A lot of people attend college, and a lot of people fail to graduate in four years. There are lots of reasons, but it’s a big, costly problem that needs to be addressed. Jenna Ashley Robinson, outreach coordinator for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, and I discussed the issue for Carolina Journal Radio.
Martinez: Do we have any way of trying to quantify how much it is costing states or costing North Carolina to continue to fund students — the same student who is continuing to go on in a fifth or a sixth year, to try to get a degree?
Robinson: Right. It’s hard to really put it in terms for the whole state, but for one student for one semester, it can be anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 extra that the state is putting into that education for just spending an extra semester in school.
Martinez: That’s a lot of money. Are you recommending that states stop funding after four years?
Robinson: We’re not recommending that they stop funding, but we’re recommending that they start finding ways to make sure students graduate on time, particularly the students who they think [are] going to graduate anyway. Let’s try to get them out a little bit faster. Of course, there are always going to be students who don’t graduate for various reasons — either they found the classes too hard, they found a different opportunity, they found a university was a better fit — so we can’t expect 100 percent graduation. But for those students who are going to graduate anyway, we want to find all the ways we can to make sure that they’re going to do so in as few semesters as possible.
Martinez: What are some of those strategies? What could they do?
Robinson: Some of the strategy is looking at students on the way in. Stop admitting students who have very little chance of graduating. Some of the recommendations that Harry Stille makes are to increase the admission standards up to about 900 on the SAT and 19 on the ACT. Don’t admit any students who are in the bottom half of their high school class, and don’t admit any students who require remediation. Insist that they do that in the community college system before they even start at a four-year school.
