Lately, Ciocca Eller said, schools are being held more accountable for their graduation rates, with some states tying educational funding to certain statistical benchmarks. “Potentially, there’s pressure on faculty to help students, especially underprepared students, to move them through the curriculum in order to keep churning up the graduation rate,” she said.
The optimistic take on this is that colleges are being more attentive to student needs and learning is improving. You would get the impression from reading The College Dropout Scandal by David Kirp that colleges do not have to reduce rigor at all in order to improve graduation rates. He makes it sound as if the Null Hypothesis has no bearing at all at the college level, and all colleges have to do to raise the graduation rate is pay more attention to their students’ sense of belonging and self-esteem. I think his “can-do” outlook is a baloney sandwich, but of course I could be wrong.
I think it is much more likely that the chief way to increase college graduation rates is to lower standards, both in terms of the courses required and the degree of rigor in grading. I think that conservative intellectuals should fight particularly hard against this.
A recent paper by Jeffrey Denning et al. finds that college completion rates have increased because standards have declined:
“Why Have College Completion Rates Increased?
Abstract:
College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed – since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional resources, and institution attended do not explain much of the change. However, we document that standards for degree receipt may explain some of the change in graduation rates.”
—Jeffrey T. Denning et al., “Why Have College Completion Rates Increased?,” IZA Discussion Paper No. 12411 (IZA Institute for Labor Economics, June 2019).
Available online, ungated:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3408309
The paper seems plausible. You can’t easily measure rigor directly, but it seems like you can indirectly. If you have more students, percentage-wise, going to college while the grades they’re receiving are also going up, it’s probably because it’s easier to get higher grades now than before. Also, students spend less time studying. So, they’re putting in less effort and getting higher grades, that sounds like it’s less rigorous.
I think your focus and many others is on the small liberal arts collage you went to. But far more collage students now go to large stat schools. At large state schools students are on one of two basic tracts. Get a “hard” degree and upon completion you find an easy time to get a job. Or get an easy degree, where one struggles to get a job. For the first group, things have not gotten easier. I was an accounting major at a large state school. My nephew was also an accounting major at the same school. It has gotten meaningful harder (not some much in individual courses being harder, but in the increased number of courses required). Likewise, I doubt many engineering majors would say things have gotten easier. For type two majors, they likely have gotten easier as the professors use easy grades and less work as a way to encourage students to take their courses and keep their jobs. As with many things , it is easy to look at things through the lens of your personal experience rather than thinking about things in a more neutral way. Kind of like the three languages of politics.
IMO, yes (though on the other hand it also seems that at least STEM students get to learn more relevant stuff these days).
Presumably it’s rotting from the Ivy League head, where lenience has long been the order of the day, but it really seems an inevitable consequence of how the game is set up. Less selectivity in the student population along with huge expenses that make the student really want the credential they paid for. So just hand out the sheep skin and everyone is happy. Well, almost everyone.
Long run you are probably right (US colleges are becoming closer to Asian universities)but it could have multiple reasons:
1) High school graduation has increased to record levels and young people are ‘valuing’ education more. The students are more ready for college and the increase of more Tiger Mom and HS students building ‘resumes’ makes a lot of impact here.
2) Students between financial aid and family contributions are financially dropping less. (I bet this explains ~10% here of drop outs.)
3) With 2 graduating HS seniors, colleges are outlaying the classes much better than when I went. The above passage could be excessive but there is probably a lot little colleges can do to mitigate dropouts.
4) I suspect at the lower end spectrum of colleges is students are ‘customers’ so this is a goal of the college.
Going to college back in 1990, It really seemed like the goal of the university was their students to attend more than 4 years and that does not appear to be as true today.
Another optimistic take is that teachers/institutions stopped engaging in a type of “toughness signalling”, ratcheting up the difficulty level based on a false assumption of filtering out unsuitable students.
Who knows. Education is like potholes; every driver is an expert.
Build better and more objective measurements of academic ability. Separate grading/measurement and coaching/teaching. That would improve a variety of aspects of education.
The business model of higher education is predatory lending. Lowering standards keeps students around longer who don’t belong there in the first place and increases the haul of student loan money collected. And it is also a way of gaming the reporting requirements of the feeble federal oversight system. In collusion with the federal student loan program, institutions load students up with debt for which students don’t have an inkling of comprehension of the consequences. The government then withholds passports from debtor students to keep them trapped in the USA.
Immediate legislation is required to protect children from predatory lending. The legislation must include two key protections:
(1) No student loans for students under 21 years of age.
(2) Prospective borrowers must have taken at least 5 CLEP, DSST, or equivalent examinations and student-loan eligible institutions must grant full credit for passing scores on all such accredited examinations.
These common sense reforms are essential for reforming the broken and corrupt higher education system. Brains don’t really mature until the 20’s so exploiting immaturity by selling dreams of education is not only economically inefficient but immoral as well. Students who wait to borrow will have opportunity to gain non-academic experience and knowledge. By taking examinations they will confront their own abilities or lack thereof and have a more realistic expectation of what they can achieve through the higher education system. On then can trust begin to be restored in the higher education industry.
