What Can Stop Kids From Dropping Out

I teach in a CUNY senior college. Almost all of my students work minimum wage jobs. This semester, one student is sleeping through most of my classes. She works 40 hours a week. I remember when I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University, I was advised that freshmen were not supposed to work -- at all. I did work, weekends only. I only knew one other freshman who worked.

I think college should be tuition free and a stipend provided so that students do not need to work. This is precisely how my nephew attended university in France. He graduated. How come other nations can invest in the college education of their youth - -but we "can't"? Aren't we supposed to be the best?

What's the goal?

Is the goal to provide everyone with a college degree (note that I intentionally said "degree," not "education")? This is how you'd work toward that goal, though I'm not at all convinced we'd have enough professional jobs for those graduates. Better students won't need all the counseling and extra help, but it'll certainly help worse students graduate.

But what if the goal is to educate all graduates to a certain level? What if, in part, the goal is to award degrees to people who've demonstrated a minimum level of intelligence and scholarship, so that the degree is an indicator of those qualities?

Graduation is a poor measure of quality because the goalposts can always be moved. And we've seen what happens when we use it to judge schools, and blame schools (rather than students) when the numbers are too low, in what's happened to a high school diploma. We've judged high schools in part by graduation rates. We've fired teachers where the rates were too low and insisted on policies that grease through apathetic, untalented students with minimal effort. And a high school diploma is generally regarded as worthless.

I don't think Americans should be denied a college education because they're poor. We definitely need to address access for minorities and at-risk students. But I also don't want anybody to be denied a college EDUCATION because public policy is focused on granting EVERYbody a college DEGREE.

College students are adults. Adults. If you can't handle your education, then you cannot handle the professional responsibilities that are to follow. Stop lowering coursework and graduation requirements: I will never be treated by a doctor, lawyer, nurse, or engineer who graduated from "Politically Correct University."

Dropping out of university starts long before a student starts university. There are steps that can be taken once a student is at university. Most students that are engaged in groups, activities, sports, and special interests graduate and go on to be productive, successful contributors to society. It has been proven time and again that students that attend school consistently in early years; learn how to learn, they pick up the skills of how to ask for help, they acquire social skills that help them deal with school pressures. This applies even to students that academically struggle. Of course when a student is at University they are adults and those kind of decisions are their responsibility, however many of those decisions and habits are established and nourished years before.

Is there evidence that the schools with higher graduation rates aren't just graduating more students without teaching them any more? It's easy to raise the graduation rate to 100% without changing anything in the classroom. But that's also worthless. I would have been more impressed with this article if it used measures of achievement and knowledge rather than just measures of credentials awarded.

It's easy to measure whether students do or do not graduate, or how many years it takes them to do so. It's much harder to measure---and therefore easily to ignore---whether students graduate with the skills their transcripts and grades claim they have. Can we distinguish between those efforts that allow students to succeed academically and graduate, and those that simply ensure that a C is possible, either by lowering the standards or providing a degree of help and attention that simply will not be available in a competitive workplace? Moreover, something is forgotten here. The amount of effort and attention dedicated to ensuring that 10% or 20% of students turn from a D or an F to a minimal C may be doing real damage to the quality of instruction for those students who were already doing fine with Bs and As, and may be missing the opportunity to push the ceiling higher. Well-paid college administrators and bloated staffs will tout student success when graduation rates go up 5, 10, or 15%, and the numbers of Fs drop correspondingly. After that, they can rest easy, for there will be no meaningful tracking of whether the bottom 10 or 15% of students who now do graduate achieve any meaningful success in the workplace through their college degree, or how a minimal education affects the services they are now deemed qualified to provide. It's not that hard to improve graduate rates, when it takes little to earn a C at a public university.

No one succeeds in college if they didn't really go to high school.

Low expectations, low standards, and pushing kids forward when they haven't demonstrated that they have acquired the skills. The PARCC was supposed to measure standards better than in the past. Money got in the way and funds were spent badly. Everyone hates the PARCC. Including me

The reason the ACT and SAT are so important because they really do measure the ability to perform college level work and if your are under 1000 or 26... You are not ready. We need to be honest and tell our students this.

