Making Sense out of Degree Completion Rates

Autor/in	Astin, Alexander W.
Titel	Making Sense out of Degree Completion Rates
Quelle	In: Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, 7 (2006) 1-2, S.5-17 (13 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1521-0251
Schlagwörter	Graduation Rate; School Holding Power; Regression (Statistics); Time to Degree; Academic Persistence; Higher Education; Institutional Research; Comparative Analysis; Student Characteristics; Academic Achievement; Prediction; College Preparation; Predictor Variables + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Regression; Regressionsanalyse; Hochschulbildung; Hochschulsystem; Hochschulwesen; Institutionelle Forschung; Schulleistung; Vorhersage; Prädiktor
Abstract	It has been more than a decade since the U.S. Congress enacted the "Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act," which requires colleges and universities to make public their six-year degree completion rates. Based on the "Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act," prospective students and their parents are being encouraged to make "comparative" judgments about the degree completion rates of different institutions. Institutions with the highest rates, then, are presumed to be superior in some sense to institutions with lower rates. Research recently completed at UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (Astin & Oseguera, 2005) shows that such beliefs may be completely unwarranted. In a national study, the registrars at 262 baccalaureate-granting institutions that were participants in the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) provided four- and six-year degree completion data on some 56,818 students (about 250 randomly selected from each institution) who had completed the CIRP entering Freshman Survey six years earlier. This article compares each of the 56,818 students' six-year retention status with their CIRP entering freshman data collected six years earlier. The results demonstrate that it makes little sense to examine any institution's "retention rate" without also taking into account the level of academic preparation of the students who enroll. For this and other reasons, the "Federal Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act" should be seriously questioned. Similarly, efforts at the state level to make institutions more "accountable" by comparing their raw retention rates are misguided, at best, and perhaps even detrimental to state interest. The obvious solution to this dilemma is for institutions to collect relevant information on their students when they first matriculate. Such data would then provide a basis for learning how much students actually "change" after entering college, a kind of "value-added" information which comes much closer to assessing institutional quality or effectiveness than raw degree completion rates, average levels of engagement, or other kinds of stand-alone "outcome" assessments of the enrolled undergraduates. (Contains 4 footnotes.) (ERIC).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10