<p>The vast overwhelming majority of college students do NOT graduate in four years. And the median age of a college undergraduate is 24.5 years. A very large plurality of students started at community colleges, and may have only done that part-time while working. A significant number served in the military before going to college. A very large plurality do not graduate from the school where they started. </p>
<p>Students starting at 17-18 and graduating in four years are a smallish minority, not the rule. (and they don't go to LACs either - the University of Phoenix by itself is, I think larger than the top 25 LACs put together.) But four-year retention/graduation rates are an excellent surrogate for family income.</p>
<p>The odds vary wildly with major, too. I would be interested in seeing the "not finishing" rate from schools with a heavy engineering focus -- especially those without a large liberal arts program to go with it.</p>
<p>One of the beautiful things about US Higher Ed is that it offers a path for virtually anyone who wants to attempt higher ed, and offers second, third, fourth and many more chances to these kids, too. </p>
<p>For commentators to fault Higher ED because it does not meet some arbitrarily set time standard strikes me as sad, and I'm sure many of the college faculties at these "slow" schools would agree. </p>
<p>After all, none of our kids are the same. Why should we expect them to all progress at the same pace? </p>
<p>I for one applaud the flexibility we offer.</p>
<p>It's not about flexibility or opportunity, in my eyes. It's that, colleges, employers, and parents create this false premise that winds up biting a significant number of students in the butt. </p>
<p>A lot of students may be smart enough to go to college, but that doesn't mean all of them are smart or ambitious enough to finish. I'd rather students START at different times rather than finish at different times.</p>
<p>If a student takes a year off, maybe works, maybe takes a trip, maybe takes a summer class or something BEFORE heading off to tens of thousands of dollars of debt...I think they would have a better chance of finishing and having that money be a wise investment than a student who got caught up in the rat race of college admissions only to go a few semesters and quit because of lack of funds or burn out.</p>
<p>The freshman to sophomore retention can also be skewed by how limited a selection of majors are offered. What about the engineer who starts at a LAC, then transfers to his state flagship because he discovers he really wants to be an engineer? Is it the fault of the LAC? </p>
<p>Now if kids are in general UNHAPPY at a college, and therefore dropping out, that's a different story. </p>
<p>If I were the king of a college, what I'd be REALLY concerned about are those Princeton Review negative lists, like "Least Happy Students", "Campus is Unsightly", "Strained Town Relations", "Dodgeball targets", "This is a Library?", "Long lines and red tape", "Alternative lifestyles not an alternative", "Professors Get low marks", and "Dorms like dungeons". (Even the Princeton Review list: "Students study all the time" is a questionable positive in my book. Do I really want to study all the time?)</p>
<p>My son actually turned away from an excellent top 5 university because it made too many of those negative lists. :eek:</p>
<p>
[quote]
One of the beautiful things about US Higher Ed is that it offers a path for virtually anyone who wants to attempt higher ed, and offers second, third, fourth and many more chances to these kids, too.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Not true. With some notable exceptions (the UC system comes to mind), it offers second and fifth chances for students who are willing to pay full or high price for product that is second-rate or worse. First-rate higher education, of the kind that opens doors to similarly selective graduate programs (funded doctorates, top law and medical schools, etc) is much harder to attain on the "second and third chances" plan than the first time around. There are extremely few second-chance, and for all intents and purposes ZERO third-chance, students on the upper elite tracks.</p>
<p>what percentage of students are on the "upper elite" tracks?</p>
<p>I guess it comes back to attitude/perspective.</p>
<p>You could be a top student in your high school- graduate with enough AP credits from tests to place as a junior at your states flagship U or have earned an International Baccalaurate diploma- go on to a "little ivy"- graduate Phi Beta Kappa & be unemployed 2 years after graduation because you weren't offered the corner office you thought you deserved.