We need more options...more after school tutoring in grade school and middle school. More trade school options...remedial classes run by local high schools for kids that didn't get it the first time around.

Most of all we have to put policies in place to protect our weakest students from predatory for profit schools that make no effort to educate these weaker students and that get paid if the kids finish or they don't. They are check cashing mills funded by tax payer guaranteed loans.

When will be learn that college is NOT for everyone! Any student who arrives at college and needs that kind of hand holding most likely does not belong in college. And this is NOT just minority students!

When I was in high school in the Stone Age, we were divided into two tracks: college prep and general studies. General studies was again divided into Trade School and a program where one learned secretarial skills and went to school part time and worked part time. And it worked. Those who went to college, were well prepared; those who went to Trade School had a skill; those who did the part-time work had a resume. The other students who just sort of drifted through..well, they just drifted through. Many completed 3 years of high school (i those days there was Jr High, not Middle school), but did not graduate. They were or the most part none too bright and totally uninterested in getting even a high school education.

Did I mention that there was only 1 high school in town, so we're not talking about the rich getting a better education. It was also Topeka KS in the late 50's/early 60's. We had many black students in the College Prep track and many went on to outstanding careers.

The cream still rises to the top...some things don't change.

One factor that inhibits these changes is that instructors, who are in a front-line position to notice which students have spotty attendance, poor writing skills, etc., increasingly are adjuncts who lack basic resources (e.g., an office, a living wage) to support their efforts.

CONNECTIONS I was fortunate in having a college advisor who met with my parents and me during the visitation weekend. She helped me select courses and supported me when I experienced difficulties as an undergraduate. Also, she steered me toward linguistics as a major, which made a profound difference in my career and intellectual life. Without her support I might well have dropped out. Currently there are groups of college students who are eligible for help due to their having been identified as need special education. Similar programs to provide emotional and academic support to students exist in some universities, but not all. Also, there are college level and college prep courses available free online, so in junior or senior high school, students can begin practicing the skills they will need to succeed in STEM courses, or any other courses they want to learn about, as soon as they are ready. There are also free courses online for Kindergarten through 12th grade. Some schools, like MIT, put their entire cirriculum online, so anyone who is interested can study whatever MIT offeres in its coursework. The college level courses and perhaps some high school level courses offer discussion groups, which is built in support. These resources are free and underutilized. Sometimes the best things in life are still free! In planning to support students, universities must develop programs that use the free online resources so that students can get a headstart.

It is college. Students are adults, with perhaps a few exceptions. If they drop out, then they should try something else.

With more and more pressure on professors to inflate grade and make classes "fun," it can only be helpful to have fewer going to college.

It apparently comes as a shock to the author that students who get D's are less likely to graduate.

Mr. Kipp suggests the solution is simply to inflate grades to get the job done by, for instance, offering a "computer lab" for students who can't understand mathematics.

He has missed the better solution: simply provide every student with a diploma. This would eliminate the angst of final exams and make the campus a "safe place."

More importantly, it would solve the student loan crisis. Simply download and print your diploma. Done deal (except for the "convenience fee").

I selected this article to read because I am concerned about high school graduation rates among children living in poverty and children of color like those I teach. Interestingly, the solutions are the same at both levels. We need the teachers and counselors to support students before they are in real trouble academically. We need the funding to do that. Students in middle school all say the want a high school diploma if you ask them. Then they reach high school and are overwhelmed. I few years later they give up. Just like some many do in college. Counselors, tutoring and extra support should be happening at all levels to break the cycle.

Aa forgotten fact in this conversation is dropout due to poor physical heath. Access to healthy food, health education and physical fitness have been systematically pushed to the curb in many K-12 systems. A student doesn't need to be acutely sick to be part of the walking dead of poorly nourished, obese, and unfit student population. The irony is we know exactly what to do: daily PE including classroom activity breaks, removal of sugary beverages and foods of minimal nutritional value, assess to healthy foods, and health instruction on how the body works and how to take care of oneself. I submit that when children grow up healthy, they will graduate from high school and college at much higher rates.

