NEW YORK
For decades, getting more students into college has been the top priority of America’s higher education leaders. But what’s the point, a growing number of experts are wondering, when so few who go to school finish a degree?
Just 54 percent of students entering four-year colleges in 1997 had a degree six years later — and that figure is even lower for Hispanics and Blacks, according to some of the latest government figures. After borrowing for school but failing to graduate, many of those students may be worse off than if they had never attended college at all.
Now the question of what to do about the country’s unimpressive and stagnate graduation rates is on the agenda, from college presidents’ offices to state houses. The latest sign of the trend comes today (Wednesday), when former Princeton University President William G. Bowen lays out an ambitious research agenda on the question during a speech in New York.
Normally, a scholar’s decision to take on an academic topic is hardly news. But Bowen, now president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is the kind of researcher whose work is so influential that his very curiosity about a subject can raise its profile.
His data-driven studies on college athletes, affirmative action and college access for the poor have all sparked nationwide debate in recent years, and he attracted widespread attention last year with a speech at the University of Virginia that called for class-based affirmative action in college admissions.
Bowen’s latest project will examine in detail who graduates and who doesn’t — and why — at a group of about 20 varied universities. In an interview, he described the message he will deliver to a Goldman Sachs Foundation gathering on issues facing college trustees as his opening salvo on the topic.