Or
you could do OK in high school do OK at a good college & be happy to be juggling three jobs all that take advantage of your interests and skills.</p>
<p>If you want it to work- it isn't gonna do you much good to whinge about how hard you have it.</p>
<p>I agree with the "do it in 4 years" philosophy, too, and my D was on track to finish a double major at a UC in 4 years, but she ran into a glitch midway through her senior term and actually had to finish one of her degrees the NEXT spring- a year later, due to certain classes being offered at certain times. One issue was personal and the other issue was that the final class she planned to take in summer school (very common at UC) and after 7 years of offering classes in a certain order, the school changed their offering and she could not take the classes she needed in the prereq order :eek: Now she has 2 degrees from 2 different years of issue- complicated, a pain, but she did what had to be done.</p>
<p>Part of this was her fault in her planning to leave a class with prereqs and one of the prereq classes for the very end, and the personal complication, part of it was just the breaks of the game.</p>
<p>Best laid plans do not always work out, esp at a big public!</p>
<p>Agree that for those who are on the upper elite tracks, 2nd and 3rd chance colleges aren't appropriate. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>But hey, isn't it great that we live in a country where even the undecideds, the late-bloomers, the less-than-spectaculars, the still wondering what to do with our lives, get a chance at success?</p>
<p>
[quote]
But hey, isn't it great that we live in a country where even the undecideds, the late-bloomers, the less-than-spectaculars, the still wondering what to do with our lives, get a chance at success?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>When those people decide, bloom, become more spectacular, and figure out what to do with their lives, their chances of (educational) success would in many cases be higher if they lived in a different country.</p>
<p>Americans have a host of unexamined automatic assumptions about things being better in the USA. Some things are, some aren't, and where education is concerned it's a mixture of advantages and disadvantages. The USA is well behind the curve in various aspects of "second and third chances".</p>
<p>thanks for addressing some of siserune's apparent elitism. I was not referring to elite colleges when I made my earlier comments, as percentage wise, few of our productive citizens are products of the elite colleges anyway. If we depended on them for the success of our economy, we'd be in real trouble (and one could argue that without them and their investment banking/lawyer/consultant jobs, we might even be better off? mildly facetious.) I think our country is better off for the legions of graduates of our "second-rate or worse" places that keep our business going, our hospitals staffed, and provide a high percentage of our corporate leadership. I guess siserune never worked with someone who had a position of high responsibility at an organization even though they came from humble roots?</p>
<p>But the truth is even more complex. A decent number of students at these so called "second-rate or worse" places DO show their stuff and get into top programs.</p>
<p>
[quote]
When those people decide, bloom, become more spectacular, and figure out what to do with their lives, they often would have a better chance at (educational) success if they lived in a different country. Americans tend to celebrate the supposed openness of their system mostly out of ignorance of what exists elsewhere.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Siserune, you leave me almost speachless. I've never seen a comment more different from my experience, from the many wonderful people I've known and worked with over the years. Maybe you think the UK is better? Or India? Yea, right.</p>
<p>The following are facts, and there is no particular elitism in pointing them out. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>The second, third etc chances in the US system are of a limited kind. Other systems, including the UK (and in some respects India, though I am not familiar with that system to say so with certainty) do not suffer from such limitation. The society as a whole may have a ceiling for reasons that lie outside the educational system.</p></li>
<li><p>The US is behind the curve in many respects in the second- and third-chance (or even first-chance) education of those "people of humble roots" that you purport to represent. Remediation of adult illiteracy, distance learning, and many other things.</p></li>
<li><p>There are many situations where a person, whatever their background, can rejoin the standard academic track in the non-US systems but would have a devil of a time doing it in the US. A student who destroys his high school career, for instance, cannot just take exams to fix things and qualify for the same level of financial aid, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>In the USA, the number and efficacy of those "second and third chances" depend very, very heavily on money. The moneyed classes have many more options for the educational rehabilitation of their errant progeny. At the lower sectors of the economy, it's a very different story.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>siserune, you're completely confusing me. First you were talking about universities for other-than-the-upper-elite (specifically "First-rate higher education, of the kind that opens doors to similarly selective graduate programs (funded doctorates, top law and medical schools, etc)"; now you're suggesting you were talking about people needing remediation for illiteracy.</p>
<p>Boy, siserune, my take is almost entirely not yours.