Happening in high schools too.
http://www.aei.org/publication/make-up-courses-can-lead-to-made-up-graduation-rates/
https://www.educationnext.org/the-credit-recovery-scam/
An interesting financing approach would be to have no stated tuition, but colleges and universities receive Y% of each graduate’s AGI for X number of years, with X and Y determined by each individual college and university.
I think this would have a number of advantages:
A. No student will be unable to attend school due to solely financial reasons.
B. People will eventually be able to escape from their college payment obligations if things don’t work out – after X years, everyone is off the hook.
C. Colleges and universities incentives will be aligned with student’s financial interests, and schools will have a financial incentive to limit/avoid majors and students with poor future financial prospects.
D. It will be easier for colleges to compete on price when the financing shifts away from scholarships and debt (with price being based on the relative values of X and Y).
E. People who receive a great benefit and/or are lucky will pay the most, and those who get little to nothing out of their college time will pay the least.
One downside is that if X is large, there will be significant transition costs. Perhaps the federal government could issue loans to universities to cover the cost. Another downside is that it would be basically impossible to implement uniformly, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
And obviously, to the main point, colleges won’t have any incentive to drop rigor.
Won’t they? Will they still get paid for students that don’t graduate?
Your approach seems very gameable. For example, I will gladly print you a degree from the University of Nonesuch (trademark pending) for 0.1% of your lifetime earnings (0.2% for Master’s, 0.3% for Ph.D, o.4% for Supreme Ultra Smartypants). It’s a good deal for me, as I can print several hundred diplomas for $35 in printer supplies. It’s a good deal for many recent high school grads- if one gets a job paying $50K, I get paid $50 per year. Even a very marginal signal of quality is worth the cost to the student (a good tie costs more), and no education need occur.
” I think that conservative intellectuals should fight particularly hard against this.”
This is an issue which I feel serious actors on both sides of the political aisle can get behind – academic rigor.
I strongly support the liberal arts generally, though I do think there are too many “fluff” courses and perhaps a few majors we could do without. There is a sense that because liberal arts are “subjective” rather than the STEM based “objectivity” within the coursework that liberal majors will necessarily be less rigorous. I don’t believe that is the case and would invite all political factions to lean hard against that.
What should not be the case is that unprepared freshman are shuffled into liberal arts majors because they are less rigorous and improve their chances of graduation. All that said, this notion would entirely depend on the particular university or state. I find it extremely hard to generalize very broad topics like this.
Good luck fighting that, Arnold. I think a different tactic would be better- just help drive it into the ground until it is a burning heap of wreckage. I think it is beyond saving at this point.
California has been the model for higher education since the 1960 Master Plan that established the University of California for the top eighth academically qualified (grades & SAT), California State Colleges for the top third, and Freshman/Sophomore Community Colleges for everyone, regardless of academic ability (high school graduation optional, adults welcome, vocational and academic curriculum). The CCs ensured academic rigor by mandating that all prospective students intent on taking academic-track curriculum must take standardized placement tests for Math and English before enrolling to determine readiness for college-level academic courses. By the last 20 years anywhere from ca. 30 to 90 percent of test takers (depending on location) earned scores that directed them into Remedial Math and English courses. Although these courses taught lower-level skills, e.g. elementary arithmetic and basic grammar, they were full-semester long, cost the same for tuition/fees/books, and were rigorous relative to the material taught. But they did not earn credits/units that satisfied graduation requirements or enabled students to transfer as Juniors to a four-year school.
Academic rigor has been relaxed at every level, starting in the elementary grades, due to a massive influx of less capable children from families with far fewer resources than was the case in 1960. Harsh truth, sorry to report. High school graduates are typically unprepared for college-level work. Despite this, going to colllege is now the default objective for all high school grads. Consequently, they grind to a halt, even in the easier Remedial courses, run out of time and money, and drop out, frequently encumbered with student loan debt. Their employment prospects were not enhanced by their college experience.
This year, to superfically rectify the situation, Remedial courses were abandoned, and credit-bearing college-level academic courses were reconfigured to admit unprepared students, with pressure exerted on teachers and administrators to lower standards so that everyone can pass and progress towards graduation.
Graduation rates will rise. Academic rigor will decline.
Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
Goodhart’s Law: “once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.”
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure ….”
This isn’t quite right.
Sprinter lap times are used as targets and they are great measurements.
School letter grades are highly subjective. Some classes grade more strictly than others, many grade on curves, and some classes cover a broader range of knowledge than others. And the grading/measurement is done at the whim of the coaches.
Grading/measurement should be separate from the teaching/coaching, similarly to how standardized tests work. That lets you get more meaningful measurements on both students and on teachers and schools that can be compared more meaningfully across time.