Students and their parents are mostly to blame for poor college-graduation rates, according to a poll released today by the Associated Press and Stanford University. When asked about graduation rates at public four-year colleges, seven in 10 respondents to the survey said students shouldered either a great deal or a lot of responsibility for the rates, and 45 percent felt that way about parents. Other people involved in higher education got a pass. From 25 percent to 32 percent of those polled blamed college administrators, professors, teachers, unions, state education officials, and federal education officials.
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20 Responses to Americans Blame Students and Parents for Poor Graduation Rates, Poll Finds
farm_boy - December 9, 2010 at 11:41 am
Well, duh. Guess what? Students need to EARN passing grades.
archman - December 9, 2010 at 12:13 pm
What? Failing grades aren’t the ultimate fault of the professor? I am shocked to read a poll that actually places accountability for learning on the learner. How refreshing.
crickels - December 9, 2010 at 12:43 pm
It’s nice to be exonerated. While we do have the imperative to assist students in the process of learning, we are not solely responsible for attrition or simply of bad behavior.
Now if only we could convince some of the strong program educational sociologists of the same.
quasihumanist - December 9, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Even if professors are 10% to blame and students are 90% to blame, it still does more to improve one professor (who teaches 20 students) than to improve one student.
People may realize that students are more to blame, but they, and especially the policy makers, also realize the futility of trying to improve the students. Since something must be done, and nothing can be done to improve the students, …
jffoster - December 9, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Can’t fire the team so fire the manager?
loranger - December 9, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Sadly, as primarily Republican state legislatures have been increasingly defunding public higher education for decades, more and more students are having to work full time while in college AND take on debt. When I was a student in the ’70s it was possible to work fulltime all summer long and come up with sufficient money to cover tuition, fees, books and some living expenses for the year.
So, while students bear some responsibility, the real blame lies with greedy, shortsighted taxpayers and the state politicians who pander to them.
planners - December 9, 2010 at 4:13 pm
I heard Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, talk about how K-12 is not doing a good job in preparing our students for college, contributing to the college drop out rate. This doesn’t remove all of the responsibility from the students themselves, but I see his point.
kathden - December 9, 2010 at 4:41 pm
quasihumanist – You seem to be guilty of a basic fallacy of distribution. You are assuming that (just to pick a simple ratio out of the air) if we professors teach twice as well as we did before, that will translate to twice as good an effect on each and every one of the twenty students in our class. But if some of those students are resistant or indocile, our effort might have little, or no, or even reverse effect.
Maybe part of the problem is in treating this quantitatively. But then how would we measure it?!?
I still believe that each teacher has a professional obligation to do as well as s/he can in a given situation. But that does not imply that we can measure what that is, much less that we could increase it toward infinity (say, by trying to improve our teaching by unlimited technological means).
These are philosophical matters—which means that they will be ignored, always in legislatures and bureaucracies, and most of the time in schools of education, where all the “effective” efforts for improvement come from.
larry6413 - December 9, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Two institutions with similar student characteristics can each have a 75% retention rate, yet one can graduate 55% of the students and the other only 30%.
This inter-institutional variation in graduation rates suggests strongly that institutional practices and cultures can have a significant impact on student success.
richardespinoza - December 9, 2010 at 6:31 pm
This poll was conducted by the AP and an elite institution using only 1,001 respondents, with a plus or minus error ratio of 6 points. It doesn’t take a PhD to see that the results are meaningless beyond what credibility the CHE and other academic elitists give it, as evidenced from the comments that have already been posted.
mbelvadi - December 10, 2010 at 6:55 am
I’d really like to know more about the “parents” part – after all, we’re talking about higher ed, not high school. Or maybe the respondents misunderstood that? The article says that minorities blamed parents 57% (whites 40%), which makes me think we’re really talking about money, and if we are, then that “blame” is misplaced and the concern behind it really should get added to the tally against the sources that set the costs – the schools, state legs, etc. Does anyone have a different idea what’s behind blaming the parents, other than refusal to pay the bills?
cleverclogs - December 10, 2010 at 7:31 am
@ mbelvadi Re: blaming parents
Maybe there is a sense that the parents didn’t do a good job instilling their children with a work ethic or interest in education? If they had done a better job raising their kids, maybe they would go to class and do their homework instead of hanging out in their rooms getting baked and playing Wii (actual excuse from a student about why said student missed so many assignments this semester).
