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The American public apparently blames college students for low college graduation rates. According to an article by Eric Gorski in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
The public pins most of the blame for poor college graduation rates on students and their parents and gives a pass to colleges, government officials and others, a new Associated Press-Stanford University poll shows.
The belief that students are most at fault for graduation rates is a troubling sign for reformers who have elevated college completion to the forefront of higher education policy debates and pushed colleges to fix the problem, said Michael Kirst, professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford.
Well I guess. But it all depends on how you ask the question. As the article explains,
When asked where the blame lies for graduation rates at public four-year colleges, 7 in 10 said students shouldered either a great deal or a lot of it, and 45 percent felt that way about parents. Anywhere between 25 percent and 32 percent of those polled blamed college administrators, professors, teachers, unions, state education officials and federal education officials.
This is an interesting point, but it seems mostly to reveal the limits of surveys as far as policy matters go. Of course individuals are to blame when they don’t graduate from college. If you don’t graduate from college it’s your fault. If I don’t graduate from college it’s my fault. No argument there. But it also doesn’t matter.
If almost 40 percent of people who start college never graduate that indicates there might be a systemic problem, no matter who the “public pins most of the blame” on.
As Ben Miller and Phuong Ly noted in an article they wrote for the magazine a few months ago:
Most students who drop out of college don’t fail out of college. They leave because they don’t perceive that the educational benefit of college exceeds the substantial expense of time and money—especially not when it’s coupled with indifferent bureaucracies that pride themselves more on inane complexities than actually helping students. But when students are given high expectations and good teaching to match, they succeed academically. And when they succeed they’re more likely to keep succeeding and eventually earn a degree.
“They leave because they don’t perceive that the educational benefit of college exceeds the substantial expense of time and money.” So sure, it’s their fault. They’re the ones who left. But do we want to assign blame or do we want to fix the problem?
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ceilidth on December 09, 2010 6:11 PM:
This raises a lot more questions than it answers. There is no way your "dropout factories" could possibly account for a 40% national dropout rate. There just aren't enough of them. What schools are being counted in that figure? Community colleges? Four Year Public or Private Schools? For Profits? How and why do they vary? For example, community colleges attract a lot of people who have no intention of earning a degree. For example at my local community college, a nationally known potter used to teach the pottery classes. These were legitimate credit bearing art classes that were open to degree and non degree students. People flocked to his classes because they wanted to learn from; many of those people already had advanced degrees. Are people like this treated as dropouts? We won't get anywhere until we understand what is behind the numbers.
Anonymous on December 09, 2010 10:18 PM:
Many of them leave because they're not suited for college. Sustained, intense intellectual curiosity is common among children, but it's rare in adults.
But many others leave because the teaching sucks. And the teaching sucks because the teachers (a/a/ professors) aren't selected, trained or rewarded for being teachers. In fact they are taught to hate teaching and they are punished for taking the time away from research to learn how to do it.
joe on December 09, 2010 10:33 PM:
Some good points here, but overall, missed main point.
COLLEGES WERE NEVER DESIGNED TO PROMOTE DIVERSE POPULATIONS INTO UPPER PROFESSIONAL FIELDS BASED EXCLUSIVELY ON MERIT.
Our last president should have proved this point to most reasonable. Most private schools cannot afford to flunk out half of their classes.
Most public/state schools, however, have a few programs that are literally meatgrinders - promising incoming students pie-in-the-sky crap and using bogus data to lie to these same students, claiming to "prove" that graduates all will make kazillions of dollars if they get the right degree.
These premiere programs often flunk out more than 85 percent of their students, claiming to its due to their high-standards.
That is not what is happening, however. These schools have created a pyramid scheme - raping incoming students for their tuition dollars (each matched by state and/or feds) and then flunking them out, diverting those dollars to support other programs and the elite that these programs actually are designed to support.
Yes - primary and secondary schools have been dumbed down. Many schools (mostly publicly supported ones) exploit this, using underqualified students as cash cows and running programs that are designed to flunk out the vast majority of incoming students.
Its a disgrace - your article misses what we really should be talking about.
Catherine Caldwell on December 18, 2010 8:56 AM:
I stumbled upon the College Guide blog and was intrigued: the blame game of schools/teachers vs. students/parents has moved from k-12 (where I taught for ten years) to the college level.
But what really got my attention was the fact that this site is supported (financially?) by the Lumina Foundation For Eduction. A bit of research at Lumina's site revealed that one of its board members is a former leader of University of Phoenix. Now that really got me wondering. How does this connection impact the content at this site?