U.S. college drop-out rate sparks concern

Getting students in college has always been America's education leaders top priority. But now a few experts are wondering why because many students never even finish college to get their degree. Just 54 percent of students entering four-year colleges in 1997 had a degree six years later — and even fewer Hispanics and blacks did, according to some of the latest government figures. 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. Former Princeton President William Bowen has been studying who graduates and who doesnt and why they dont graduate. “The United States has always said it believes in opportunity and social mobility and fairness,” Bowen said. “If you find that the odds of getting through are very different for different groups of people, that’s something you ought to be concerned about.” 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 instance, the main campuses of Penn State 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. Racial gaps are a concern. Experts say 57 percent of white students finish their degree, compared with 44 percent of Hispanics and 39 percent of blacks. Sarah 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.

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