Does Chicago have the worst public higher-education system in America?
There's precedent for that kind of condemnation. In 1988, U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett called the city's elementary and secondary schools the "worst in the nation." People noticed. The next two decades brought a wave of reforms and improvement that eventually elevated Arne Duncan, chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2009, into Bennett's old job.
Yet during that time, the city's sprawling system of colleges and universities received nothing like the same scrutiny. Now we're seeing the result. The Chicago Tribune recently reported that Chicago State University was at risk of losing accreditation because of various "grave" concerns, the accreditor said, including "remarkably poor" graduation rates.
The news couldn't—or shouldn't—have come as a surprise. According to Chicago newspapers, Chicago State's enrollment has declined by more than 30 percent since 1994, and its finances are in disarray. The previous president resigned after audits uncovered $15,000 in spending on a nine-day Caribbean cruise for herself and five family members. In the past 12 years, the university reported six-year graduation rates of 12, 15, 22, 12, 16, 18, 15, 14, 16, 18, 16, and 13 percent. The odds of Chicago State's having a not-horrible graduation rate in a given year are about as good as the odds of the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.
To be sure, the university enrolls many part-time students with academic deficits and financial difficulties. The eight-year graduation rate is 27 percent, which is better, but still pretty bad. Other urban universities get closer to half of all students through, if not more. And a recent study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research found that completion rates for well-prepared students attending Chicago State are as much as 40 percent lower than for similar students attending better colleges.
Chicago State is hardly alone. The graduation rate for black students at Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago, is 4 percent. Even the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois graduates fewer than half of its students in six years. Malcolm X College, a two-year institution, has a combined graduation and transfer rate of 36 percent, and other city colleges have similar results.
Outside of its elite private institutions, Chicago is the city where dreams of college graduation go to die. And the same can be said for other cities nationwide.
I wonder what Arne Duncan thinks about this. After all, those are his students washing out en masse, young men and women he worked night and day to nurture through high school and into the supposed promised land of college. Since becoming secretary of education, Duncan has repeatedly denounced the "dropout factories" in urban school systems, high schools that routinely fail to graduate most of their students. What about the dropout factories in higher education? They serve the same students in the same places, and are performing even worse.
To its credit, the Obama administration has proposed spending tens of billions of new dollars on Pell Grants, community colleges, and an Access and Completion Fund. But as now designed, those reforms won't be nearly enough to turn things around in cities like Chicago. The proposals lack the sharp edge and urgency of Duncan's approach to failing high schools, about which he has said, "We cannot continue to tinker" as "students fall further behind, year after year."
Nor can we rely on accreditation to protect students. For every Chicago State on the hot seat, dozens of institutions persist with similar failure rates. (And I'm willing to bet Chicago State will, too.) Minimum institutional standards for student success are, to the extent they even exist, shockingly low. The voluntary accreditors assigned to protect students and taxpayers are hamstrung by a lack of resources and by strong deference to the colleges that support them financially. They are loath to invoke the "death penalty": cutting off access to the federal financial-aid system. And when they do take action, they are increasingly being taken to court, as was recently the case with Paul Quinn College (graduation rate: 17 percent), in Dallas.
Accreditors often say that their malleable standards are a function of our higher-education system's broad diversity, that one cannot evaluate different colleges in the same way. But catastrophic failure rates are a problem for any college. In reality, the accreditation system has evolved over time to accommodate diversity in quality to an almost infinitely elastic degree.
The accreditation system also provides little useful information to potential students. The letter detailing the "grave concerns" about Chicago State is unavailable on the Web site of either the university or the accreditor. Instead, the front page of the university's site features a letter to students from the provost, saying, "I want to reassure you that CSU is fully accredited." The worst part is, it's true.
Most states have taken a similar hands-off attitude, refusing to hold colleges accountable in any meaningful way for helping students learn and earn degrees. They support institutions based on how many students enroll, not how many succeed. The chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently resigned amid a scandal related to secret admissions preferences for children of the politically well-connected. I am unaware of any chancellor's ever resigning because of the scandal of terrible failure rates for disadvantaged students.
These attitudes are rooted in a strange but pervasive idea about college success: that once students reach the age of majority, their institutions have no control over—and thus, responsibility for—whether they succeed. Of course, students' actions, motivation, and preparation strongly influence achievement and graduation. But colleges matter, too—a lot. At least, I hope they matter. Otherwise what are we paying them for?
