selection effects dominate) and looks into colleges’ treatment effects on graduation rates after accounting for student characteristics, with examples of different colleges with similar student characteristics having different graduation rates.
For example, Kirp notes that CSU Chico and Eastern Michigan have similar student characteristics, but their graduation rates are very different (68.7% versus 40.7% in six years), and the “opportunity gap” (in graduation rates) for “new gen” (URM, Pell, 1G) students is greatly different between the schools.
Kirp also recognizes that incentives to colleges need to be considered carefully: “This doesn’t mean rewarding schools simply on the basis of their graduation rate, because that might well lead them to set higher admissions standards and relax academic requirements. Instead, the focus should be on adopting policies that remove the biggest roadblocks.”
However, Kirp mentions cost and financial aid issues only briefly in the interview, even though other studies suggest that these and related issues are the most common reasons for dropping out of college.
Most of the chapters in the book are examples of what specific colleges have done: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-college-dropout-scandal-9780190862213