Ben Miller and Phuong Ly’s expose of college dropout factories reminds me of many conversations I’ve had over the years with policy makers and foundation officials about helping more students earn college degrees. They tend to go like this: First, we need a “research strategy” to identify “best practices” that have a statistically significant impact on college graduation. Then we need a “dissemination strategy” to communicate those practices to administrators and practitioners. Colleges will adopt the best practices, and graduation rates will rise.
I think this is mostly wrong.
The article tells the story of Nestor Curiel, a former student at Chicago State University. Here’s what happened:
With its tree-lined campus and gleaming new steel and glass convocation center, Chicago State certainly looked impressive. But within his first month there, Nestor wanted to leave. Advisers in the engineering department seemed clueless about guiding him to the right courses, insisting that if he wanted to take programming he first needed to enroll in a computer class that showed students how to turn on a monitor and operate a mouse. (Nestor required no such training.) The library boasted a robot that retrieved books, but Nestor would have preferred that it simply stay open past eight p.m., since class sometimes ended at nine p.m. or later, leaving him without a useful place to study or do research before going home. Trash littered the classrooms and grounds, and during class many of the students would simply carry on conversations among themselves and ignore the instructors—or even talk back to them. Nestor was appalled. “It was like high school, but I was paying for it,” he says.
Several students he knew dropped out, but Nestor stayed. “I wasn’t going to give them my money and let them kick me out,” he says. For the next two years, Nestor encountered a ceaseless array of impediments to getting through school. When he wanted to get a tutor, his advisers couldn’t offer any advice about who might be available. When he visited the financial aid office to clear up what seemed like a simple clerical error depriving him of a state grant, the office told him—untruthfully, as it turned out—that getting such grant money would disqualify him from getting any scholarship money from the Pullman Foundation.
And so on. Not coincidentally, Chicago State has had many problems throughout the years:
In 2008, Chicago State’s President Elnora Daniel resigned under pressure after the school suffered yet another severe bout of mismanagement. A state audit found that even as the university suffered budget cuts, Daniel and other employees had spent lavishly on meals, alcohol, and first-class airfare. Daniel had brought five relatives and a university administrator with her on a nine-day Caribbean cruise for a “leadership conference.” Lax financial oversight allegedly resulted in the university paying more than a quarter of a million dollars for two photocopiers purchased from a company owned by a university employee.
Meanwhile, students contended with broken elevators, dirty classrooms, and ill-equipped labs. As enrollment declined, so did graduation rates. Of the first-time, full-time freshmen who started in 1996, about 18 percent graduated within six years. The graduation rate dropped to 13 percent in 2008.
Maintaining an up-to-date list of available tutors, calculating financial aid accurately, placing students in the right classes, picking up garbage, and maintaining elevators aren’t “best” practices. They are “minimally competent” practices. Nobody is ever going to publish a research study finding a causal link between $125,000-per-photocopier contracts, Caribbean cruises, and graduation rates.
But I’m quite sure that these things are much more important to helping students graduate than the presence or absence of specific retention programs. They all go to the basic competence and quality of the institution. Well-run universities that have student-focused organizational cultures and are properly accountable to outside regulatory bodies simply don’t behave this way. Well-run universities are also much more successful in helping student earn degrees. It’s unreasonable to think that a university like Chicago State, which enrolls many part-time, low-income, and academically diverse students, will have a 100 percent graduation rate. But based on the research and examples cited in the article, it’s reasonable to expect that CSU could graduate 1 in 2 students, as opposed to 1 in 10.
The article also highlights an important fact about federal graduation-rate measures, which are often criticized because they count transfer students as dropouts. Sometimes students transfer for reasons that have nothing to do with the university. But sometimes, as is was the case with Nestor, students transfer because the university is doing a really terrible job.
Because colleges and universities are unusually well-regarded institutions that serve a noble societal purpose and are run by people with esteemed academic credentials, the public conversation about them tends to discount the possibility of gross incompetence. In reality, universities can be terribly mismanaged just like K-12 schools, fire departments, or huge multinational oil companies. Failure to acknowledge this prevents us from tackling the problems that most need to be solved.
24 Responses to The ‘Don’t Suck’ Theory of Improving Graduation Rates
hoytleno - August 27, 2010 at 8:45 am
This is so, so true, and has strong implications for primary and secondary education as well. Thank you for this blinding flash of the obvious you have given me this morning. I can’t believe I’ve never thought of this issue in quite this way before!
mvclibrary - August 27, 2010 at 8:46 am
Amen.
gsawpenny - August 27, 2010 at 9:24 am
Excellent work, too true.
dank48 - August 27, 2010 at 9:26 am
Yep. Back when the Clintons were new to Washington, there was a lot of discussion about the D.C. schools. Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly summed it up perfectly: “The point is not that Chelsea Clinton shouldn’t have to go to these schools. The point is that no child should have to go to these schools.”Chicago State sounds like it would fit right in: education in hell.
