I know that a college where I used to teach did keep track of “persistence” (students staying enrolled from year to year). They conducted studies of the factors involved, including finances, health, academic performance, and other issues. And they instructed academic advisors that one of their responsibilities was to help students to make “normal progress” in their programs.
I’m sure you are familiar with a variety of mathematical approaches to questions such as this, @ucbalumnus. Nonetheless, you seem to be adhering to just one of them. Often – but not always, of course – an individual’s odds will roughly (but predictably) comport with the general odds irrespective of what would appear to be confounding additional elements specific to that individual.
Does taking longer than 4 years constitute “failing”?
The school where I teach has a lot of non-traditional students. Some of them are taking courses to advance their jobs with no particular intention of graduating with a degree.
If students do poorly it is always the fault of the faculty. Even if they arrived with an ACT score of 11. Really, you must join the faculty so you can experience the joy and reward of failing students who are functionally illiterate.
@sylvan8798 if they are functionally illiterate then it begs the question why were they admitted? A a low graduation rate due to admitting academically unqualified students would definitely be a red flag.
You also have states where they want their state schools to have high acceptance rates to give “all” their state students a chance at a good education. Some of these students take longer to graduate because they have more remedial or low level classes to take. The classes do not teach down.
A high number of students taking time to coop or study abroad or are in programs where they have programs that don’t give BS degrees until later but give advanced degrees more quickly can add to the numbers.
I do not like people saying S17s college isn’t good because of these numbers. Most of his classmates are high achieving and the classes are well-taught and challenging. He won’t graduate in 4 years because he goes straight to vet school his fourth year. Lots of students do one year internships to help pay for school also.
You can find an interesting interactive figure and New York Times story about predicted graduation rates at various colleges and their actual graduation rates at this site:
This compares graduation rates for similarly situated student bodies at different schools. There is quite a variation. I am not sure what exactly causes all of the remaining variation. It would be interesting to explore.
I was using 6 year graduation statistics. IMO if a traditional, full-time student hasn’t graduated within 6 years something has gone very wrong with that kid’s college career.
Open admission community colleges and the least selective public universities exist to give students another chance to do well in college even if they did poorly in high school (or may not even have usable high school records, such as immigrants or refugees from countries in civil war or such). Obviously, even though some such students will succeed, many will fail. The states funding them presumably believe that those who succeed will help the state economy and society to a greater extent as college educated people than those who fail will cost the state in educational subsidies that fail to produce much.
Missing from those listed factors used to calculate expected graduation rate are HS GPA and/or rank (perhaps due to it being less convenient to find consistent and comparable numbers than for test scores, even though they are somewhat more important than test scores at colleges overall) and students’ ability to pay the cost of the college (which is reflective of both the student’s parental money and the college’s cost, including its FA and scholarships). They do, however, count students as graduated if they transferred to a different college and graduated from another college.
Within their model, they found that overperformers had higher percentages students living on campus, while underperformers had the lowest percentage of students living on campus. There is probably some correlation with students’ ability to pay the cost of college, since the lowest percentage of students living on campus colleges tend to be commuter-based colleges, where students attend because they have no other affordable choice.
I don’t think it is unreasonable to regard a school’s graduation rate as a general indicator of an accepted student’s chances regardless of their individual HS GPA or standardized test scores. As evidence, take a look at https://chancellor.mit.edu/sites/default/files/MITGraduationRates-2008-2015.pdf which gives graduation rates by residence hall affiliation at MIT.
With nearly all accepted MIT students having fairly impressive high school stats, the large differences in graduation rates among the residence halls is probably more attributable to the culture of the halls than the HS stats of the particular students. If that is true for MIT residence halls, it seems to be likely true when comparing graduation rates between colleges as well.
The analysis at https://heri.ucla.edu/DARCU/CompletingCollege2011.pdf found that living off campus was one of the most influential analyzed variables in predicting reduced chance of graduating after controlling for low/middle/high income. Planning to live off campus appeared to be more influential than parents’ income level. The author writes,
Some of the other more influential variables for reduced and increased chance of graduating in 6 years with full controls include:
Reduced chance of graduating
Poor HS grades
Is American Indian or Latino
Expects to study health or engineering fields
Expects to live off campus
Expects to transfer to a different college
Attended charter high school
Older student than traditional
Parents living apart
Parent(s) deceased
Increased chance of graduating
Good HS grades
Attends HBCU or Catholic school
Is Jewish or Catholic
Is Asian
Speaks English as a 2nd language
When actual graduation rate is notably different than expected based on student stats, there is often a valid reason for that difference that is not a negative for individual students. For example, among highly selective colleges, GeorgiaTech has one of the lowest 4-year graduation rates, with only 37% graduating in 4 years. I believe the primary reason for GeorgiaTech’s low 4-year graduation rate is the extremely high co-op participation rate. Offering many co-op opportunities is not necessarily a bad thing, even if it does reduce graduation rate. Stanford’s 4 year graduation rate of 75% is well below almost all other Ivy-type highly selective colleges. I believe the primary reason fro Stanford’s low 4-year graduation rate is the high co-terminal master’s participation rate. 37% of engineering/CS school graduates did a co-terminal master’s in addition to the bachelor’s in the most recently available year. Making it easy for undergrads to simultaneously pursue grad degrees is not necessarily a bad thing, even if it does reduce graduation rate.