But I’m just guessing. Also, I’m not saying that’s a fair assessment of parental influence at all, but I’ve certainly heard people say things like that.
11132507 - December 10, 2010 at 7:58 am
Wow. So when a student has spent the past 10 years of his/her life devoting one minute of academic study to every hour spent playing video games, texting, updating their Facebook page, etc, graduates from HS thanks to social promotion, the fact that they’re not geniuses ISN’T the college’s fault after all? Who would’ve thought?
gaprofessor - December 10, 2010 at 10:13 am
I find the discussion for university students completely irrelevant and pretty much a diversion from real measures of how well we do. The problem is that the real value students get from spending 4+ years with us is pretty damned difficult to measure. Some of my best students would be ranked as failures on the graduation metric, but have turned out to have very successful lives by any other measure. So what if they left school and came back 5 years later when they figured out what they really wanted to do. If they don’t come back maybe they should not have been there in the first place.
davi2665 - December 10, 2010 at 3:07 pm
How predictable- the comment from loranger blaming the “greedy, short-sighted taxpayers.” Of course- how foolish of me to think that I should be able to keep ANY of my salary; after all, it belongs to the benevolent government which sometimes graciously allows me to keep a small pittance. Perhaps in the name of “fairness” and redistribution of wealth, the academic elites can direct deposit my entire income into the university coffers, confiscate all of my savings and pensions to help needy students, and open up my home as a dormitory to provide free room and board. I wonder what the redistributionists will do when they have finally bled the well dry and all of their whining for more and more free benefits have no more money to confiscate. We can become the next Greece, with a fiscal policy fashioned after Zimbabwe.
pdecresc - December 10, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Why is it I can point to an elementary school in a neighborhood and determine whether or not a student will graduate college? How is it the child who is entering a school system at five years old is likely to fail at five times the rate than his or her neighbors in a surrounding wealthy area? How can that be a child or parent’s fault? Ok professors, I understand this is your livelihood but please give attention to the quantitative and qualitative research that determine this issue to be one that is complex. We are all at fault as a society (students, parents, faculty, administrators, and policy makers), but without funding towards the K-16 system and an openness to different learning styles, our country will continue to suffer.
Please read Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Finish-Line-Universities-ebook/dp/B002WJM6B8
and
Retaining Minority Students in Higher Education: A Framework for Success: ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report
http://www.amazon.com/Retaining-Minority-Students-Higher-Education/dp/0787972479/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1292026934&sr=8-2-catcorr
jffoster - December 10, 2010 at 10:38 pm
Pedecresc,
It’s not “K – 16″. College is not, or isn’t supposed to be, Grades 13 – 16 of high school. That’s one of our big problems these days — college students who think they’re in high school. Another big problem is faculty, associate deans for “first year experience” and Directors of Tiddly Twiddle who can’t tell the difference between College and Ckindergarten.
rpmthinking - December 11, 2010 at 4:26 pm
As one who has taught overseas, American students and their families generally demonstrate a lower level of dedication and discipline in regards to their college studies. It seems worse now because 30 years ago fewer average students went to college.
sdryer - December 12, 2010 at 2:14 pm
To the commenter who said that institutions clearly have an effect on graduation rates, since different universities with similar retention rates can have markedly different graduation rates. That argument fails to account for equally marked differences in the economic situations at different institutions (which are very much non-randomly distributed) — AND the way graduation rates are measured. Students attending my urban university are more likely to be older, forced to work and to not go full-time all of the time, and frankly, there is a subset that is not all that prepared to begin with. Our sample of students is not identical to pool of students attending the very nice elite private university about three miles away, where pretty much the only students they accept are rich, white, smart and good-looking, and they live on campus. I am not complaining, just telling how it is. The fact that students at my institution graduate at a lower rate should not reflect our effectiveness without somehow accounting for this. My university gives people a chance. They will not all succeed with it.
sdryer - December 12, 2010 at 2:18 pm
as for davi2655, the American system of publicly funded education was once the envy of the rest of the world and it is what for many years gave us our “edge”. Degrade that and you can keep all the tax money you want, your quality of life or at least that of your children will degrade as we become more and more like Brazil. My guess is that people like you couldn’t care less, and hence the accusation of “greedy and selfish”.