College’s graduation rates give you some idea of caliber of peers and support system provided by the college.
As there is more to education then working the system and getting out with employability. I want kids to be educated in a supportive yet challenging system with collaborative yet competitive peers. It’s more of a degree vs education issue than effect of average graduation time on an individual student.
If we are ignoring ranking, selectivity, teacher standards, acceptance rate, average student stats/caliber, graduation rate etc etc then what are we really looking for? Just affordability and employability?
One of my roommates had an onset of full-on paranoid schizophrenia during the winter of our junior year. Auditory and visual hallucinations, God speaking to him and telling him how awful he was. He was hospitalized at least three times in a 15-month period, the first time with me restraining him while he writhed and spoke in tongues in the back of the Hillel rabbi’s car. He had to withdraw for that semester.
He graduated on time, with our class.
It turned out that with some support, some medication, some friends who are willing to put up with a lot, and parents who are in complete denial about the severity of your problems, plus a really high IQ, you can pass college classes, especially technical ones that don’t invite psychotic ideation, even if you are completely loony tunes. Not all kids are like that, of course – there are many parents on CC with different sorts of stories to tell. But kids like that exist.
I suspect hyper-selective colleges have a higher proportion than other college of kids who, if they become crazy, can nonetheless power through on that basis.
Anyway, I think it is perfectly legitimate for Williams not to count any of the kids in The Grey King’s dorm as first-year attrition. They all apparently plan to return, and they will likely all graduate within six years, if not four.
I wonder whether kids who die are included in the denominator of those percentages? It seems wrong not to include them if they committed suicide due to academic stress, of course, but it seems wrong to include them if, for example, they died because of a pre-existing illness, or because they were hit by a car. And I wouldn’t want the job of deciding which suicides were a reflection of some quality at the college and which were simply the result of a pre-existing condition that happened to become virulent during college.
I don’t think we should be so quick to assume that people who start college but don’t finish are “failures” or a waste of their own and society’s resources. Salary surveys consistently show that on average, people with “some college” but less than a Bachelors degree (or even less than a 2-year Associates degree) have considerably higher lifetime earnings than those with no college—though of course less than those who complete their studies. Many people in this group learn valuable skills in college, expand their social networks, perhaps increase their self-confidence. Some employers give them credit for at least trying college and will entrust them with more responsibility than workers with only a HS diploma or less. And although I’m sure this will sound old-fashioned, I continue to believe that education has intrinsic value, and that a life with a semester or two of exposure to literature, philosophy, history, and the fine arts is a better life than one with no exposure to these subjects at all.
While I agree that financial constraints are often the principal reason people don’t finish college, many other factors may be at play as well. Illness, for example. Or family obligations. Unplanned pregnancies may affect both female and male students who suddenly find themselves juggling child care responsibilities with demands for more income to support a growing family, and education taking a back seat, if it continues at all. In some of our immigrant communities, cultural norms allow young women to be educated, but only until they marry, often young, and sometimes in arranged marriages; at that point their sole responsibility becomes to maintain the household, do all the cooking and cleaning, care for their husband, and produce and rear children. And some students don’t figure out until they’ve had some college under their belts that it just doesn’t suit their interests, their temperament, and their best talents, and they’d rather be welders or electricians or auto mechanics than sit through classes that bore them to death and exams that are as much fun as root canals, in order to prepare for a job pushing paper somewhere when they’d rather be in a hands-on skilled trade they truly enjoy. Better to know this before ever starting college, of course, but it’s not always clear to a 17- or 18-year-old, especially if parental, peer, and teacher expectations are pushing them toward college. These sorts of students don’t show up in large numbers at the elite colleges with gaudy graduation rates, but they’re actually quite common at our public universities, even at the flagships but especially at the less selective and non-selective public institutions.
Students entering the top colleges are often 18 years old and have fewer obligations than those starting at pubic schools, even flagships. They can go to school for 4 straight years, especial if they have financial support, good opportunities for summer work at more than minimum wage, good health care on campus. Other students take time to do co-ops, missionary work, military service. Really, I think the 4 year grad rate will soon be meaningless.
My own daughter is a ‘statistic’ as she only attended school for 8 semesters but took one semester off to do a gig at Disney’s College Program, so she graduated after 4.5 years. We don’t consider her a failure. Other daughter went 8 straight semesters because that’s what her scholarship required so the school was controlling that a little.
I don’t know how they count my nephew as he finished his degree in 8 semesters but delayed graduation so that he could attend grad school at the same school but at the undergrad rate. Technically, he graduated after 10 semesters.
All actual research demonstrates the exact same thing - the most common reason for students not finishing their degrees are financial. Yet, despite that, and with absolutely no evidence, people keep on insisting that kids are dropping out because they are “not good enough” (AKA “they’re not prepared”).
As for the claims that students are less prepared today. That doesn’t match the statistics that show that the rates at which students are dropping out of college are lower today than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, across all income levels (page 21 in the second reference).
@MWolf For the colleges JHS is talking about (elite private’s) preparedness/maturity are the most common reasons for dropping out. For public colleges where many students struggle financially to pay, finances are the reason they drop out.
@CU123 I was speaking to the general theme of the thread, rather than to JHS’s last post.
Also, the majority of private schools also struggle with issues of students dropping out because of finances. There are 1,700 nonprofit private colleges out there, and only about 200 or so are full of rich kids who do not run out of money.
The average 6 year graduation rate of private colleges and public colleges is about the same.
In all honesty, only about 5% of all undergraduate students actually attend one of these “elite” private colleges, and therefore I do not actually think that the issues that affect graduation rates in such a small subset of undergraduates are important, compared to those that determine kids dropping out in the colleges which are attended by the majority of American undergraduates.
I mean, the average graduation rate in those schools is about 85%, so we’re talking about issues that affect maybe 1% of all kids attending college, while the average graduation rates of the rest of undergraduates at 4 year schools is about 60%, so the issue driving kids to drop out of these colleges are affecting 38% of all students attending 4 year colleges.