Here's an interesting article about what Georgia is doing (or attempting
to do) to improve graduation rates.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/23/georgia
There is an interesting bit about Kennesaw, well known to all of us who
worry about psychology teaching issues, which I have copied below.
My own, extremely unfashionable, opinion on this matter is that the
matter of graduation rates is mostly a red herring, born of a misplaced
industrial understanding of what constitutes "success" in the university
context. Many people don't graduate because they don't want to -- they
decide after a year or two that university is not for them. This should
be a perfectly acceptable outcome. The equation of "graduated" with
"success" is utterly bogus. A student who decides that s/he doesn't want
to do the things that are required to graduate from university is not a
"failure." S/he has made a wise personal decision. Many other students
don't graduate either because it is too expensive or because course
offerings have become so tight that they can't get into the courses they
want in a timely manner. This is indeed a problem, and it is (obviously)
addressed by lowering tuition rates, raising student grants, and
increasing course offerings. These solutions are unspeakable in the
current context, however, because they involve the application of money,
and the taxes that would be required to fund them are politically
unpalatable in the US (despite the fact that it remains one of the most
under-taxed countries in the developed world today). As Oliver Wendell
Holmes wisely observed so many years ago, taxes are the price you pay
for civilized society. A highly educated population is an important part
of that civilizing process. There is no cheap work-around.
With increased funding being off the table, nearly everyone turns their
attention to other "solutions" -- activities that look like they might
be helpful, especially if you can focus blame on some unpopular group
(such as teachers), but that will only have, at best, a very modest
impact on the problem. These include the popular babble about various
"learning styles" and the array "teaching techniques" that are said to
"address" this "problem." (A lot of this amounts to little more than
"I'm bored. Teach me in a more entertaining way or I'll tell whoever
will listen that you're a bad teacher.") Another is the increasing
popularity of electronic distance learning (which, to be sure, has a
place in the system, but is mainly being used to massively increase
enrollments in courses of almost necessarily diminished quality).
In the end, I fear, Boards of Governors and their government masters
will force school administrators to increase graduation rates without
increasing resources. The increase will come nearly entirely from
graduating people who would not have been able to successfully complete
their studies under earlier circumstances. Of course, no one is able to
say this explicitly, so it is done under the guise of a wide array
subterfuges by which courses are made easier (e.g., "learning
objectives" subtly morphing into "maximum requirements"), degree
requirements are relaxed ("modernized"), and those who cannot pass even
under these lenient circumstances being offeredvarious special statuses
that relieve them of completing the same work in the same time as
everyone else.
Sad but true.
Discuss.
Chris
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
416-736-2100 ex. 66164
chri...@yorku.ca
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
==========================
Daniel S. Papp, president of Kennesaw State University --- with about
22,000 students, one of the system's mid-sized "state universities"---
was one of the campus leaders who were told to go back to the drawing
board after an initial meeting with the regents.
"We were a bit surprised about that," Papp said. "They wanted additional
information on why folks left our institutions [before graduation]. They
also wanted us to drill down further into the data we had specifically,
for example, to assess the impact of some of the retention programs we
had in place. They told us, 'You've got to look at something more than
just adding money to the equation, such as doing better advising.' It
wasn't the least bit punitive. Rather it was like, 'Have you considered
this?' Or, 'Have you looked at this?' "
Kennesaw State's most recent freshman-to-sophomore retention rate is 76
percent, and its latest six-year graduation rate is 38 percent. Among
other issues revealed in a self-study, the university found most
students who dropped out said they did not receive enough academic
advising and that student demand for courses exceeded availability. The
three-year goals Kennesaw State presented to the regents are fairly
ambitious. It wants to boost its graduation rate by 10 percentage points
and hopes to do so by, among other projects, encouraging all of its
students to take between 30 and 33 credit hours per academic year,
increasing the number of hybrid and online course offerings, and helping
its students plan their academic courseload at least two years in advance.
---
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