First, in the US there are no shortage of schools willing to take your money for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th chances etc., and no shortages of suppliers of money should you decide to undertake such a course, foolish as you may be. Access is not an issue up and down the line.
Another issue is having your fate determined by tracking by secondary school. The US, particularly the elite schools, are more open to home schoolers with non-traditional trajectories than the rest of the world, as far as I can figure out. Heaven help you if you live in Germany, the originator of mass compulsory schooling, where dancing to your own tune is illegal.</p>
<p>First you were talking about universities for other-than-the-upper-elite... now you're suggesting you were talking about people needing remediation for illiteracy.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That's incorrect. My comments are about the entire system. They amount to this: for plenty of people ranging from illiterates to would-be PhD's, the US system is often less flexible and less prone to allow second and third chances, than the systems in other places. The references to remediation or the "upper elite track" are illustrations, not the point itself.</p>
<p>(Note that this is different from the question of whether a second chance in the US is better or worse than a first chance in India, or whether an associate's degree in California imparts more social mobility than a master's degree in Italy, and so on).</p>
<p>my take is almost entirely not yours.
First, in the US there are no shortage of schools willing to take your money for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th chances etc., and no shortages of suppliers of money should you decide to undertake such a course, foolish as you may be. Access is not an issue up and down the line.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That's nearly the same as what I wrote, not an item of disagreement:</p>
<p>"With some notable exceptions (the UC system comes to mind), [US higher education] offers second and fifth chances for students who are willing to pay full or high price for product that is second-rate or worse."</p>
<p>it is pretty clear to me that you have a shocking ignorance about the flexibility in the US system, shocking for one to be so confident in making broad statements, and perhaps also lacking an understanding of the system in other countries, such as the UK. It was not by accident that I chose those two examples. If you had any familiarity with both the US and the UK, then I can't imagine how you could claim the UK offers more flexibility (or whatever you want to call it.)</p>
<p>Another possibility is that I made correct statements. If you "can't imagine" that they are correct, that's not necessarily a problem with anything I said.
Maybe you misunderstood the statements, or maybe the imagination is lacking.</p>
<p>Siserune, in my opinion you made a lot of citation-free assertions with very little specificity. I've been ignoring this thread (a lot of broadly stated heat with very little fire), but I've finally gotten curious enough to ask: What exactly do you mean by "second and third chances," how do different educational systems address these, and what are your sources? </p>
<p>I'll just start by saying that I don't think one can even do this analysis for the US educational system, since there are at least a few thousand different institutions of higher education in the US, and it would be extraordinarily difficult to even catalog them, let alone create a taxonomy of "second and third chances." It might be easier for -- say -- Germany where there is, if I understand it correctly, one centrally-managed system of education, but where education is part of a free market you might end up trying to incorrectly reify something that does not exist.</p>
<p>to return to the original article- I will reemphasize that a lower graduation rate isn't always a bad thing.
Would we hold programs like the Marine Corps, Navy Seals or Army Rangers in higher esteem if they had a higher percentage of completion?</p>
<p>When you are looking for an opportunity to be challenged and grow, it isn't always going to be one that has a high rate of successful completions.</p>
<p>FOr a high rate of successful completions- a program may be either so nurturing and slower pace to accomodate any difficulty- or have a very competive process that only those applicants who have shown that they will finish the program by past experience are accepted- or both.</p>
<p>But there is still a need for programs that are so demanding that not everyone decides/is able to complete it. There is also a need for programs who take chances on applicants- who admit students that haven't necessarily excelled as shown by a 4.00 & 2400 SAT scores, but have shown their tenacity and intelligence in other ways.</p>
<p>Would my daughter have gotten more out of her college education had it not been so rigorous?
I doubt it.</p>