To help the United States produce more college graduates, colleges should make better use of data, campus administrators and professors should take more time to really understand their students, and both colleges and schools should improve how mathematics is taught, a panel of education experts said here on Wednesday.
Their remarks were made during a forum, called “Competing in a Global Economy: How to Boost College Completion Rates,” that was held by National Journal and sponsored by several nonprofit organizations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
American colleges often focus too much on enrolling students and not enough on making sure they graduate, a number of panelists said.
Sanford C. Shugart, president of Valencia Community College, in Florida, said his institution had doubled the graduation rate of its black and Hispanic students by “redesigning the deep architecture of our values.”
He said the redesign had taken into account how students experience the community college and not the other way around. One of the college’s significant changes has been catching failing students early in the process. Mr. Shugart said research has shown that a student’s odds of finishing a degree drop when he or she fails even one course in the first semester.
Apathy Toward Math
Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, echoed Mr. Shugart’s observation. He said many students don’t develop a connection with their institution. And when they don’t, they leave.
“If a student leaves, we need to know that it just wasn’t their fault,” he said. “We need to look at ourselves.”
He also expressed frustration over American students’ apathy toward math. Research has found that the need for remedial math in college is a major stumbling block toward graduation. He said “we need to rethink the approach,” especially at the college level.
The forum’s moderator kicked off the panel discussion by interviewing Robert M. Shireman, the departing U.S. deputy under secretary of education. Mr. Shireman outlined several efforts by the Obama administration aimed at improving college completion. He highlighted the $2-billion allocated by Congress to community colleges and increases in money for Pell Grants.
Mr. Shireman was asked about the hotly debated issue of defining “gainful employment,” one of 14 rules the Education Department is expected to propose in coming weeks that would set standards that for-profit and other colleges would have to meet for their students to be eligible for federal student aid. The department is considering defining “gainful employment” by requiring that a program’s students not take on loan payments that would exceed 8 percent of their expected earnings based on a 10-year repayment plan and Bureau of Labor Statistics earnings data.
Mr. Shireman didn’t elaborate much on why the department had chosen an 8-percent debt-to-income ratio, other than to say it’s the same standard used by mortgage lenders. But he did say that it could be another few weeks before the department released its draft of the regulations.