optimysticynic - August 27, 2010 at 9:42 am
In order for this to happen, there needs to be accountability AT ALL LEVELS, not just for faculty and top administrators. I once proposed that student service personnel who were overtly failing to perform should, um, be fired and the storm of insulted horror that resulted was itself horrifying. Some of the responses: we have families and mortgages, I wouldn’t want to lose my job, and the sickening “we all make mistakes,” etc. There has come to be NO relationship between job performance and job security in higher education and we should not be exempt from this real-world cause-effect linkage. You guilty of gross incompetence? GET FIRED!!! I work with an advisor who cannot get one single document or audit to me that is error-free…no exaggeration…in five years, NOT ONE completely correct document. She was just promoted.
lapgr8ful - August 27, 2010 at 9:52 am
Bullseye. Thank you for your frankness.
dld310 - August 27, 2010 at 10:08 am
As long as my Assoc Provost has less education and experience than I do, I have no confidence that “the powers that be” really know WHAT I am doing or supposed to do…much less how to hold me accountable for it. My work ethic, knowledge and experience guide my day-to-day work as well as the overall goal to assist students learn – both inside and outside the classroom.
11121641 - August 27, 2010 at 10:25 am
At the college where I earned (and worked very hard to earn) tenure, the incompetence, mismanagement, and irrational commitment to busines model principles in executing dedliervy of serices (i.e., classes) to paying customers was legion. Duirng a partticualrly poor period of leadrrship the college recruited a huge percentage of underprepared, first-genertion students. They desperatelty needed tutoring and basic college skills trainingm buit were essentially plundered for their access to student loans a grants. The administraiotn axcgted as if it could care less: the college got its hands on the money and simply recruited another batch of clueless freshmen. The turnover from August entrants to January dropouts was amazing: out of 300 new freshmen, perhaps 100 woudl surviv thier first semester.Sadly the running joke among faculty was: incompetence or malice? It seemed the adminstration shielded themslelves, shrugging off as incompetence what we mostly sus[eerd was quite deliberately intended.The inevitable accreditation visit eventully put an end to this batch of corrupt and incompetent adminmistrators, ut until incalculabnle harm had been done.
mathmaven - August 27, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Amen, Kevin!
usaret - August 27, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Useful article for me today because our community college is beginning its “Achieving the Dream” program. We have our kickoff pep rally-information session at 2:30pm today (Friday) and have to close everything down so all faculty and staff (no students, interestingly)can attend. Part of me is excited because we may well find ways to get better; part of me is not because I have been through one too many top-down-driven reinvention/re-engineering/re-whatever processes and fear this is more old wine in new bottles. I expect that some outsider will simply borrow our watches to tell us the time. Further, I am concerned, as Mr. Carey points out, that we already know what we need to do–we simply lack the will to be tough enough on ourselves to get it done.
11223435 - August 27, 2010 at 12:59 pm
OK, I’ll bite: #8, your grammar and typing is satire, right?If not, I bet you did have to work very hard to earn tenure!
cassadia - August 27, 2010 at 1:53 pm
@#11, please.What you see at #8 is a TYPING problem. The vocabulary and syntax indicate an intelligent, articulate speaker.
softshellcrab - August 27, 2010 at 2:25 pm
This was truly a well done and well researched article. It is one of the bset things I have read in the Chronicle. My only “beef” is I am not sure how important this problem is, compared to many other problems in higher education. For instance, probably a more significant problem is the “diploma factories” where they simply pass through and graduate students who should not be graduated. At least these high dropout schools are not just putting out fake graduates who have not learned anything. But as I said, a well done article.
11223435 - August 27, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Dear #12, you’re being funny, too, right?
11274135 - August 27, 2010 at 4:26 pm
The motto of the college I went to (and probably lots of other colleges) was “Pursuit of Excellence.” To be honest, as I proceeded in my academic career, I came to hope that I would someday work for a college whose motto was “Pursuit of Competence” (essentially the polite equivalent of “Don’t Suck”). Competence is the baseline that allows us to identify excellence, and if we have no real idea of what competence is we are very likely to get excellence and competence confused. I must admit that, except to the jaded, “Pursuit of Competence” is not a motto that dazzles and stirs the soul. But lots of students, faculty, staff, and, yes, administrators can actually achieve competence whereas only a few can achieve excellence. Excellence usually takes care of itself. People who achieve competence are poised, then, to make a a foray into excellence. The college I went to pursued excellence largely by recruiting students who were, by all measures, pretty excellent to begin with (blush). This is a college that could pursue excellence by not sucking too badly. I have always wondered what this little academe would do if its classroom were populated with a representative criss section of the students of a large public metropolitan university.
