The Chicago Tribune is reporting that Chicago State University is in danger of losing accreditation, “because of ‘remarkably poor’ graduation and retention rates, as well as tumultuous leadership and finances.”
The article goes on to note that “the Higher Learning Commission cites several ‘grave’ concerns regarding the future of the South Side school that serves roughly 6,800 students,” and that “retention of students from the first to second year of college is ‘very poor,’ the letter said. Of the 372 students who started college in fall 2007, for example, only 55 percent returned the next year. And the six-year graduation rate has continued to decline. Only 12.8 percent of first-year students in 2002 graduated by 2008.”
Not to mention the fact that incoming president Wayne Watson “was expected to start August 1, but a snafu over his state pension delayed his service two months, creating a void of leadership just after the university learned its accreditation was in jeopardy. Students and faculty have protested Watson’s selection as president, and almost the entire search advisory committee resigned. That came after past president Elnora Daniel left under fire for using university funds for personal purchases.”
I wonder what U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan thinks about this.
After all, those students who enrolled at Chicago State and didn’t graduate? Those were his kids, for the most part. They were the students Duncan managed to help through Chicago Public Schools while he was the system’s CEO. I imagine that in the eyes of the district, those students were on the success side of the ledger: didn’t drop out, didn’t end up in prison, enrolled in a four-year university, the American dream.
But the dream didn’t come true. Instead, they enrolled in a university where the graduation rate for black men is less than 12 percent. A university that’s the poster child for the “undermatch” problem we’ve been hearing a lot about lately, because it only graduates 20-30 percent of CPS students who earned good grades in high school, even though students with similar academic profiles who attended other colleges were two or three times more successful. These horrific numbers have been publicly available for years. Was anyone at CPS aware of them? If so, did they take steps to send their students somewhere else?
Duncan has regularly denounced the “dropout factories in our urban districts that are at the root of our dropout problem.” What about the dropout factories in our urban universities? They’re in the same places, educating the same students. Seven months ago, the Secretary’s boss said he wanted a big increase in the number of college graduates by 2020. If Duncan is serious about achieving that goal, he doesn’t have far to look.
2 Responses to A Question for Secretary Duncan
cwinton - September 28, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I think it is unfair to label this school a dropout factory. While I’m not particularly familiar with Chicago State, I doubt they are in little danger of losing accreditation, especially if one considers the number of far weaker institutions that have been similarly threatened and let off the hook. Incidentally, it appears that the statistics this post is reacting to represents a very small portion of their student body (372 of 6800 is < 6%). One should be very careful about casting aspersions where statistics are involved, since they are often manipulated to support an agenda not otherwise apparent.
gtkarn - October 1, 2009 at 9:28 pm
I’m suspicious when I find it too easy to take sides on this matter. I have some questions, ones Carey needed to ask: Has any research been done explaining why students didn’t return? If so, does it support the idea that CSU was the cause (i.e. failures in teaching, counseling etc)? Also: what has happened to those students? Did they transfer to other schools or engage in some other form of post-secondary education? Were there economic reasons for their not returning? Also, as regards the graduation rate: Do we know that this failure to graduate is a true sign of failure, or that the student may have decided that he or she could benefit more from a full-time job and perhaps return at a future time? Or perhaps those who dropped out simply decided that they were no lnger committed to obtaining a degree and perhaps decided that some other marker of “success” was more in their interest.Unless questons like these are seriously raised and addressed, let’s hold off on the critiques of CSU. Carey has to earn his conclusions and I find all too often that he doesn’t.