I agree that change has to come from within institutions -- on many levels. The institutions need to respond to the students they are educating, not just academically but psychosocially too. Here's where I vehemently disagree: it is not simple. There is nothing simple about systemic and systematic institutional change. Seriously hard on every level.

High schools use the IEP, the individual education plan, and that is essentially what the author is calling for here. When a student has an IEP at the high school level, then goes to college without one, of course they will struggle. Community colleges are the place where students can get the individualized attention and where they can make the transition to university academics. Four year colleges are not for developmental learning. Students who are low level learners must go to community college and become better students and get the attention they need. There are many fine teachers at the community college level. Instead of being stuck in a class with 50 to 200 as a freshman at a university, at a community college students can be in a class of less than 20 and get some attention. Of course, some community colleges courses will be poor, but many are quite good.

Dropping out will be greatly reduced when all kids will be able to read properly at third grade. Dropping begins there.

A recent article noted that just 37% of high school graduates were prepared for entry level college math and reading. That seems about right for the number of high school graduates who should be going to college.

The problem is that there is this attitude that without a college education one is basically worthless, combined with colleges' need for tuition paying students that has led to too many unqualified students starting college.

We can stop kids from dropping out by stop pretending that all are equal in their abilities, not all are suited for college. Fifty percent of all Americans are below the national average in intelligence and perhaps those should be directed elsewhere.

I love that Georgia State is actively trying to solve the dropout problem. We need more people to graduate with degrees that can lead to gainful employment. Is that happening? We also need colleges and students alike to get rid of the 'right to party' on mom and dad and instead focus on the true purpose for this outsized expenditure.

Professor Kirp's suggestion in his concluding paragraph should be the beginning of a reassessment of the funding of college education.

Presently, colleges have incentives to accept more and less prepared students because the loans are made to students, not to colleges, who thus assume full risk for those loans. If colleges had to borrow the money from government and then loan it to students, defaults would affect colleges as well. Since colleges are already in the application evaluation business, they should be able to ascertain the likeliest risks. They can accept students with weak backgrounds but promise and provide additional support or reject them and thereby direct them to schools for which they are suited. This approach to financing provides an incentive to improve its academics and its academic support if it want to maintain levels of enrollment to sustain academic programs. It also provides an incentive to restrain costs of tuition and fees as a way to mitigate loan losses.

A good family is the solution to this......................................supportive mom and dad in the home......................worked for generations as Americans climbed the ladder of success...............

>>>>

This is like worrying that the sink has a leak while the Titanic is going down.

New studies, serious people who study future potentialities, and CEO's........ are all predicting that within the next 15-50 yrs much of white collar employment will be deemed unnecessary and massively cut just due to technological advances.

Marx's predictions are slowly coming into the collective consciousness.

Rough seas are ahead; build yourself a fireproof room.

1 yr. mandatory military service for M & F high school grads
Higher pay grade for better students. Waiver for service after College for best students.

2 yr. for non-graduates; higher pay for grads; incentive for GED completion. But graduate or not ...

Historical black colleges and universities in America managed and still manage to create and produce black excellence without the presence of white folks. If whites believed in their own innate natural supremacy then they would not have felt the need to cheat in order to "win" in every field of civil secular endeavor. African enslavement and Jim Crow were "cheating".

Segregation by force of a physically identifiable colored "race" naturally selected the most evolutionary fit thriving survivors. Integration had "costs" along with" benefits."

Brown v. Board of Education diabolically and deceptively presumes and perpetuates the myth of white supremacy and black inferiority that blacks are "hurt" by the absence of whites in their school class room.

Ans: 'Jobs, Jobs, Jobs'.
(but we all Gnu That!)

