The Chronicle of Higher Education
By David Glenn
September 8, 2009
Ten years ago this month, after the summer of American Pie and The Blair Witch Project, roughly 94,000 students arrived as first-time freshmen at 21 American flagship public universities. Four years later, 49 percent of those students had graduated from the institution where they began. Two years after that, an additional 28 percent had done so, for a total six-year graduation rate of 77 percent.
At less-selective public universities, the numbers are even worse. For one recent cohort, the six-year graduation rate at the University of Cincinnati was 46 percent, according to federal data. At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, it was 51 percent.
All of those rates will need to improve—a lot—if the nation is going to come remotely close to the Obama administration's goal of restoring America's position as the country with the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
In Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities, released on Wednesday by Princeton University Press, three scholars dissect the experiences of the entering class of 1999 at those 21 flagship universities, along with the entire public-university systems of Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia.
"Graduation rates are hugely consequential for what's going to happen to the country down the road," says William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton University. Mr. Bowen wrote Crossing the Finish Line with Matthew M. Chingos, a graduate student in government at Harvard University, and Michael S. McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation and a former president of Macalester College.
Among the book's central themes: Large disparities exist in graduation rates by gender, ethnicity, and family income, even after accounting for differences in standardized test scores and high-school preparation. That is not exactly news, but the book grounds those findings in an unusually rich set of data.
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Imagine two students with, say, SAT scores of 1050 and B-minus high school grade-point averages. The only visible difference between them is social class: One of them comes from a family whose income is below the national median, and neither of his parents completed college. The other comes from a family with above-median income, and both of his parents completed college. At all but one of the universities studied in Crossing the Finish Line, the more-privileged student would have been significantly likelier—between 6 and 17 percentage points likelier, depending on the institution—to graduate within six years. (The exception was the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where the graduation rate for less-privileged students is slightly higher than the rate for their wealthier peers, after controlling for differences in high-school background.)
The gaps shaped by gender, race, and ethnicity are more complex. At the 21 flagship universities in the study, African-American women and Hispanic women did relatively well. Their six-year graduation rates (72 percent and 76 percent, respectively) were close to the rate for white men (75 percent). But African-American men and Hispanic men lagged far behind, with rates of 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively. Even after controlling for differences in test scores and high-school preparation, black male students' graduation rate was 5 percentage points behind that of white men.
"What we were struck by," Mr. Bowen says, "is just how pervasive and persistent and substantial these disparities are."
Full Story: http://chronicle.com/article/For-Some-Students-an/48331/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Princeton University Press News Release: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8971.html
Purchase this book from the AAAA Bookstore: http://astore.amazon.com/ameriassocfor-20
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