Indeed, the question of whether Chicago's public colleges are actually the worst or merely not good enough is hard for many people to process, because words like "worst" aren't in the vocabulary of how we think and talk about higher education. A subtle but powerful rhetorical logrolling is at play: Despite all evidence to the contrary, people like to pretend that there is a good college for everyone, and that every college is good for someone. We have an excess of politeness and a deficit of candor in our discussions of higher education. As a result, public leaders in Chicago and elsewhere have turned a blind eye to dysfunctional institutions in the heart of their communities. Students are paying the price.
And until education leaders like Arne Duncan take the same attitude toward chronic failure in college that they have so admirably adopted on behalf of the most vulnerable students in our high schools, that's not going to change.
Comments
1. archman - November 02, 2009 at 10:28 am
In this day and age, I have an opposite interpretation for a college with low retention rates. High Quality Control.
It always disturbs me when I read about a school's educational quality being judged by its graduation numbers. There are so many factors other than educational quality that can (and do) affect college retention, I won't even post them. Those of us that teach are well familiar with most of them, unfortunately.
2. pbhales - November 02, 2009 at 11:49 am
As a 30+ year faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I was disheartened to see a shallow and broad-brush inclusion of UIC in an attack on failure rates in Chicago's higher education institutions. Kevin Carey's statistics about UIC aren't even right-- it graduates 54.1%, and has another 3% still in the school after six years. This reflects its longtime mission as a rigorous institution serving primarily first-generation college-goers. And Carey doesn't even mention one of the primary reasons UIC students don't make it to graduation-- the costs of an education that is, increasingly, removed from the public sphere as the state legislature cuts general revenue funds, and the university is forced to make it up by raising tuition, even as we cut, cut cut at the programs and faculty needed to improve the outcomes of our students.
We are not an institution like most other state universities. Our undergraduate students are far poorer, with fewer resources, both financial and social. They work, and work, and work, to pay for their educations-- and that takes its toll as well.
So what are institutions like UIC to do? One option is to roll up the welcome mat for this unique bootstrap constituency. Another is to lower the standards that apply in every course taught-- standards that ensure those of our students who do graduate are at the top rank of college graduates globally. Or perhaps, just perhaps, a better funding system might be proposed-- one that enables students to work less at menial part-time jobs and more at the schoolwork they need; one that provides sufficient resources to fund writing, math and science centers with real tutors who aren't racing from one client to another; one that recognizes the strictures of running a teaching hospital with a predominantly poor, under- or uninsured patient population and reimbursements from the state and the feds weeks and months behind; one that considers higher education something other than the first-to-cut, never-to-restore part of a chronically underfunded state budget.
3. 12021895 - November 03, 2009 at 11:00 am
I got my BA at NEIU and my PhD at UIC, and now I teach (and do research) at the University of Southern Indiana, which also has an open-admissions policy.
Any university with an open admissions policy is going to have an atrocious graduation rate. These universities put higher education within reach, or almost within reach, of students who would otherwise have no chance at it, either because of a lack of prior preparation (perhaps they went to the day-jail system known as Chicago Public Schools), prior life choices (I myself dropped out of the University of California system in order to 'try and make it in Manhattan,' a move I don't regret in the slightest), social background (perhaps their family recently immigrated from Mexico or Eastern Europe), or because of any number of other reasons.
It is a wonderful thing that all sorts of people get a shot at higher education through open admissions universities. But let's face it, they are going to graduate at way lower rates than at schools with more stringent admissions policies. Many won't have college level reading and writing skills. Some will just be worked to death trying to meet education expenses and support their families and themselves. Some will decide that higher education wasn't necessary for their life goals after all, but will be glad to base that knowledge on having dipped their toes in the water.
Now of course these universities need to do more to retain students and help them out. But with the financing they get and the needs of the student body... well, the universities can only do so much. Yes, at some schools there has been gross mismanagement and corruption. And at others the deficiencies less extreme. When I was at NEIU, I often felt that the folks in at university offices such as records or registration acted more like they were working at the DMV than at a university and the architecture was generally depressing. And the financial aid lines... those were pretty long. And I wouldn't be surprised if a bad parking day and a long financial aid line drove some people right out of the school.
In the case of UIC, a tremendous number of students are given a great chance at a good higher education. Not all of them have the equipment, time or willpower to make it. But let's bear in mind that a good number of those that do make it would have been excluded from the opportunity if UIC didn't have an open admissions policy (or what amounts in practice to the same thing). Yet, the only way those graduation numbers will go up is if we abandon open admissions.
