Re: data on college graduation rates

[Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>]

Thanks, Jerry. What, then, do you make of the widespread claim that  
goes something like this: "If you think graduation rates are bad in  
K-12, just look at higher education." I'd read this/heard this one  
time too many, so I decided to look into it. Convoluted, indeed! Is  
this claim merely anecdotal? Is there any information that actually  
makes this point?

One interesting source of data was the The National Center for Public  
Policy and Higher Education . Do you (or does anyone else) know the  
skinny on this group?

Dept. of Ed's National Center for Education Statistics provided some  
insight, but was also very convoluted. No clear picture emerged.
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40


On Apr 10, 2006, at 8:02 AM, Gerald Bracey wrote:

> A study of the graduation rates of colleges "as a whole" would
> be misleading and hard to interpret.  The State Council of
> Higher Education did one for Virginia about a decade ago,
> public schools only.  The flagship schools--William & Mary,
> UVA, VA Tech, James Madison had very high rates of students
> receiving a degree within 6 years of matriculation--and no
> remedial courses. If I recall right, the grad rates were in
> the 80's. Graduation rates at the urban institutions were much
> lower--Old Dominion U (Norfolk), Virginia Commonwealth
> (Richmond).  They also had significant amounts of remedial
> work.  George Mason, a quasi-urban school(it was a bucolic
> setting when my son went, now it's an exurb)was in the middle.
>
> Now, it would be hard to think what an accurate count would
> be.  Mason has an enormous number of students from Africa, the
> Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. They
> are not likely representative samples of their nations.
>
> The historically black colleges, Virginia State and Norfolk
> had lower completion rates and more remediation than even the
> urban schools.  The highest incidence of
> remediation--surprise--was in the community college system.
>
> Another complication: By law, 65% of all students admitted to
> public universities must be Virginia citizens.  The ratios of
> those attending, though, are lower, substantially lower at W&M
> and UVA--they have a long tradition of luring out-of-state
> students because they are generally ranked among the top
> "public Ivies" and their out-of-state tuitions, while much
> higher than in-state, are well below the typical tuitions of
> private universities.
>
> Sorry to complicate things.
>
> Jerry