Part-Time College Students Face Abysmal Graduation Rates

Laura ClawsonFollowforDaily Kos Labor

You've heard the expression about treating dandruff by decapitation? A new report on college completion argues for the opposite, identifying the graduation rate equivalent of a gaping wound filled with bits of shattered bone, and suggesting Band-Aids as a treatment.

"Time is the Enemy," the report from Complete College America, points to extremely low completion rates among part-time students, and to the fact that it's difficult to even track completion rates for the vast majority of college students today. These are serious problems: 40 percent of public college students are part-time and only 25 percent are full-time, residential students whose tuition is paid by their parents, yet policy and data collection are structured as if it was the norm to enter college as a full-time student and go straight through to graduation. As Tamar Lewin writes in the New York Times:

The numbers are stark: In Texas, for example, of every 100 students who enrolled in a public college, 79 started at a community college, and only 2 of them earned a two-year degree on time; even after four years, only 7 of them graduated. Of the 21 of those 100 who enrolled at a four-year college, 5 graduated on time; after eight years, only 13 had earned a degree.

But the Complete College report doesn't even make a halfhearted gesture toward addressing the deep economic issues that produce such results. The full report is 246 pages focused on the problem of part-time students struggling with obligations like supporting their families and themselves, yet a search for "financial aid" yields one result. "Tuition" comes up twice." Pell grants are used as a data point, but are not the subject of any policy discussion.

The report's suggestions, like "embed[ding] remediation into the regular college
curriculum so students don’t waste time before they start earning credits" and making scheduling changes so that course times are more predictable, allowing students to plan their lives ahead of time, may well be worthwhile and help raise graduation rates. But when students who have borrowed to finance their education face an average of $24,000 in debt after graduation and public college tuitions are skyrocketing, the problem of graduation rates requires us to think bigger. Yes, if students took less time to graduate, they would accumulate less debt. But they would take less time to graduate if they did not have to work so many hours; tinkering with scheduling is not going to suddenly make people able to afford high tuition, especially when people in their 20s face 14.1 percent unemployment and increasingly cannot afford to live outside their parents' homes.

So, yes. Fix remedial education. Fix course scheduling. But don't try to pretend that economic factors aren't affecting college completion rates. This is something that policy can and should address right alongside course schedules.

(h/t Hamilton Nolan)