So, all of this is to say (in a meandering and off-the-cuff way, as I sip my morning coffee) that I think we need better metrics than graduation rates in assessing the performance of open admissions universities.
4. cwinton - November 03, 2009 at 12:35 pm
As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. I find graduation rates to be one of the more meaningless statistics one can cite regarding institutional success or failure. Our high schools have already demonstrated how easy it is to raise graduation rates. You simply pass students on through each grade level with scant concern for performance, and award them a diploma at the end of their senior year. Oh I know, we test them, with extensive prep to get past "comprehensive" tests that supposedly ensure they are at least functional through the 8th grade level (with all manner of work arounds if even that proves to be too much to expect). Unfortunately, the outcome has not been students better prepared for collegiate work, or it would appear for much of anything else. The graduation rates at Chicago State may be a symptom of deeper problems with the institution, but if the solution is to push the institution to raise graduation rates, I predict they will do exactly that and the underlying problems with the institution will persist. Of course, the easiest way to improve graduation rates without compromising the viability of degree programs is simply to limit access. Is that really what Mr. Carey and others want in their willingness to condemn with a brush so broad as to include institutions like UIC?
5. witten426 - November 03, 2009 at 03:56 pm
the social expectation here in the middle of the country that all 21 year olds need to be married, have kids, own a house and a pickup truck doesn't help either. so many of my students are clearly
in over their heads with too little time left over for anything else. they just get used to doing everything badly.
6. schaber - November 03, 2009 at 09:01 pm
Gone are the days when students were responsible for their own failure.
7. simondale88 - November 04, 2009 at 09:04 pm
<Comment removed by moderator>
8. simondale88 - November 04, 2009 at 09:05 pm
<Comment removed by moderator>
9. voprice - November 06, 2009 at 11:47 am
What this conversation needs is a few good mathmeticians,peolpe who might help us devise an effective formula to standardize commonly reported educational data, so that they become a more meaningful rubric than today's news headline. I suppose - that in addition to the gross data as presently reported - it would help matters greatly, to quantify and balance such dissparate factors as: selectivity of admissions; cost of education; student faculty ratio; percentage of fulltime/parttime faculty; level of student engagement;percentage of Pell( grant) recipients, etc.
Outcomes for the 'the better-off'in the nations the best schools, is not news. It's a birth right.
10. reeselibasu - November 06, 2009 at 03:55 pm
As long as persistence to graduation and acceptance to college are part of the calculus of high schools' adequate yearly progress 'grade', this will probably continue to be the case. Not every high school graduate is ready for college right away, especially if they are the product of parents who feel that once you're 18, you're on your own. But guidance counselors and graduation coaches will move heaven and earth if they must to get kids graduated and into college.
"Gone are the days when students were responsible for their own failure." Perhaps. Gone, also, are the days when only the exceptional went to college and everybody else just went to work, period. Lots of kids grow up hearing that if you don't go to college, you'll never make anything of yourself. They assume they need college. Watch some of those ridiculous College in Your PJs commercials on tv; they wouldn't be there if there were no market for them.
11. phikaw - November 06, 2009 at 04:25 pm
Much more refined study would be needed to establish whether a low or not so great graduation rate reflects anything about the institution itself and the kind of education and learning that it provides. At institutions with a very high percentage of academically high performing students (measured, for example, by SAT or H.S. rank), the graduation rates are predictably high. An academically gifted student will most likely do well whatever the institution offers because that student has a wide range of skills that ensure success (or make it highly probable). It is not helpful to criticize en masse institutions with less than stellar graduation rates without a more refined analysis of what actually contributes to graduation rate. Elsewhere, Carey himself has made the argument that graduation rate is not an entirely fair measure of "success" or of how well an institution is doing its job precisely because graduation rate tends to favor exactly those institutions that admit only very academically able students to begin with.
12. lilandy - November 06, 2009 at 10:53 pm
I wholeheartedly agree with #10. Our school system is designed with college as the end, when, in reality, only a small percentage of students are ready for full-time study. Parents put undue pressure on their students, because most families, especially ones where the student is the first one to go, take pride in having a student in college. In most other countries, vocational training is respected, unlike here, where most high school students in vocational training are there because they don't want to be involved in the regular school day, yet don't know what they really want to do. I think every high-school education should include learning vocational skills that will serve them well in real life, as well as reach their academic goals. Even though only about 20% of Americans have a college degree, this number should probably be lower. College is not for everyone.