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More Colleges Try to Stem Dropouts

Posted on: Tuesday, 26 August 2008, 06:00 CDT

By Mary Beth Marklein

As colleges welcome a record number of students this fall, they are taking steps to ensure more students actually complete a degree.

College enrollments have been on the rise for decades, but the proportion of students who earn a bachelor's degree within five years has stagnated at about 52%, down from 55% in 1988, says a report due this fall by the College Board, owner of the SAT. Some of those left behind eventually graduate, while others drop out.

Federal and state policymakers increasingly use graduation rates as one measure of a school's effectiveness. Governors of several states, including Arizona, Ohio and Michigan, are vowing to produce more graduates to meet future workforce demands.

Colleges also are responding to families' concerns that high tuition prices may not translate into a college degree, says Jerome Lucido, vice provost of enrollment at the University of Southern California. "We have to make sure that access to college is not an empty promise," he says.

Most colleges offer support such as orientations for first-year students, about a quarter of whom don't return for a second year. Now, colleges are expanding their efforts to other groups:

*Sophomores. Second-year students face key decisions involving their majors, yet they're the "frequently neglected middle child," says Jerry Brody, of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. This fall, his campus will offer sophomores a class to help assess their strengths.

A new welcome-back event today at the University of South Carolina will point sophomores toward options such as studying abroad. The campus loses 9%-10% of students in or just after their second year.

*Males. Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., plans this fall to sponsor a video game tournament as one way to draw males "out of their rooms and into the community," says Tracy Gottlieb, head of a campus retention committee. Males make up 44% of the student body and are a "fragile" population, she says. "Young men are less likely to be joiners. If they're engaged, they're happy. If they're happy, they stay."

Connecticut College in New London is launching an effort to keep minority males by offering events that let them mingle with successful men of color in the community.

*Adult dropouts. Last year, Oklahoma began recruiting state residents older than 25 who have earned some college credit. Louisiana and Kentucky have launched similar initiatives, which often stress conveniences such as speedy registration. These adults "almost have a college degree in hand," says Sue Patrick, who directs Kentucky's program, which targets 11,000 adults who are 75% of the way toward graduating.

Colleges say their programs make a difference. At the University of Richmond in Virginia, which stepped up services to males in 2003, retention rates for males have exceeded those for females in two of the past three years.

Yet Don Hossler, a professor of higher education at Indiana University in Bloomington, says his research suggests most colleges still devote "too little in the way of resources."

Source: USA TODAY

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