Student Attrition
August 9th, 2010America’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.
