Graduation Rates

Greg Jones

The New York Times recently published an article entitled Colleges Are Failing in Graduation Rates by David Leonhardt. In it, he alerts the reader to the fact that many colleges, especially the less selective community ones, are not graduating students at acceptable rates. He states that such colleges recieve funding based upon enrollment not upon whether these students ever graduate. The colleges, thus have incentive to attract lots of freshmen because that increases their enrollment numbers, but has no incentive to retain them until graduation. This is especially true since upperclassmen are much more expensive than freshmen are. As a result the universities admit more students in order to recieve funding and then have little to no incentive to ensure they graduate because in doing so they would be spending more money per student. The capitalistic nature of higher education these days would ensure that a majority of students never make it to graduation.



David also discusses what can be done to solve this dilemma, but this is where his ideas become flawed. He claims that in order to fix this we must tie funding in colleges to graduation rates instead of enrollment rates. This, however, could be disastrous because it would lead to colleges skimping on instruction in order to graduate as many students as possible. This could lead to a sub-par education that still resulted in a diploma. In an effort to support his ideas he points to high level universities across the nations, such as Princeton, that have enormous rates of graduation. The flaw with this logic, however, is that many of these universities are extremely selective in the admission process and thus their students already have what it takes to graduate. Whereas, many of the lower level colleges across the nation have students that lack either the motivation or the drive that it takes to graduate. It's not that Harvard and Princeton offer more help to their struggling students, but instead their students don't need the help that is being provided because many of them are brilliant to begin with.

Many kids across this nation have been told since the day they were born that they can be anything they want to be. While this is true if they put in enough effort, if they aren't motivated enough then maybe college isn't for them. The idea that we should lower the standards for everyone just so that several slackers can graduate is ludicrous at best. Such an action doesn't help the standard of education in any way, shape, or form. Students across this nation go to college to get ahead in the workplace but if everyone in the country has a college degree then there is no advantage provided to those that actually worked hard to aquire theirs. While the author of this article does a good job of pointing out what appears to be a flaw in our system of higher education it is actually the system working properly to weed out the college students that are not motivated enough to graduate.