11274135 - August 27, 2010 at 4:29 pm
For those sensitive to typos, make that “if its classrooms were populated with a representative cross section…”
softshellcrab - August 27, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Let’s all hold hands and make a solemn promise not to jump on each other’s typos. I for one don’t feel like having to spellcheck my postings to Chronicle articles.
11223435 - August 27, 2010 at 5:33 pm
Well, if you are as liberal with student errors, if youthink that mess up above was just “a typo” I’ll bet you probably might not be as quick as our hero up above to jump to label students as people “who shouldn’t be in college.” OK, I’ll join in the exhibition of understanding here–even though I think those who type drunk shouldn’t be encouraged–I spen over 10 years helping in the effort to integrate the University System of Georgia, with many students who were labelled remedial or developmental students. I know all the deep brown wells from which the “they shouldn’t be in college” sentiment can be dredged up from. If we meet the president’s graduation goals, we will have to teach the students we have, the students who fail the gatekeeper courses (the same courses that just happen to enroll about a third of all our students)we all can name, the students “who shouldn’t be in college.” Notice before you start dredging your well that I said “teach,” not “pass.” Or do you think if we meet Obama’s goals we’ll have to buy students from China?And, yes, my third from last sentence is awkward, but I know you’ll forgive me…
fruupp - August 27, 2010 at 9:50 pm
#15 wrote: “I have always wondered what this little academe would do if its classroom were populated with a representative criss section of the students of a large public metropolitan university.”Nestor Curiel (from the article) nailed it: “It was like high school.”At best.
inarchetype - August 30, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Granted on the incompetance and corruption, but with respect to things like out of touch advising…Chicago State’s mission per Princeton Review includes the following description of its target population: “under-prepared” minority students, who, because of a variety of reasons, have been denied many of the economic and social educational benefits enjoyed by the greater society.So if you are not an under-prepared student who for whatever reason has been denied many of the economic and social educational benefits enjoyed by the greater society, you are likely to find its programs and advision perspective is NOT GEARED to YOU. Go somewhere else. Anyone who is not in that boat and decided to go to Chicago State didn’t so much as do the research involved in a fifteen second google and deserves whatever they get. Who in their right mind would go to Chicago State unless they knew themselves to be in the target audience.Given that the University quite ostensibly specializes in near-hopeless cases, a low graduation rate is to be expected, and may even be indicative of their success in maintaining legitimate academic standards despite their intake. Unfortunately, not only are the students they specialize in editing confronted with vicitudes and challenges that more traditional students are not, one of the educational benefits they have been “denied” is also the learned habit of perserverance and persistence. Schools like C.S. provide these students with a CHANCE, to EARN a degree that would have been offered to them by few other legitimate Universities, even though it is known at the outset that many will not measure up. That is a laudable model, and I think one that has a place in our education system. One that says “your past performance and record do not indicate that you are likely to be successful in University, and most would not give you a shot, but we will give you a shot, because we know that there is a chance, given your background, that your record does not reflect your potential”. It would serve noone to cheapen the degree in service to raising the graduation rates at schools like these.
jimislew - August 30, 2010 at 4:32 pm
My Freshmen floor (all male) was asked to come up with a list of rules we could abide by in the dorm. Rule 1 summed it up “Don’t be a Dick”. It was a near perfect rule, applicable in a variety of situations both in and out of the dorm.”Don’t Suck” seems a good rule for any business wanting to improve.Sometimes where one sucks is obvious (half million dollar copy machines) but occasionally help is needed in identifying areas of suckage. Then, those who have identified those practices need to communicate them to others who probably actually do the “practicing”, assuming they were not in on the research in the first place. Hopefully positive change takes place. I liked the article. I think not sucking (so obviously) is key, however, researching best practices and then disseminating that info has its place. parting note: sometimes implementing change requires one to be a dick and that is unfortunate.
pomerol - August 30, 2010 at 10:31 pm
To number 20: Agreed, but even hopeless students will do better in a clean classroom.
marka - August 31, 2010 at 1:00 pm
“Let’s all hold hands and make a solemn promise not to jump on each other’s typos. I for one don’t feel like having to spellcheck my postings to Chronicle articles.”Hmm … spellcheck isn’t instantly available on this site … but we should all strive to checking our spelling, and grammar, and be able to do it by ourselves without a computer program. Not to look nice, but to communicate well.Somehow, this actually relates to the topic of this article – the inability/failure to spell well enough leads to an inability/failure to communicate, which suggests less than excellence, and perhaps – perhaps – incompetence.The reader should not be forced to thrash thru a comment to discern its meaning …And, by the way, I fired a secretary who failed to use the grammar/spellcheck programs with which he was provided, and failed to notice (or care) on his own to correct the errors, whether or not the programs were available.
pierce_library40 - August 31, 2010 at 5:07 pm
CSU is part of the spoils system in Chicago–competency and student service aren’t part of the game, whereas giving jobs to political appointees and their friends is virtually the entire raison d’etre for the school.