Budget problems at public colleges and universities have been published in the press for the past year and a half.  Approximately a year or so ago, I decided to collect articles about the situation and organized them on this blog by state under the title Higher Ed’s Economic Challenges.  As the recession continues to impact the value of residential and commercial real estate (or was it the real estate that impacted the recession?), many states’ tax collections are below the level of three or four years ago. 

Unlike the federal government that is allowed to print money, most state constitutions have a balanced budget requirement.  When taxes decrease, expenditures must decrease as well.  K-12 education and Medicaid are two of the largest mandated expenditures at the state level.  Higher education has never been a mandated expenditure at the state level, so when state budgets have to be cut, higher education has usually been one of the first areas impacted.  Some states in some years increase student tuition rather than cut their higher education expense budgets.

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Critics of higher education are numerous these days. Whether it’s politicians or professors, the numbers of defenders of the status quo appear to be dwindling. Most of the books and articles that I’ve read recently have been written by current or retired professors whose audience is either higher education leadership or public policy leaders. Recently, a publisher contacted me and asked me if I would review a copy of the newly published book entitled The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It.

Author Craig Brandon was a former journalism professor at a Northeastern party school (Keene State College in New Hampshire) as well as an education reporter. His book combines stories of his personal experiences as a professor along with complementary evidence about other institutions or the higher education industry in general. His writing is hard-hitting, designed to create an action or a reaction from the reader, depending on their point of view.

Brandon’s intro provides the overview for the theme throughout the book which is (in my words) “colleges have sold out and don’t care if students learn as long as they pay tuition.” Additionally, Brandon cites the ever increasing administrative payrolls as well as the luxury “student centers, water parks, hot tubs, workout centers, and climbing walls” as bait to attract new students. He writes that many students expect diplomas for their cash and don’t expect to have to learn.

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I had the opportunity to present a paper this week at the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education’s (AACE) E-Learn 2010 conference in Orlando along with Dr. Phil Ice, our Director of Course Design, Research & Development.  The paper, Comprehensive Assessment of Student Retention in Online Learning Environments, originated from research that I conducted as part of my doctoral dissertation at The University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Student retention has been an issue in higher education since the late 1800’s.  Some of the early research in the area began in the 1930’s but the volume of research studies increased substantially in the 1960’s through the present era.  Early research focused on psychological reasons for students to drop out of college but most of the literature since the late 1970’s have focused on sociological issues.

While there are many significant contributors to the research of student retention (William Spady, Alexander Astin,  Vincent Tinto, John M. Braxton, George Kuh, Ernest Pascarella, etc.), Vincent Tinto’s Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition provides a fairly thorough overview of many research studies (note:  the second edition of this book was published in 1994 and new copies are difficult to find).

Tinto is given credit for developing the first theoretical construct of predicting student retention.  Three major areas of his theory involve the importance of the background characteristics of college students, the social integration of students with their college, and the academic integration of students with their professors and programs.  Subsequent research studies have focused on some of these areas and/or attempted to prove or disprove the original construct.  Colleges and universities use some of the studies as the basis for their internal retention research or external explanations of their graduation rate.

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Tomorrow is the ninth anniversary of 9/11.  Most of us can remember where we were and what we were doing the moment we heard about the planes flying into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon.    Unlike normal days where we go about our business, many of us knew our lives would be changed forever.  Our sense of security at home, a sense reinforced by years of geographical isolation from the world’s conflicts, was altered.

The number of deaths that day in New York was 2,819.  Of that number, 343 were firefighters and paramedics, 23 were NYPD officers, and 37 were Port Authority police officers.  The crash at the Pentagon killed 125 people including 55 service members.  The death toll of passengers and crew members from the four planes was 246.

The quest to reduce the impact of terrorism and subsequent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted in 5,661 deaths through September 5.  Hundreds of thousands of our country’s active duty, reserve, and guard service members have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, many for multiple assignments.  Thousands of intelligence community members have been deployed as well.

We salute the memories of the fallen as well as salute the efforts of everyone who has been deployed in the fight against terrorism.  Tomorrow morning, pause for a moment and think about the hundreds of thousands of heroes who have sacrificed life, limb, and personal safety for our security at home.

The end of August, first of September represents the start of the traditional fall semester at most colleges and universities.  Freshmen arrive with the excitement of attending a new school and meeting lots of new friends.  Returning students arrive with tales of summer’s experiences and a spirit of renewal for their academic quest.  The campus has been spruced up with summer maintenance projects, some of which have been completed just days, or even hours, before the first freshmen arrived.

As you know, we have no physical classrooms at AMU and APU.  Our campus consists of 15 administrative buildings for our leadership and staff in Charles Town, West Virginia and Manassas, Virginia.  Over 90 percent of our students are not first time freshmen transitioning from high school to college.  Yet, for some reason, many of our adult students choose to come back to college in the fall.  Even though we accommodate the schedules of many working adults with 12 monthly semester starts, the fall is usually a busy time of the year for us.

Hosting a back-to-school picnic or cocktail party is more than a little difficult for a university with students in all 50 states and 100+ countries.  Virtually, I welcome you to our university and hope that you will find our continuing efforts at academic and social integration helpful.  As technology changes and improves, effectively shortening the distance between people, we hope that our abilities to integrate students academically and socially improve as well.

Welcome back and thanks for making us your choice for college.

America’s declining college graduation rates have been the subject of many a political speech or hearing lately.  President Obama set a long term goal for his administration to restore America’s prominence in the percentage of its citizens with college degrees.  When you examine the research literature regarding student attrition, persistence, or graduation rates, there are thousands of publications and numerous dissertations written about some aspect of those topics.

John Thelin is a research professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation at the College of Education at the University of Kentucky.  He also authored A History of American Higher Education.  The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) recently sponsored a working paper (#2010-01) authored by Thelin entitled The Attrition Tradition in American Higher Education:  Connecting Past and Present.  Thelin’s research documents that attrition in higher education has been a problem since the early 1900’s, but that it has only been the focus of research, discussion, and improvement efforts for the past 30 years.  He cites several recent publications, AEI publication Diplomas and Dropouts:  Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students (and Which Don’t) and a publication of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College and America’s Public Universities, which both deliver distressing news about college graduation rates.  The first publication indicates that graduation rates are not entirely a function of the selectivity of admissions by the school and the type of institution.  The second publication focuses on the 20-year decline in state university graduation rates noting that few state universities graduate more than 65 percent of their students in six years.

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