« Field Trips for Peace | Main | Those Foreign Keyboards . . . »

February 28, 2006

How to GET to College Graduation

One of the best regular things to read on education in America is the Washington Post "Class Struggle" columnn by Jay Mathews; this week he has an especially interesting one about a government report on success in college -- how to graduate.

Lots of the advice is particularly aimed at the less-likely-to-succeed, but some of it explains things that have been bothering me here at these Colleges, a place where really all our student could do the work pretty easily. Here are some excerpts:

But many of our assumptions about how they managed that feat are wrong, Adelman says. For instance, despite our national obsession over picking the right school, Adelman shows is it not where you go to college but how you use that time in college that most closely correlates with getting a college degree. If you earn at least 20 credits your first year, don't take more than one break from college of more than a semester (not counting summers) and keep your grades up, your chances of getting a bachelor's degree are very good.

Also, Adelman says, it is not true that freshman year is the make or break time for undergraduates. Ninety percent of them show up for sophomore year, although those with bad first-year grades are unlikely to survive much longer.

Here in the highly selective liberal arts zone we believe in the where a lot -- part of what we sell is admissions anxiety -- but he makes a great point. Here's one that I wish we would take to heart:
He says colleges that allow students to drop courses with no penalty long after an initial sampling period, or allow students to repeat no-credit remedial courses, are creating conditions that raise the likelihood that those students will not graduate. They are also are depriving other students of a chance to fill those seats.
We have an especially late drop deadline and a horrific policy of an "honorable withdrawal" that does both of those things. I have had a number of advisees who "walk but don't graduate" -- who are allowed to walk across the stage and get an empty diploma holder; if they complete the 1 or 2 courses within a set time and transfer the credit back they can get a diploma for their original class year. The usual patter is that these students have used their honorable withdrawals and dropped below the minimum number of courses in more than one semester. I'd never heard anyone point out that those students are keeping others out of the seats -- which now seems incredibly obvious I'll try to use that argument the next time we discuss the policy. And it's not that I don't appreciate a marginally smaller class than I had intended when the drop deadline comes close and a few seats empty out, but I do think about those who I turned away earlier in the term.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at February 28, 2006 6:54 AM