America has a college dropout problem. For all the talk of college costs and whether students can even afford to go to college, we’ve tended to skip past an equally crucial question—whether students who make it to campus are graduating with a useful credential. The sad reality is that far too many students invest scarce time and money pursuing a degree they never finish, frequently winding up worse off than if they’d never set foot on campus in the first place.
How common is this? In a word: very. In 2016, more than 48% of first-time, full-time students who started at a four-year college six years earlier had not yet earned a degree. For these schools, the four-year completion rate—that is, the share of students who complete a bachelor’s degree in the time the program is expected to take—is just 28%. Put another way, nearly 2 million students who begin college each year will drop out before earning a diploma. The picture at community colleges is no better. At public two-year colleges, only about 26% of full-time, first-time students complete their degree within three years.
Lackluster completion rates yield significant costs. Students wind up burdened by debt, waste their time, and see their expected earnings markedly reduced. Taxpayers wind up shelling out for grants and subsidies that go to waste, and for federal loans that are unlikely to get repaid. (For more on the numbers, check out the new set of papers issued jointly by the education teams at the American Enterprise Institute and Third Way, at Elevating College Completion.)
Now, there are a couple of crucial caveats when we talk about the nature of this problem and what might be done about it. First, not everyone who starts college should finish. Students have to be able and willing to do the requisite work. Pushing colleges to issue degrees to students who can’t do the work, or haven’t put in the elbow grease, doesn’t do anybody any favors. So, the proper response is not to simply start telling colleges, “Graduate more students, period!” Faced with such pressure, colleges will have a lot of incentive to churn out watered-down degrees or admit only the students who seem like the safest bets. Needless to say, that’s not the goal.
Indeed, a single-minded focus on college completion can create a whole slew of unintended problems. As we have seen in K–12 schooling, simple metrics can yield gamesmanship, corner cutting, or manipulation. That said, there are examples of promising developments that merit careful attention. Thirty-two states currently use performance-based funding policies that award a larger share of public subsidies to colleges that deliver impressive performance metrics. It’s useful to note, as the University of Virginia’s Sarah Turner has observed, that incorporating multiple performance measures in an evaluation “lessens incentives to distort behavior.”
The reality is that there’s a lot colleges can do, without compromising standards or cutting corners. Analysts Mark Schneider and Kim Clark, for instance, have explained how Georgia State University’s targeted “Panther Retention Grants” help financially strapped students make it over the finish line. GSU doesn’t require that students apply for the grant. Instead, Schneider and Clark note that GSU staff flag “the account of any student who is about to be dropped for nonpayment [and] checks the student’s financial aid eligibility to credit any available aid against the debt.” Programs like this can especially effective when students might not know how to tap into such resources or fear they’ll be stigmatized if they take advantage of them.
There’s a growing body of research which suggests that colleges can improve their students’ chances of success by working to understand student frustrations, provide appropriate supports, and find ways to help them over the rough spots. As Northwestern University’s Mesmin Destin has reported:
It is a long-standing empirical finding that students who have discussions and informal contact with faculty outside of class time are less likely to drop out of college. . . In one experiment with 13,000 college students, some students were randomly assigned to have access for two years to consistent college coaching resources to help them form clear goals and related strategies. Those who received the coaching were 14% more likely to remain enrolled in college a year after the coaching ended than students in the control group.
Some colleges successfully graduate most of their students with high-value degrees, and other institutions—even those enrolling similar students and charging similar tuition—do not. Students who are willing and able to do the work should reasonably expect to attend colleges where they’ll earn a degree. If colleges are admitting qualified students and then passively watching them drop out along the way—or are recruiting large numbers of students who are not up to the challenge—that’s a problem. It’s past time that we stop accepting this state of affairs and start focusing on what we might do about it.