The graduation rate by residence hall is completely different from the graduation rate by HS GPA or standardized test score. There is no shortage of research showing that individual students with lower HS GPA/score stats are less likely to graduate than are individual students attending the same college with higher HS GPA/score stats, including the paper linked in my earlier post above. However, this relationship is not as significant at highly selective colleges like MIT, where almost everyone is academically qualified enough to graduate and hardly anyone fails out. The small minority of students who fail to graduate from HYPSM… type schools often do so for reasons unrelated to academic qualifications.
Then I would submit that the money lost on the educational subsidies for students who really had no chance of graduating would be better spent on strengthening the K-12 system so they didn’t graduate functionally illiterate in the first place. It would also result in less debt for the students. That’s a failure of the K-12 system and should not be addressed by turning a 4 year college degree into a 5 year degree. Personally I don’t think that falls within the mandate of a college or university. Paying tuition to earn an education that is free in K-12 does not make economic sense to me. It’s akin to sending your kids to a private school for a year after high school graduation. Also what happens to those students who graduate who are functionally illiterate but don’t go to college?
Would be great if the heavy co-op programs would/could report figures differently (maybe they do), so a 5 yr co-op student who graduates with a full yr work experience is viewed the same as graduating in 4 yrs. These programs are great and quite frequently result in a very strong job placement. They pay decent salaries while working at the co-op too so it’s not like it’s costing a traditional additional year of college expenses.
Internships are great but you can’t really compare a 10 week summer internship to a full yr of work. The type of responsibilities assigned are quite different.
There are many reasons why individuals transfer or stop attending a school, but when you’re looking at year after year of cohorts, it’s about the money. Period. You can have all the support networks, fabulous advising, first class faculty, etc, but if a student is working 30 hours a week while going to school, the financial and other stresses can be too much. This is true for students who live at home, maybe more so as they’re expected to work, go to school, and help at home, for instance picking up siblings after school or getting dinner started.
(1) I went to a public university and while there was (and still is) a demographic who “flunk out,” the overwhelming majority of kids who don’t finish in 4 or 6 years are kids who just can’t afford college anymore. Sometimes families struggle and send their kids “for as long as possible” and sometimes a life event such as the death of a parent or a personal illness gets in the way. Neither is a reflection on the capabilities of the students nor the professors. Very few public scholarship and/or grant aid includes money for room and board, a large expense of college.
(2) The super-bright kids are most likely going to be in honors schools where they will have similarly placed class peers who are also super bright.
The reason why a lot of the “top” schools have high graduation rates is because most will come close enough to meeting need that students have the luxury of focusing on their education without killing themselves trying to earn enough money to keep themselves in school.
There’re multiple causes for low, or lower than expected, graduation rates. Beyond simultaneous pursuit of multiple degrees or coop opportunities, which should have been excluded from the calculation of graduation rates, there exist underlying causes for lower graduation rates we see today than before. More students are going to colleges today. Some of them are simply unprepared for colleges academically (and perhaps financially). They affect mostly relatively unselective colleges. At the other end of the spectrum, for the more selective colleges, admission standards have become more “holistic”, some of their admits are less than qualified, despite adcoms’ constant assurances. Many more students today struggle in colleges, even though colleges have generally become less rigorous. Burnouts and mental health issues have become more widespread.
That would be connected to another theme around these forums, which is that many posters do not want their states to financial-aid-fund residential living for college students (i.e. students with little or no money should commute to the nearest state university). But then that presumes that the ROI of additional financial aid to fund residential living that would produce higher graduation rates (and hence a better educated work force that will improve the state economy) at already-subsidized state universities is not high enough to be worth doing (but do we know whether this is true?). Or that it is a case of where, even when an attractive ROI opportunity is presented, the state may not have the money up front to take advantage of it. Or that some prefer to hoard opportunities and do not want additional college graduates competing with them or their kids in what they see as a zero sum job market.
What is the evidence that the more selective colleges are admitting academically weaker applicants than before, either overall, or for “special” groups (athlete, development, legacy, URM)?
What is the evidence that “many more students today struggle in colleges” for academic reasons (as opposed to cost and affordability reasons)?