With all due respect to Professor Karp, I believe he overlooks a fundamental flaw in our current education system. Namely the greed of colleges to prioritize government dollars from student loans regardless of the quality/qualification of a potential student. The savings and loan crisis conned people into accepting mortgages that they could not afford. Colleges are guilty of the same exploitation with uncontrolled student loans.

As one with several post graduate degrees from prestige universities I recently enrolled as a part time student in a local state college. It is my observation that 20 to 30 percent of these undergraduates are not college material and would be better served by attending a trade school. I am skeptical of the college motives for accepting such unqualified students as well as the college standards that permit students to remain enrolled for many many years. This is not improving our education system but rather diluting it. This certainly flies in the face of the meritocracy of Confucius.

Let's stop worrying about them dropping out and start worrying about them actually getting an education. With a couple of years of REAL education they can drop out and get a good job; with a degree and NO real education, they can stay in and wind up with a bad job. Just think about the following.

In the 1960's critical thinking skills of college students (who at that time studied, on average 25 hours a week) increased considerably more in 2 years than they do now in 4 years (when they study less than 13 hours a week)!

(For links and details, search for Arum and Roksa on my blog, inside-higher-ed .)

While some comments complain, the proof that the strategies North Carolina State implemented worked is in the data. Why is resentment expressed that the academic weaknesses minority students had were identified and effectively addressed?
I taught high school to children, many from backgrounds of chronic deprivation and neglect. They need guidance and support often missing at home growing up. Congratulations for reporting a university recognizing this and making efforts to address the problem rather than blaming the victims.

The step I see most utilized is lowering the bar for graduation. Has anyone noticed what the average store clerk, dental assistant, or even news writer is like today? A long time ago, you actually had to learn some things and begin thinking to graduate. Soon, it will be - you are born, you automatically get your certificate, and you never get inside the walled city that will be for real humans.

North Carolina provides heavy subsidies to our state colleges. Every student who drops out because he/she cannot do the work is tax dollars wasted as well as a lost spot for more capable students.
More effort to provide tutoring and remedial classes helps to keep more students in the system and is cost effective. I wish the schools did a better job at preparing the students though.

Apart from an increasing financial burden, it may be beneficial for many students to spen more than four years to Bachelor's Degree graduate. Mental and emotional maturity matter, and for some even taking a year or two off before or during the first college years makes a difference in both course mastery and a dedication to learning. Prior to moving on to graduate studies, some will benefit from being employed for a period.
Following World War Two and Korea military service, the G.I. Bill students had a dedication to learning that made for so many excellent students. Teaching can be an important learning experience and improve one's ability to study and master subject matter. While the "four years and out" model can be a pathway for some, it is an artificial academic enterprise wherein one size does not fit all.
Doug Giebel
Big Sandy, Montana
The writer is a retired public school teacher and college professor.

Eliminating option to drop out at 16 and requiring h.s. graduation will motivate students to pass minmum standards instead of just watcing the clock until old enough to drop out.

Excellent article, thanks. Shows how much waste could be prevented.

Many students who discontinue their education come back several years later with new motivation, new goals. I wish the author had mentioned the many degree programs that are built around an adult student with generous credit transfer and evening classes for working students.

Just in NYC there is Columbia, CUNY and the NYU SPS McGhee Division, probably others I do not know about. I teach in one of them and am thrilled with the life stories and maturity these students bring to the class room. People change, give them room + they may surprise you.

This article proposes a totalizing approach that promises to do as much harm as benefit. Sometimes the institution is to blame, as when students drop out because they're struggling to afford their bills; they're trying to navigate their college world without advice that suits their predicaments; they're trying complete homework in courses that provide too much lecturing and too little guided practice sessions.

But some students drop out because they needed to take the initiative, and didn't; they needed to learn which courses were required of them, and they didn't; they needed to complete coursework without hand-holding, and didn't.

Many universities have instituted mandatory advising sessions. The result has been that more students graduate on time, but many students thereby never learn how to navigate their own lives, they don't learn by making choices and learning from the consequences, good and bad - their advisors lifted that burden, and the learning that came with it, from them.

