A recent U.S. Department of Education study provides good news about the work colleges and universities are doing to address student persistence. Despite the challenges of increasing enrollments and greater socioeconomic diversity, institutions are managing to serve and retain students at the same or a better rate than they did a decade ago.

The report, "College Persistence on the Rise? Changes in 5-year Degree Completion and Postsecondary Persistence Rates Between 1994 and 2000," compares the degree completion and persistence rates of postsecondary students who started college in 1989-90 versus those starting in 1995-96.  It shows that more students now are staying in school through the fifth year as opposed to giving up and dropping out. 

One reason more students are persevering, the report's authors suggest, is greater access to financial aid. During their years in college, nearly one-half of the 1995-96 enrolled students borrowed money, compared with one-third of students who enrolled six years earlier.  The report even speculates that students who borrow heavily have an incentive to complete their degrees so they are in a good earning position to pay back their loans after they graduate.

Another phenomenon the report documents, says John Lee, a college finance policy analyst, is that students are moderating college costs by stretching out their college-going years. "Students are working more hours and borrowing money while they're in college," he says. "As costs go up, students are making decisions about how they'll pay for it." Stretching four years of college to five reduces the cost on an annual basis, he notes.

Lee, who helped prepare the AFT report, "Student Persistence in College: More that Counting Caps and Gowns," notes that other factors are having a good influence on persistence rates.  More 18-year-olds are going straight to postsecondary education after high school, and these traditional students tend to finish their degrees. Also, with some of the education reforms of the recent past, high school graduates are better prepared to do college-level work. Students also are looking at college offerings from a more pragmatic perspective, he says, and are shunning the theoretical courses of study for the practical. The mindset might affect persistence rates as well.

Current borrowing practices have a down side however. Increasing debt burden upon graduation might be discouraging some students who would most benefit from higher education: middle-to-low-income students, a group that the AFT has historically fought to protect during budget cutbacks. As tuitions continue to increase and state support declines, the issue of how financial aid is awarded to achieve broad access to higher education grows more pressing. This is why the AFT advocates restoring the purchasing power of Pell Grants, reducing the rising debt burden on students and improving support for nontraditional students.

In the challenge of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act with little money available for discretionary spending, Congress and the Bush administration are talking about funding mechanisms that link financial aid to accountability measures, such as persistence. This report suggests that persistence is not posing a problem that warrants government intervention. On the other hand, warns Lee, "all schools need to make investments in how to make high-risk students succeed so that when Congress asks, 'what are you doing?' you're in a better position to not have programs imposed from the outside."

To see the U.S. Department of Education  report, go to nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005156.pdf . The AFT's report can be downloaded at www.aft.org/pubs-reports/higher_ed/student_persistence.pdf [Barbara McKenna/Lindsay Albert]

November 23, 2004