Lamentations over America’s college dropout rate have become commonplace.
The American Enterprise Institute issued a paper calling the many schools with high dropout rates “failure factories.” An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor called for community colleges to raise their graduation rates. And a coalition of groups is pushing the objective of getting community colleges to set specific goals for increasing their graduation rates.
Supposedly, the country is hurt when students start college but don’t graduate.
Lurking in the background to these claims is the implicit notion that things are getting worse with regard to college completion rates—that in the past, most students completed their studies within the standard time frame. We used to do a lot better and need to get back in the groove.
But is that true? A new paper, “The Attrition Tradition in American Higher Education” by University of Kentucky professor John Thelin, takes issue with that. After some painstaking research into a graduation data for a sampling of colleges and universities going back about a century, Thelin concludes that there never was a “golden age.” Even prestigious schools used to have surprisingly high attrition rates.
Nowadays, colleges and universities compile and report statistics on a vast array of student data but that wasn’t always the case. To find out how much of a dropout problem there used to be, Thelin had to carefully go through each year’s class rosters at schools like Brown, Harvard, Amherst, and William and Mary. Based on that work, he found that in the early 1900s, graduation percentages were often in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. (Today, the rates vary enormously, from around 90 percent at the most selective colleges to the teens at some of the least.)
Were those rather high attrition rates regarded as a problem? Thelin shows that they were—but only because they meant financial pressures for which college presidents wanted to avoid blame. “A president who reported declining enrollments to a scrutinizing board of trustees was a president whose job was in peril,” he writes.
Yes, these schools were all non-profit institutions, but money was still crucial. Thelin found that administrators used a number of tactics to keep their enrollments up. One was to accept applicants who didn’t meet the (generally low) admission standards but then charge them for needed “preparatory” courses, i.e., “remedial” or, to use the current euphemism, “developmental” courses. Another was sliding discounts on tuition: the closer to the beginning of the school year, the lower the rate in an effort to lure in a few marginal students. Airlines do the same thing today, of course, when they sell standby seats at a low fare rather than have them remain empty.
Why did so many students fail to complete their degrees? Thelin contends that it wasn’t mainly because going to college was so expensive. Even at top private colleges and universities, tuition and expenses were low. A much bigger obstacle to college completion, he maintains, was the fact that having a college degree just wasn’t thought to be very important.
For one thing, many students apparently did not think that college “success” mattered much. Thelin observes that a popular slogan at that time was “Don’t Let Your Studies Interfere With Your Education!” Much as we decry the “Animal House” party atmosphere that is found on many a campus today, there’s nothing new about it.
Far more important, though, is something Thelin misses: Back in those days, having a college degree was of little benefit because there was no mania over educational credentials. Except for the clergy and medical doctors, having a college degree was not a requirement or even an expectation. Not only that, many of America’s business leaders actually held college education in disdain.
An enlightening book in this regard is Professor Edward C. Kirkland’s 1990 book Dream and Thought in the Business Community, 1860-1900. Kirkland devotes a chapter to the relationship between business and higher education and in it we learn, for example, that Andrew Carnegie thought that a young man who went to college was at best wasting time and money. At worst, he was ruining himself for the rigors of the commercial world.
Not everyone had quite so negative a view. John D. Rockefeller employed some college-educated people in his business enterprises and famously used his own money to establish the University of Chicago. Still, it is true to say that hardly anyone hurt his career prospects by dropping out of college. And that explains why there were no lamentations over the low college graduation rate a century ago. Going to college at all was not regarded as important, so graduating was of very little concern.
Thelin also examines the attitudes toward college during the interwar years and finds that there was a “fatalism” toward academic attrition among administrators. Once students were enrolled, he observes, their fates were “not especially a matter of great administrative concern.” That is, students were supposed to meet the demanding academic standards and if they either could not or would not, that was that. Much as school officials wanted tuition-paying bodies, academic standards trumped revenue.
Instead of trying to move mountains to keep struggling students in school, counselors in those days engaged in what famed sociologist Burton Clark called the “cooling out” function, which meant getting them to accept responsibility for failure and consoling them that dropping out wasn’t so bad.
How things have changed.
Today, higher education is a mass phenomenon and nearly all schools pay very close attention to student retention. They are counseled to stay in school; if any pressure is brought to bear, it’s against faculty members for making courses too hard and adhering to strict standards, this recent case being a good example.
While his history is revealing, the weakness in Professor Thelin’s paper is that he assumes that attrition is now a problem calling for more research and institutional effort, but never explains why our current college dropout rates are “troubling.” With large numbers of academically weak, disengaged students enrolling in college, a high dropout rate is predictable. The big question is whether, even with today’s credential mania, it should be a matter of national concern that such a large percentage of young people give college a try but never complete the degree requirements.
Lots of them who stay in college are, as Professor Jackson Toby argued in his recent book The Lowering of Higher Education in America (which I reviewed here), just going through the motions and learning little of benefit. Many of those who do graduate end up working in low-skill jobs. Was the degree a good investment for them—or a waste of time and money?
Thelin is right that there was no golden age when nearly all those who went to college earned their degrees. High dropout rates weren’t seen as a national problem in the old days and it’s hard to see why they are today.