Higher education leaders in Maryland say they are moving with haste to develop plans to significantly boost public college enrollment and graduation rates, with a variety of strategies being explored, except lowering admissions standards.
“We don’t want to lower (admissions standards) any more,” says Coppin State University President Reginald Avery. Coppin, with an enrollment of approximately 3,800 students, enrolls the highest level of Pell Grant-eligible students in the state. Students must have a 2.5 GPA in high school to be considered for admission to the Baltimore university.
“Yes, we are looking at things like admissions standards as a variable,” says Avery, stressing that Coppin’s focus is on barriers to retention. He says anecdotal evidence points to students’ lack of money as a primary cause of his school’s low graduation rate — 17 percent. The inability to pay for college is a major hurdle for many students, he says. Coppin is currently doing research to support the anecdotal evidence.
Avery says Coppin has many so-called “stop outs,” students who stop college for a few years for financial reasons then come back to finish. Industry standards for measuring retention and graduation rates force Coppin and many other minority-serving schools to count such students as “dropouts,” however, since those students don’t fit the four and six-year yardsticks for calculating graduation rates.
Avery says Coppin’s long-term planning complements the new 10-year strategic plan issued in December by the University System of Maryland, of which Coppin is a member.
The plan calls on its 12 universities to meet specific goals by 2020. Those goals include increasing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates by 40 percent by 2020, boosting “externally sponsored research” funding and slashing internal operating costs. Each school in the system is free to chart its own course for reaching those goals.
The system’s flagship institution — the 37,000-student University of Maryland —has tightened admissions standards over the past 20 years in a concerted effort to raise the school’s national standing. According to some school officials, the idea of relaxing standards has been informally discussed, but has been met with strong opposition.
