BALTIMORE – Colleges and universities must find ways to help their increasingly diverse student bodies earn their degrees on time and accept responsibility if large numbers of students persistently take too long to graduate, a series of panelists here said Wednesday.
“This is going to take such a massive effort,” said Dr. David Spence, president of the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), speaking at a conference titled “Time to Completion: How States and Systems are Tackling the Time Dilemma.”
The event was sponsored by SREB, an organization that works with 16 member states to improve public pre-K-12 and higher education, and Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based organization that works on developing new education and workforce strategies.
“We can’t get there simply by setting higher goals. We tried that,” Spence told the nearly four dozen conferees. “And we simply can’t get there by measuring our accountability.”
“It’s going to take all these things and then all of these state actions and campus actions in the context of a terrible economy over the next 10 years, at least as it relates to higher education,” Spence said.
At the two-day conference, which wraps up today, lawmakers, higher education leaders and others shared their experiences and floated ideas that were all centered around moving students through college in a timely fashion.
Among the ideas discussed were smarter, more targeted approaches toward remedial education, better systems of credit transfer and undertaking efforts to remove extraneous courses from a student’s course requirements.
