American higher education has a dropout problem. About one in three students who enroll in college never earn a degree. But a promising solution is staring us in the face: Schools with similar students often have very different graduation rates. This suggests that the problem isn’t the students — it’s the schools.
Here we looked at 368 colleges arranged by what we would expect their graduation rates to be, based on the average for colleges with similar student bodies.
Take Western Kentucky University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. At both, the expected six-year graduation rate is close to 60 percent.
But the actual graduation rate at U.N.L.V. is far lower than at Western Kentucky. In human terms, the difference amounts to about 500 more dropouts at U.N.L.V. each year.
That kind of variation is common. If struggling schools could learn some lessons from the high performers, tens of thousands more students could graduate from college each year.
By David Leonhardt and Sahil Chinoy
American higher education has a dropout problem. About one in three students who enroll in college never earn a degree. But a promising solution is staring us in the face: Schools with similar students often have very different graduation rates. This suggests that the problem isn’t the students — it’s the schools.
Here we looked at 368 colleges arranged by what we would expect their graduation rates to be, based on the average for colleges with similar student bodies.
Take Western Kentucky University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. At both, the expected six-year graduation rate is close to 60 percent.
But the actual graduation rate at U.N.L.V. is far lower than at Western Kentucky. In human terms, the difference amounts to about 500 more dropouts at U.N.L.V. each year.
That kind of variation is common. If struggling schools could learn some lessons from the high performers, tens of thousands more students could graduate from college each year.
The chart above is based on an analysis done by The New York Times and the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy. We undertook this project because the college-dropout crisis is a major contributor to American inequality. Many lower-income and middle-class students excel in high school only to falter in college. They then struggle to get good jobs.
College matters so much because it isn’t just about book learning or the development of tangible skills. It’s one of the first obstacle courses of adult life. The students who complete it typically go on to earn more and live healthier and happier lives, research shows.
For too long, high-school students, parents and guidance counselors have hardly thought about graduation rates when choosing a college. And for a long time on many campuses, administrators and faculty members didn’t even know what their college’s graduation rate was.
But now people are starting to realize the stakes. “The issue of college completion is front and center for presidents and trustees,” said Ted Mitchell, a former Obama administration official who runs the American Council on Education, a consortium of universities.
Some high school administrators have also started focusing on the problem, in part out of frustration. Over the years, they have watched their hard-working, talented graduates struggle in college. “It’s disappointing, to say the least,” said Catherine Suitor, the chief advancement officer at Alliance, a network of charter schools in Los Angeles.
In response, Alliance has put together its own ranking, based on colleges’ graduation rates for students who are black or Latino (as most Alliance students are). It then encourages students to attend a college with a relatively high rate. “A bachelor’s degree,” Suitor said, “is the single most influential determinant in multigenerational change and ending the cycle of poverty.”
To create our expected graduation rates, we looked at the characteristics of a college’s students, including income, race, gender, age and test scores. On average, colleges have lower graduation rates when they enroll more lower-income students, more black and Latino students, more men, more older students and more students with low SAT or ACT scores.
We found that the list of top-performing colleges — those that exceed their expected six-year graduation rate — is diverse in almost every way. It spans colleges with expected graduation rates from 18 percent to 80 percent. It includes private colleges, like the University of La Verne, in Southern California, as well as historically black colleges like North Carolina Central and Fayetteville State. It also includes big public universities like San Diego State, New Hampshire, Virginia Tech and several branches of the State University of New York.
Large schools (1K+ students) Largest schools (2K+ students)Note: School size refers to the entering first-year class, not the total student body.
The group of underperforming colleges is also diverse, although all of the outliers in our analysis are public:
Large schools (1K+ students) Largest schools (2K+ students)Note: School size refers to the entering first-year class, not the total student body.
Why do some colleges do so much better than others? Part of the answer involves structure. Students tend to do better when they are following defined academic paths, rather than “aimlessly signing up for classes,” as Pamela Jackson, the provost of Fayetteville State, said. Her university, for instance, no longer allows students to be classified as undeclared, instead assigning everyone a “pre-major” based on the interests they listed on their application.
Many colleges also publish “degree road maps” that guide students through a course of study. And more colleges are pushing students to take enough classes to graduate in four years, instead of thinking of college as open-ended. At the University of California, Riverside, a student-government leader made up sweatshirts with a subtle message for the class that entered in the fall of 2014. The sweatshirts read, “Class of 2018.”
But perhaps the biggest lesson from our reporting is that the colleges with higher rates of student success simply seem to have been trying harder for longer.
They collect data on their students, study that data and use it to remove hurdles for students. They deepen students’ connections to other people on campus, including their classmates (through extracurriculars), professors and advisers. “A lot of it seems like it’s attention to detail in catering to students,” said Leebo Tyler, a recent graduate of Troy, an Alabama university with a higher-than-expected graduation rate. La Verne’s president, Devorah Lieberman, said, “The bottom line is connection — feeling like somebody cares.”
That approach worked for Anyssa Ramirez, who grew up in Dinuba, a small city in California’s Central Valley. Her family could not afford to send her on the 200-mile trip to La Verne’s visiting days for admitted students, so two of her teachers offered to take her and a classmate. The visit persuaded Ramirez to enroll.
The next fall, some of Ramirez’s high school classmates struggled with the transition to college, she said, but she felt connected to her campus from the start. Through La Verne’s day of community service and other programs for new students, she got to know classmates and professors early on. “La Verne holds your hand, but not in a detrimental way,” Ramirez said. By our measure, La Verne is one of the country’s most impressive colleges, with an expected graduation rate of 53 percent and an actual rate of 74 percent.
After Ramirez finished classes in December — graduating in three and a half years with a degree in education — she returned to Dinuba to become a substitute teacher. This summer, she will move to Las Vegas to join Teach for America as an elementary school teacher.
Anyssa Ramirez, a recent La Verne graduate, is substitute teaching in her hometown, Dinuba, Calif., and plans to move to Las Vegas to join Teach for America. Max Whittaker for The New York Times
Another important factor involves student living. At colleges where more students live on campus, graduation rates tend to be higher. After SUNY Brockport, which is near Rochester, began encouraging sophomores to remain in campus housing, for example, graduation rates rose.
Schools with more students living on campus did better
Average gap between actual and expected graduation rate in percentage points
Schools with more than 50%
of students living on campus
