“But you have to do it carefully, because if you put all the incentives on completion then you just encourage colleges to cherry pick the population” of students most likely to graduate, Callan says. “There’s already too much of that.”
Dr. Sarah E. Turner, a University of Virginia education economist, has assembled data showing graduation rates have stagnated over recent decades even as enrollment has climbed. Explanations range from rising college costs to insufficient academic support to students simply not realizing how valuable a college degree is.
But which factors matter most, and how they overlap, is not well understood, largely because the topic is hard to measure. Tracking enrollment numbers is relatively easy, but tracking what happens to individual students over six years is much harder.
Bowen, however, specializes in studies that look at large numbers of individual students over time. His previous work tapped into a huge data set of student records from a group of about 20 highly selective colleges. Those schools have atypically high graduation rates, but Bowen says his new work will be based on data from a more representative group of less selective schools.
— Associated Press
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