The Six-Year Plan: How students linger on campus and universities stiff the taxpayer - Statistical Data Included

National Review, April 22, 2002 by Kate O'Beirne

The jubilant high-school senior dances up the path from his mailbox calling out, "Mom, I got in!" The TV ad's heartwarming tag line boasts, "The next four years, brought to you by the United States Postal Service."

This month's college acceptance letters might be arriving on time, but the USPS's message is badly outdated. The odds are that students heading off to public colleges and universities in the fall will spend six years earning their degrees. On average nowadays, only about 30 percent of students at public institutions graduate in four years.

When the NCAA reports graduation rates to compare the performance of athletes with that of other students, it now relies on the six-year rate as the standard. Thus, 43 percent of Indiana University's basketball players graduate in six years (versus 65 percent of all male students). "The four-year graduation rate is scandalous," declares Eugene W. Hickok, who as undersecretary of the Department of Education is the third-ranking official in that federal agency. Hickok explains that the cost to states is "enormous," and criticizes the lack of attention to the scandal: "However frustrated we might be over accountability in K through 12, at least the conversation is taking place." During his six years as Pennsylvania's education secretary, this reform-minded great-great-nephew of "Wild Bill" Hickok started plenty of unwelcome conversations with the state's higher-education officials -- and engaged in a real shootout with them over an innovative grant program designed to address the problem of students' dawdling through six years of college.

Graduating from a public college in four years has gone the way of coeds in bobbysocks. This is the result of a lax system run by administrators happy to take the extra funds that come with having students hanging around for five or six years, and eager to admit students who aren't prepared to do college-level work. Also, professors often aren't willing to teach students the basic courses they need to graduate in four years, and would rather host seminars on trendy, idiosyncratic pseudo-scholarship. The bottom line is that students incur extra years of debt and miss out on earnings that would come from getting a real job sooner -- while taxpayers foot the bill through loan subsidies and tuition grants.

According to a 1996 federal survey, 65 percent of students at private colleges manage to graduate in four years, while only 34 percent of public-college students do. "Too often, four-year programs turn into five-year sessions -- or more," then Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge said. "That's not good for our students or for taxpayers." The state offered $6 million in bonus payments to Pennsylvania colleges that graduated more than 40 percent of their in-state students in four years; in 2001, the first year of the program, not a single public institution qualified for the reward. (Sixty-five private Pennsylvania colleges received the bonus payments.)

Only one public university even bothered to respond to a request to submit its graduation rates; but when the bonuses were awarded, they squawked. The Chronicle of Higher Education aired complaints from public-college officials about the bonuses; they insisted that their students were more disadvantaged, and more likely to work during school, than students in private colleges. But Hickok notes that a high percentage of students at private schools hold down jobs -- and points out that the students themselves rebutted the officials' excuses by blaming their inability to graduate in four years not on the demands of working, but on the difficulty of scheduling the courses they needed for graduation.

In Colorado, Republican Gov. Bill Owens is also trying to boost the four-year graduation rate in his state's public colleges, and he highlights a significant difference between public and private institutions to explain the disparate performances: "Without the public subsidy, the pain of every year's tuition is greater." Colleges with higher tuition rates do have higher graduation rates. According to a report in the University of Michigan newspaper, "The 15 highest graduation rates belong to private institutions with annual tuition of at least $23,000."

Owens has bucked Colorado's academic establishment and introduced a system of performance funding for the state's higher-ed institutions. Higher-education czar Tim Foster -- who, according to Owens, has the "toughest job in state government" -- quickly shoots down the most typical excuse public-college officials offer to explain their undergraduates' lengthy stays on campus: He points out that public- and private-college students participate in the state's work-study programs in roughly equal numbers.

Under Colorado's new performance standards, public colleges will receive increased funding if they meet certain criteria, including increasing their four-year graduation rate (currently 24 percent) and their retention rate for freshmen, and ensuring that required courses are available to students. (Foster reports that to satisfy state overseers, one school had to add 40 sections of a basic required freshman course.)