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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From Thanksgiving to New Years Day and the following weekend, the college football schedule is filled with bowl games.  After the New Year begins, college sports fans can turn their attention to the height of the college basketball season that culminates in the annual March Madness NCAA Division I tournament.  College athletics is big business although perhaps only ten to twenty Division I programs make money each year.

While many books have been written about sports including college sports, there are a few that I found interesting for their background about the origins of the modern college sports “game” and its current state of commercialization.   John Thelin’s  A History of American Higher Education is a fairly comprehensive book about the origins and development of America’s colleges and universities.  In a chapter entitled “Alma Mater,” Thelin outlines major developments during the 1890’s to 1920, a time period that he calls the “age of university building” and the “golden age of the college.”  During this period, going to college became “fashionable and prestigious” and the national media covered the daily life of a college student in the same manner that the lives of the rich and famous are covered today.  During that period, university colors and mascots were conceived and adopted and the role of alumni associations and fundraising became very important.

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