Two new reports from The Education Trust clarify dismal higher education graduation rates by putting those rates in context according to individual institutions' profiles and then spotlighting universities that have successfully improved them. The idea is to share best practices and improve rates across a broad spectrum, for low-income as well as middle-class students, for small campuses as well as large, for selective universities as well as institutions with more open admissions.

Six-year graduation rates, tallied annually by the federal government, average around 60 percent among full-time students at four-year colleges. For minority students, that rate plummets by 20 percent or more in a quarter of the nation's institutions.

Acknowledging that these rates rely on such variables as median SAT scores, selectivity, size, percentage of Pell grant recipients, nontraditional students and part-time undergraduates, the report, One Step from the Finish Line: Higher College Graduation Rates Are Within Our Reach, nevertheless finds institutions accountable for serving their students regardless of the challenges inherent in their populations. That's because its new tracking tool, College Results Online, compares graduation rates at similar institutions and finds that, even with variables considered, some universities are more successful than others at keeping students on campus.

"Even when you compare roughly similar institutions that serve similar populations, you'll find institutions that do a lot better," said Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust. "Some, in fact, may have as much as twice the rate of graduation." Institutions in the report are grouped together by 11 factors, including private or public, size, number of part-time, low-income and nontraditional students, financial resources, and whether they are commuter campuses. Users can visit the Web site, www.collegeresults.org, to compare any university's graduations rates with 15, 25 or 50 of its peers. Rates are also broken down by race and gender.

Among those singled out for their successes are institutions where AFT members serve students. SUNY College at Plattsburgh is ranked fifth among similar institutions, with graduation rates of 58.9 percent. SUNY at Oswego, in the same group, comes in at 56.3 percent. The report also considers institutions that have improved dramatically, listing among them the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, University of Illinois-Chicago, CUNY City College and CUNY Queens College.

The report, along with its companion, Choosing To Improve: Voices from Colleges and Universities with Better Graduation Rates, pays particular attention to the gap between black and white students, which averages 11 percent or 12 percent. Looking at schools that have successfully closed that gap and using their methods elsewhere, The Education Trust suggests, could increase the number of black graduates dramatically. "If we just cut that black-white graduation [gap] in half," says Haycock, "we would actually produce an additional 10,000 African-American college graduates a year. That would be 100,000 more African-Americans with a degree over a decade."

The report singles out Florida State University as successful for closing the racial gap. Just 2.6 percentage points remained between white and black graduation rates in 2003; Florida International is an even better at 1 percent.

The Education Trust finds three factors contribute most to better graduation rates: focus on freshmen; emphasis on undergraduate teaching; and monitoring institutional systems for needed adjustments. At FSU, professional full-time advisers contact each student at least three times a semester, often during off-hours when they are most available, and a seven-week summer program prepares freshmen for the transition to college, an orientation especially useful for low-income and first-generation students.

  Other successful programs include:

• assigning two freshman advisors—one academic and one general—at Alcorn State, a historically black institution in Mississippi;
• developing an alternative, team-oriented chemistry class at Notre Dame, when tracking showed a large number of less-prepared freshmen flunked the class;
• creating a "critical path analysis" to alert students to required courses and make room to enroll them so they could graduate on time;
•  successful teaching as a requirement for tenure at Syracuse University; and,
• in a unique program at New Mexico University, tracking students who dropped out just short of graduation and luring them back to complete their degrees by facilitating registration and following up with support.

With these sorts of innovations, universities can and should improve their graduation rates, contends The Education Trust. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities, with the National Association of System Heads, is continuing the exploration of high-performing institutions by launching a national graduation rate study of more than 100 institutions, seeking out more successful strategies and, as a consequence, more successful college graduates across the nation. [Virginia Myers Kelly]

January 20, 2005