College Graduation Rates Moving to Top
Of Agenda for Education Leaders, Policy-makers

NEW YORK
For decades, getting more students into college has been the top priority of America’s higher education leaders. But what’s the point, a growing number of experts are wondering, when so few who go to school leave with a degree?

Just 54 percent of students entering four-year colleges in 1997 had a degree six years later, according to some of the latest government figures. The numbers for Black and Hispanic students are even lower.

After borrowing for school but failing to graduate, many of those students may be worse off than if they had never attended college at all.

Now the question of what to do about the country’s underwhelming graduation rates is on the agenda, from college presidents’ offices to state houses. Former Princeton University President William Bowen recently laid out an agenda during a speech in New York.

Normally, a scholar’s decision to take on an academic topic is hardly news. But Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is the kind of researcher whose work is so influential that his very curiosity about a subject can raise its profile.

His studies on college athletes, affirmative action and college access for the poor have all sparked nationwide debate in recent years, and he attracted widespread attention last year with a speech at the University of Virginia that called for class-based affirmative action in college admissions. Bowen’s latest project will examine in detail who graduates and who doesn’t — and why — at a group of about 20 varied universities.

It’s known that elite schools have generally higher graduation rates than non-elite schools. But what’s less clear is why the graduation rates at seemingly similar colleges vary so much. For example, the main campuses of Pennsylvania State University and the University of Minnesota have comparable price tags, student SAT scores and percentage of students from poor backgrounds. Yet Penn State graduates more than 80 percent of its students, and Minnesota barely half.