Vast sums of taxpayer dollars are being wasted at community colleges because of the large numbers of students who drop out during their first year, an education researcher argues in a new report released today.
Dr. Mark Schneider, Vice President of American Institutes for Research and author of the report, titled “The Hidden Costs of Community Colleges,” says the high dropout rate within community colleges threatens to undermine the Obama administration’s goal to have the United States regain its position as the nation with the highest proportion of college-educated adults in the world.
“You can’t cross the finish line if you don’t finish the first lap, and most students drop out during the first year,” Schneider said during a phone conference this week with reporters, in reference to first-year, full-time community college students.
About three-fifths of students entering community college require remedial education, and only about a third of those will eventually graduate.
“So what I tried to do was show the high costs of low success rates of community colleges, and the purpose of calling attention to these numbers is to really say: Look, (community colleges) have a hard task in front of them, they have hard-to-educate students, but we have to pay attention to this problem because it’s too expensive not to pay attention to it.”
The report says that for each of the last five years that were studied, from the 2004-05 to 2008-09 school years, about one-fifth of full-time students who began their studies at a community college dropped out before the second year. For perspective, in 2009, the report says, more than 800,000 first-time, full-time students “stood at the starting gate,” but their dropout rates were expected to follow the same pattern that it did in previous years.
The price tag the report puts on the problem of first-year dropouts: Nearly $4 billion from the 2004-05 through the 2008-09 academic years. That figure is based on three primary sources of funding:
