A Senate committee looked at how colleges and universities might improve student success at a hearing on Wednesday. The simplest metric of student success are graduation rates. Senators and hearing witnesses said that too many students drop out of college or take too long to graduate.
There are a host of reasons for why students fail to graduate. Those that graduate tend to be enrolled full time or make steady progress toward a degree, underscoring yet again the importance of the year-round Pell Grant, which allows students to continue their studies in the summer. Students who cannot attend full time, due to work or family obligations, therefore have less of a chance of graduating.
College graduation rates are also often dependent on family income. Studies show that the wealthier a student is, the better he or she tends to do.
“While college completion rates for students from more affluent backgrounds have increased over the last 40 years, the same is not true for students from low-income backgrounds,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. “Just 9 percent of people from the lowest income bracket graduated with a college degree by the time they reached 24. That’s only up 6 percent from [the] 1970s.”
Murray said that there were a number of larger structural reforms that would improve student graduation rates, such as better preparation in K-12, or increasing financial aid opportunities so students could focus on their studies as opposed to working to pay their bills. Colleges and universities also need better federal data so they know what programs work.
“It’s hard to believe that higher education data ignores part-time students, transfer students, adults who return to school, students in remedial education and Pell Grant recipients,” Murray said. Last year, Congress requested a report from the Department of Education on enrollment and graduation data for Pell Grant recipients during the 2012-13 academic year, but that data will not be available until 2019.
Students who need remedial education are also less likely to graduate than their peers who start out in full-credit classes. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., called it a “bridge to nowhere,” but noted that there are some institutions that are actively working to reform it.
