Dropout Factories, America's Worst Colleges

I'll just add that if anything, they understated some of the problems. I have attended and/or worked for 5 universities, 3 private and 1 public. The hassles that students routinely go through simply would not be tolerated at other schools.

While many of the students are disadvantaged, IMHO, 90% of the problem is the administrative culture of the institution, NOT the students. As the article states, other universities have taken the EXACT same type of students (poor, black, under-prepared) and somehow are able have a graduation rate over 3 times better. The runarounds that I have seen some students go through is terrible.

 

I used to work for Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) and worked closely with certain departments at Chicago State University (CSU). Both institutions certainly have issues, but an abundance of distance learning is certainly not one of them (although CSU offers a fair amount of online courses--NEIU offers just a few and no online degree programs). In fact, one of the reason that NEIU has such a low graduation rate it that many of its students transfer to U of I-Chicago and to other programs that do offer flexible, accelerated, online and hybrid programs, while NEIU operates as a traditional face-to-face university, just as it has done for decades.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to come up with accurate conclusions regarding graduation rate data, since transfer students are not counted. The rates reflect how many student who started with the institution as freshmen stayed until they graduated six years later. While I am no apologist for U. of Phoenix, how reliable is a statistic that only accounts for a tiny percentage of students (the vast majority of Phoenix students start somewhere else, so they would not be counted in this graduation data).

Utah Valley University is a unique and interesting case. It was a two-year college that became a four-year in the 90s, so a number of students leave after completing two-years programs (which would contribute to 4-year attrition). Quite a large percentage of the student body are Latter-day Saints who interrupt their studies for 1.5-2 year church missions or who take classes at UVU in order to be able to transfer to BYU (both of which would contribute to the attrition rate).

 

If one transfers from one college to another does that individual have a negative impact on the graduation rate?

 

Washington MONTHLY

Permit me to reiterate. The story appeared in the Washington Monthly. not the The Washington Post

Washington Monthly has no relationship with the Washington Post or the Kaplan Group

The Post had a column that commented on the Monthly's article.

 

Yes, it does. If a student starts as a freshman at Chicago State U. and then transfers to the University of Illinois at Chicago, it negatively impacts Chicago State's graduation rate, since that student will not graduate from Chicago State within the six year range.