Chancellor Jim Petro recently weighed in on Ohio’s poor record of graduating its college students. Only 56 percent who entered college in 2004 had achieved a bachelor’s degree six years later, for example. A primary cause of the failure, according to the leader of the state’s higher education system, is “motivational weakness.” Students apparently just aren’t rewarded enough.
His proposed solution, a “Roadmap to Success” program that will give students honorary pieces of paper for each of the first two years of schooling they complete, is, unfortunately, just more of the bureaucratic bloat that has proliferated in higher education in recent years, driving up the cost of a degree without producing any noticeable improvement in quality or completion rates.
Pardon the skepticism, but we’ve seen it all before. The past three decades have seen significant “administrative creep,” as layer upon new layer of bureaucratic sclerosis has been added at colleges across the land, all in the hope that something — anything — would finally do the trick. Those of us who are actually in the classrooms, however, can tell you that the nation’s public universities and community colleges face two significant obstacles to improved graduation rates — whatever the students’ motivations.
First, we are simply allowing too many students to enter college without the skills they need to succeed. It will come as news to no one that far too many of our high schools are passing students along unprepared. Objective indicators (standardized test scores) certainly bear out such a perspective; but so, too, do the frustrations of tens of thousands of college instructors who receive papers from their students that are virtually indecipherable for their lack of writing fundamentals.
A report by Ohio’s own Board of Regents (August 2006) reveals that nearly two of every five incoming freshmen require at least one remedial course (many require two or three). Of those, only 15 percent will earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared to 47 percent for those who don’t require remediation.
Leaving aside the ethics of our taking tuition dollars from those whom we know are largely destined to fail, the monetary costs are considerably higher when we provide in college what should have been insisted on in high school. The mini-bureaucracy of remedial coursework is one of the drivers of higher education inflation. (Gov. John Kasich’s recent emphasis on placing more students in two-year, terminal technical-training programs seems like a good start toward addressing this problem, by the way.)
The other significant impediment to graduation for so many of our students is the financial burden we place on them by our failure to subsidize more of the cost of their education.
At a four-year, public research university in Ohio (like Kent State, Ohio State, Cleveland State or Akron), students now (according to figures from 2009, the most recent year for which comprehensive data are available) bear 62.7 percent of the cost of their degrees; nationally, students at like institutions pay 50.4 percent of the price tag. Analogous figures for community colleges show an even greater Buckeye gap, at 55.6 percent versus 30.4 percent, respectively.)
Thus, while Ohio’s average annual cost actually is no higher than the nation’s ($15,855 here versus $15,919 nationally), the 12.3 percent “penalty” that Ohio students must pay translates into an extra $1,950 that a student must come up with each year.
At Ohio’s current minimum wage of $7.70 per hour, for example, that means a student attending a four-year university in the Buckeye state must work an additional 253 hours just to make up for the state’s lower level of support. Analogous figures for community college students in Ohio are $2,336 and 303 hours.
Informal surveys of my students regularly reveal that significant majorities are working while going to school, and many are working more than one job. So if the chancellor is looking for a real solution to our problem of low graduation rates, he should put aside the tangential considerations and cut to the heart of the matter: Send us better-prepared students, and support them better financially while they are in school; symbolic certificates need not apply. That is the ticket to better success.
Yantek is an associate professor of political science at Kent State University.