Thus the biggest problem with this article's outcome-based approach are the effects on self-responsibility. When you shift the responsibility for graduation from the student to the institution, you shift how responsibility is learned. By taking the responsibility off of the student's shoulders, students don't learn how to be responsible for their own lives. They instead shift expectations: they expect others to do for them what they could have, and should have learned to do for themselves.

As the article correctly indicates, lecturing and assigning homework is not a good way to teach algebra, so a large portion of students drop out due to math weakness. Replace traditional instructor-based algebra teaching with computer-assisted programmed instruction, and that will significantly reduce the number of students who are weak in math. I know because I learned algebra by this method. Intransigent teacher unions fight against this, of course.

A lot of college dropouts should not have gotten into college in the first place. Unfortunately Affirmative Action has gotten out of hand and unqualified kids end up where they should not. This is especially harmful at elite colleges where AA kids cause denied admission to more qualified non AA kids. That is the true tragedy.

Rather than increasing graduation rates, it would be better to get rid of graduation, degrees and diplomas. Degrees and diplomas exist only to stigmatize students who drop out before completing degree plans devised to spread tuition dollars across as many academic departments as possible. Instead of diplomas, universities should confer nothing but transcripts that document courses students have taken. It is absurd to label someone who completes three years of college as a dropout. It is equally absurd to label someone as educated simply because they hung around campus for another year or two. Many people become uneducated a few years after college. I’ve seen too many home bookshelves in which the most recent titles are “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Catch 22” to think otherwise.

Universities must give students personalized attention'? Way to make college cost $5m per semester.
'Ivy League ministration'? My dad went to Columbia after WW II, and far from 'individual attention', he took several large lecture classes. When you were admitted, it was rightly expected you could cope with the work. By the time you get to college you should not need remedial help. Period.
And the notion that a 'C' is an imminent predictor of failure, requiring counseling, just shows how far grade inflation has advanced. Yesterday's D minus is today's C.
The author is wrong in arguing to the contrary about unprepared students. I suspect he simply despairs of reforming K-12 education. (Not 'blaming the students,' blaming the public school system.) Not everyone is suited to college. That doesn't mean you're stupid or worthless; just that it's not your forte and you'd be better, say, putting your energies to a trade.
To reform the K-12 system nationwide, we need to agree on and institute a common core (not necessarily "the Common Core") and standards, including tests, so that a high school diploma not only means something, it means the same thing whether you got it from a rural public school, inner-city high school, or exclusive private school.
In short, we need to care as much about academic and intellectual achievement as we do about athletic achievement.

Before bemoaning the students, please take a look at the policies of the junior colleges and the transfer policies of what are still called "four-year colleges." Many of those policies are designed to soak students of money and keep them enrolled as long as possible.

There are often "extra" requirements of mandatory coursework before one can enter a particular major -- by which I mean, courses taking a semester or even a full year to complete. If one wants to change a major, the same types of policies apply. Even with a junior college degree, many "four-year schools" require extra course work before one may qualify as a "matriculating student" -- even if the junior college has a better educational standing than the "four-year" college.

College students know these shell games are being played, and being played with their lives and years. They get tired ... passing into becoming 22, 23, 24, 25 and more years old. It is a hard slog and the policies of most colleges accessible to less advantaged students has roadblocks and difficulties which can become mountainous if one has to work part-time or has parenting obligations.

These "soak the student" policies should be a national shame Help make it so.

While I agree that large universities can and should do a better job with helping students graduate, I feel that I am an example of someone who even with a middle class upbringing and the underlying expectation that I would go to college, was simply not mature enough or self confident enough to do the work I needed to do to graduate (initially). It was not until a few years of working in dead end jobs that I really took my education seriously. Now, a few graduate degrees later, I feel like I am missing out on something if I am not taking a college/graduate level class in something.
We continue to try to place people in molds and not all are going to fit. Just because statistically speaking someone with a high school diploma is going to be more successful than someone without, and someone with a college degree is going to be more successful than without, it seems like we are just passing the buck. If students need such high levels of hand holding while in college, how much are they going to need when they get a job? When will they find out that the real world is tough and they need to be self-motivated enough to do what is necessary to succeed. I was not motivated enough when I was younger, but once I became motivated, I have been able to succeed independently.

