| 摘要 | Key Points
Almost 600 four-year colleges report that less than one-third of their students earned a bachelor’s degree within six years.
Simple, affordable, replicable, and scalable improvements that significantly improve completion rates remain elusive. Programs that improved student success in one college all too often fail, often spectacularly and expensively, at another college due to unique characteristics of the first school’s student body or particular style of implementation.
Many colleges have found initial, immediate improvements in retention from programs such as summer bridge experiences for incoming freshmen or yearlong learning communities. However, once those programs end, longitudinal data find little to no significant impact on the later success of the group as a whole.
The colleges reporting the most success in producing high-value degrees tend to provide holistic, wraparound support for students
Short-term budget concerns have caused many colleges to stint on providing important services such as financial aid, tutoring, and advising. But when the horizon is lengthened from the cost per year to cost of each degree awarded, many of these programs result in lower costs for students, colleges, and taxpayers.
Introduction
Each of the more than 4,500 degree-awarding colleges in the United States claims to provide students with the support they need to succeed in school and life.
Of course, defining just what “success” means is both highly personal and highly controversial. Certainly, higher education is not simply job training. But surveys consistently show that career and financial advantages are among the top expectations of college students1 and the political leaders who determine the level of taxpayer support for higher education. In today’s labor market, most new jobs require some type of postsecondary education.2 In fact, the vast majority of the best paying jobs are increasingly reserved for those with bachelor’s degrees.3
Given the current difficulty in measuring desirable student outcomes, such as student growth in “critical thinking skills” or how much students actually learned in college, both public and private efforts to clarify the contribution of colleges to student success have usually focused on graduates’ ability to land jobs with high wages and pay back their student loans. Milestones on the way to those goals, such as attainment of a bachelor’s degree and even year-to-year retention rates, are useful (and easier to gather) measures, although they reflect the process of getting through postsecondary education rather than successful student outcomes.
Regrettably, whether we focus on process or outcome measures, the data should humble anyone hoping to raise Americans’ educational and skill levels. Bridget Terry Long notes that completion rates at some types of institutions—especially public and private not-for-profit universities—have risen over the past decade.4 But declines at other types of institutions, such as for-profits, have meant a less dramatic improvement in the overall graduation rate. Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data show that 59.6 percent of freshmen entering four-year colleges in 2008 earned a degree from their initial institutions within six years, up from 55.4 percent of 1996’s freshmen.5 That level remains in the range seen in previous generations, as described by historian John Thelin. The nation’s college graduation rate has remained remarkably stable at about 60 percent for generations,6 Thelin says. The improved outcome measures available today show that hundreds of American colleges are failing many of their students as well as the taxpayers who subsidize higher education. For example, IPEDS data show that almost 600 of the nation’s approximately 3,000 four-year campuses report that less than one-third of their freshmen earned a four-year bachelor’s degree within six years.
The Department of Education’s College Scorecard data show that a majority of the former freshmen at more than 200 of the colleges that exceed that low bar are earning annual salaries below $25,000 in their sixth year after starting their studies—which is less than the average pay of those with only a high school education.7 While the schools on this list are varied, most are open access or nearly open access, serving disadvantaged and often academically unprepared students. More than 50 of them are for-profits institutions. Nearly 40 are institutions focused on either art or religion, and so, presumably, serve a population less interested in financial returns. A disproportionate share—more than 40 percent—are in the South, where wages tend to be lower than in other regions. Florida alone accounts for 35 of the colleges.
Still, many of these colleges are failure factories sucking up billions of dollars from students and taxpayers without contributing much to their students’ financial stability or careers. In some cases, students graduate with debt but are no better off in the labor market than before enrollment. In contrast, hundreds of other colleges could be described as success incubators, since most of their students go on to land good jobs and live financially stable lives.
How are they doing this? Can their success be replicated to give more Americans the education and credentials they need to thrive in the 21st century?
Despite the importance of higher education and the hundreds of billions of dollars in public and private spending on it every year, we are only now beginning to create a “playbook” of institution-level interventions that just might help the nation and many more students reach an increasingly important goal: a high-value college degree that leads to family-sustaining wages over the long run.
Read the full report.
Notes
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