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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I read an editorial from the Pasadena, California Star News entitled “Higher Ed Needs a Redo.”  The article discusses the premises, philosophy, and outcomes of California’s Master Plan issued in 1960 and states that it’s time for a revision to a document that is approaching 50 years old.  The article mentions the 30+ percent tuition increase at the University of California and the tuition increases at the California State University System (CSU) that have reached the point where students pay more in tuition than the state pays.  The writer notes that this is a long way from the original Master Plan which guaranteed a free education to anyone qualified for admission.   The editorial notes that during the recession of the 1990’s, CSU’s enrollment decreased by 50,000 and it took the state years to recover.  Lastly, the California House and Senate have agreed to meet to discuss a revision of the Master Plan on its 50th anniversary.  The timing is fortuitous given the budget crisis.

As I read this article, seemingly the 500th that I’ve read about California’s crisis in higher education funding, it reminded me of the data available through the annual State Higher Education Finance report issued by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO).  On August 9, 2009, SHEEO issued their sixth report which is for FY 2008.  I highly recommend this report for anyone interested in understanding the funding of public higher education in America.  What’s important to note about this report is that it shows positive progress in higher education (since it’s for the 2007-2008 funding year) but notes that 2009 and 2010 will probably be different given the impact of the recession.  Supplementary tables are maintained by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) on their website at www.sheeo.org.

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An article with the above title was recently published in the Daily Egyptian, Southern Illinois University’s student newspaper.  Authored by Madeleine Laroux, the article discusses a report provided to SIU’s Board of Trustees at a September meeting.  According to Laroux, Paul Sarvela, Vice President for Academic Affairs, stated that the for-profits are growing at a substantial rate but don’t offer the level of service that the traditional universities offer.  Instead, they’re enrolling the working adult and focusing on marketplace demands.  Chancellor Sam Goldman added, “We are not appropriately compared to a for-profit.  We provide a value-added education and some people want that, many people don’t.  It depends on where you go.”

I think there are two telling comments in the above narrative.  The first is Vice President Sarvela’s comment about for-profits enrolling working adults and focusing on marketplace demands.  I wonder why SIU isn’t interested in that?  Working adults may understand the value of a college education more so than a student just out of high school.  Focusing on marketplace demands sounds important in most businesses.  Imagine if American automakers had focused on the marketplace demands when the Japanese automakers entered the U.S. market.

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Articles about transformations in higher education are being published daily, it seems.    Many of them focus on affordability and the fact that the increasing costs in higher education in the United States cannot continue to exceed inflation or the increase in earning power of Americans.  Very few of these articles, however, offer solutions or examples of solutions to the high cost conundrum.

In the September issue of Fast Company Magazine, Anya Kamenetz writes an interesting article entitled “How Web-Savvy Edupunks are Transforming American Higher Education.”  She begins the article by discussing how the internet and various applications or sites such as Google, YouTube Edu, iTunesU, Wikipedia, and Facebook have changed the way all of us share information.

Yet while colleges like MIT have placed all of their coursework online for free, an MIT degree costs about $189,000.  She cites Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at the University of Mary Washington as stating, “Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies.”  According to Kamenetz, Groom coined the term “edupunk” to describe the high-tech do-it-yourself education.

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The Sloan Consortium and Babson Survey Research Group (an organization based at Babson College in Massachusetts) released their sixth annual report on the state of online higher education last November and I recently revisited the report.  Titled, “Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States,” there are several elements contained therein that I feel are worth noting here.

Attempting to answer “the fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education,” the report addresses several topics that provide evidence that the “nature and extent” of online education is growing rapidly in the United States.  The report begins by noting the significant increases in enrollments in online colleges and universities.  According to the authors, in the fall of 2007, some 3.9 million students were taking at least one online course, representing a twelve percent increase over the previous year.  The growth in enrollments for higher education as a whole grew at only 1.2 percent.  The report notes that in total, 20 percent of all US college and university students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2007 semester.

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In last week’s The Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Carlson reported on a speech given by George Pernsteiner, Chancellor of the Oregon University System.  In addressing attendees at the annual meeting of the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), Pernsteiner was quoted as saying “If [the crisis] is all we look at, we will have failed.  Our institutions will have failed.”

Mr. Pernsteiner believes that all the solutions generated so far out of the current crisis are “Band-Aids.”  He talked about the slipping position of college educated Americans versus other nations, the cutback in funding to public institutions by the states, and the growing percentage of Latinos who have been a traditionally underserved group in higher education. “More students, different students, fewer dollars, more control, and more accountability,” Mr. Pernsteiner said. “If you lay those things down end to end, you have a series of puzzles.”

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