Parents, involved parents.

They're the bedrock, without that (or some, involved, parental figure) there is no hope.

Pass all the laws you want, more government is never the answer to societies problems.

Lots of interesting ideas and many can get students to graduate. But there is are important parts ignored - desire, direction, common sense.

Most young people are getting their advice, at least the advice they actually listen to, from age-peers that they respect. Call it street smart versus book smart versus experience.

Schools and colleges are demanding that children pick a path four plus years ahead of their potential employment. Many find themselves deep in debt trained for a career that peaked before the entered college.

There is on one-size-fits-all solution. I have found that the draw of a positive future is what got me through college as well as many of my peers. When you cannot see that positive future, no program is going to help.

It isn't just students with academic struggles not graduating. In California, we've long bragged about the affordability of our public State College System (CSU);[ not to be confused with the UC System]. However, when held up to other State's Universities, it isn't a bargain when the typical California College student requires six years to get a four year degree. This isn't new. As far back as 40 yrs ago when I attended, it was difficult to graduate in four years.

Less and less tenured track faculty positions and over reliance on temporary faculty and Adjunct professors leave an abundance of unfilled openings and less class offerings. [As of today, there are 446 unfilled teaching positions at California's State College system]. csucareers.calstate.edu

Horror stories abound of playing "fall semester-spring semester" ping-pong: Colleges offering Core classes and major classes one semester each school year [rather than both semesters] requiring taking filler classes to maintain financial aid eligibility until the class opens up the following year- pushing graduation further and further away while collecting useless college credits: Students relying on Federal Pell Grants or "Cal Grants"- eventually see the funds run out before the degree attained.

I've spoken to many college students proudly proclaim being "5th Year Seniors"; having [now] become the goal to reach. Those who actually graduate in four years are now viewed as super-achievers .

To make the focus on students a practical requirement and a moral imperative requires more emphasis on teaching and less upon research and winning grants. Many universities attempt to straddle this divide by having teaching done by adjuncts or grad students while tenured faculty is devoted to research and grants. It is accidental, I'm afraid, at least so far as the institution is concerned, that the teaching is done by someone who has both a deep love and understanding of the subject and also of teaching.

It is important for the government or university authorities to support students financially from low income families. We cannot find vigor or power in the society where young people have to give up their dreams for financial difficulty.

I started attending Merritt Community College in 1975. I graduated from Cal State University Hayward in 1991. I'm sure it's harder to track the data; but graduation rates period might look quite a bit different from graduation rates in 'just' six years. I worked my way through college and had very little debt when I finished; but it took way to long. (Much of that was my own fault.)

As a first generation US citizen, and the first to go to college, I did not get much good advice. I would have loved someone from the institution to give me some feedback or advice, frankly there was little to be had. When it was time to graduate, the university 'advisor' went out of her way to put roadblocks in my path.

Bootstraps, self-help and motivational readings are dandy. Positive, friendly, useful guidance would be great for any student.

It does not matter whether someone drops out because of academic issues or financial reasons, higher education will continue to not be an inclusive system for all.
Even if it was completely inclusive, the result of getting a college education would still not be a guaranteed way of having a good job...if more people have more education, then credentialism will reign as a dominant trend in which only graduate degree holders will be able to live a "nice life." Addtionally, already crowded avenues to employment would become even more crowded. For example, in my field (teaching) whether I'm going for a job in NJ or Florida, I'm applying alongside at least 100 people for each position I apply to and upwards of a 1000 applicants for positions in really good districts. Now if the amount of credentialed teachers increases due to more degree holders (undergrad or grad degrees) the already high level of difficulty of getting a job will increase significantly...Sadly, tough questions about improving higher Ed. come from this scenario and others.