Healthcare and Higher Education .... continued

This topic is rapidly gaining attention at different places. I hope my academic colleagues are following the discussions and commentaries.
The latest one is from David Leonhardt of the NY Times--he includes public universities in "a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years."

That ought to hurt somewhere! I teach at a public university--a regional one, like the regionals that Leonhardt refers to. What are our graduation rates?
The following is the "Percentage of first-time, full-time freshmen entering and graduating from the same institution within six years."

• 2000-2001: 39.5%
• 2001-2002: 41.1%
• 2002-2003: 41.6%
• 2003-2004: 42.9%
• 2004-2005: 44.4%
• 2005-2006: 43.5%
• 2006-2007: 45.5%
• 2007-2008: 39.5%

These numbers are not unlike the ones Leonhardt cites: "Eastern Michigan (39 percent) or Western Michigan (54 percent)."

Leonhardt goes on to write:

Students see no need to graduate in four years. Doing so, as one told the book’s authors, is “like leaving the party at 10:30 p.m.” Graduation delayed often becomes graduation denied. Administrators then make excuses for their graduation rates. And policy makers hand out money based on how many students a college enrolls rather than on what it does with those students.

There is a real parallel here to health care. We pay doctors and hospitals for more care instead of better care, and what do we get? More care, even if in many cases it doesn’t make us healthier.

In education, the incentives can be truly perverse. Because large lecture classes are cheaper for a college than seminars, freshmen are cheaper than upperclassmen. So a college that allows many of its underclassmen to drop out may be helping its bottom line.

The blogger at the Economist disagrees, and contends that low completion rates and delayed graduation result from inadequate preparation at K-12:

America has a serious and growing problem in its primary and secondary education systems, and lacklustre college graduation rates are a symptom of that problem. Fix the former and the latter will largely take care of itself.

Everybody ought to be blamed here. Including me.

BTW, how does my university explain the phenomenal drop in graduation rates from what seemed to be an upward movement in the chart and back to 2000-2001 conditions?

The decline in 2007-08 graduation rates are a result of the challenging campus climate of several years ago. WOU engaged in a difficult 2005-07 collective bargaining process and experienced serious financial difficulty resulting in changes in senior administration. The uncertainty caused by these events resulted in many students choosing to leave WOU. This exodus was first evident in the 2003-04 drop in freshman retention rates and continued for several years. Fall 2006 and fall 2007 retention rates have substantially improved and will likely lead to increased graduation rates following several depressed years. The effect of campus climate and uncertainty on student persistence is evident and worthy of special consideration as the system discusses efficiencies during the current financial crisis.

Hmmm .... nice try :-) I wonder if the union folks, who are currently in the next round of contract negotiations, actually read this report! If perchance they did, well, it is not like improving student graduation rates is the highest priority for them either. Neither tweedledum nor tweedledee will make this an issue :-(