New AFT Report Calls Bush Administration's
Proposals for Higher Education a "Wrong Turn"
There Are Better Ways To Measure College Success than Graduation Rates

SEATTLE – The American Federation of Teachers, which represents more college and university faculty and professional staff than any other union, today released a report highly critical of recent proposals that would link federal higher education aid dollars to graduation rates and time spent obtaining a degree.

The report, Student Persistence in College: More Than Counting Caps and Gowns, challenges one of the Bush administration’s priorities for the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act – the concept of rewarding colleges for retaining students and graduating them on time.

"The administration says it wants to improve the quality of postsecondary and adult education, but this is the wrong way to go about it," said William Scheuerman, president of the faculty union at the State University of New York and an AFT vice president.

The administration has proposed penalizing institutions that don’t graduate students within six years or that have high dropout rates, what the U.S. Department of Education terms "linking federal education funding to accountability for results."

According to the AFT report, the administration’s proposals fail to account for the 40 percent of the students who are part-timers. It also treats undergraduates as traditional students when the reality is that the majority of undergraduates today (57 percent) are over age 21. The proposals also do not account for the large number of students who transfer between four-year institutions or between community colleges.

"We should be rewarding those students who persevere, who stick with college for years, often while working a full-time job or caring for a family. We shouldn’t be penalizing them or their institutions," Scheuerman said.

The AFT report raises concerns that "rewarding or punishing colleges on the basis of graduation rates creates a perverse incentive for them to stop serving students who are likely to have problems in persistence." The report also questions whether a financial reward based on graduation rates would encourage some institutions to lower academic standards to boost graduation rates.

Creating a program for higher education modeled after the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) would be a mistake, according to the report. PreK-12 schools are "charged with achieving relatively uniform results for their students based on standards that every child is expected to meet." In contrast, the report points out that in higher education there is an almost endless variety of curricula, and college students can pick and pay for what they want "including the amount of education they want."

The AFT report says that the best way to speed students through college and make sure they don’t drop out is to increase federal student financial aid, in particular the Pell grant program. Many students have a hard time balancing work and study, and students who work "over 25 hours a week increase the risk of dropping out." Statistics show that only 8 percent of the lowest-income students graduate within five years.

Other steps the report recommends to improve retention and graduation rates include: more emphasis on academic advisement, more collaboration between colleges and high schools, and "bridge programs" that prepare students over the summer before they enroll in college.

The full report Student Persistence in College: More Than Counting Caps and Gowns can be found at http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/higher_ed/student_persistence.pdf.

The American Federation of Teachers represents 150,000 higher education members, including full- and part-time faculty at four-year institutions and community colleges, academic staff and graduate employees. The union is holding its national higher education conference in Seattle, March 5-7 at the Westin Seattle.

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The AFT represents more than 1.3 million pre-K through 12th-grade teachers, paraprofessionals and other school support employees, higher education faculty, nurses and other healthcare workers, and state and local government employees.