Academic Epidemic The Cost of College Drop Out

on may 11

2008 i nervously found my seat on the

lawn in the afternoon sunlight

it was a beautiful spring saturday in

meadville one by one i listened to all

the names of the people i had come to

know being

called to the stage and i looked at the

proud

smiling faces of all the friends i had

made as as they shook president cook’s

hand and received their diploma

554 people the largest graduating class

in the history of allegheny college

had finally gotten what they worked so

hard for over the last four years

but i wasn’t one of them that spring i

failed three out of the four classes

that i took

including my independent capstone

project a research paper that i barely

started

i hadn’t planned on dropping out but i

could kind of see it coming

i barely went to class i preferred to

stay in my room all day and

play video games escaping into a world

any world where i could be somebody

anything else i drove out of meadville

the next day

and i didn’t really have a plan in mind

my parents recently divorced

my mom living in a rehab facility

because she passed out

drunk with food on the stove and almost

burnt our house down

i was too scared to even ask my dad for

help let alone

if i could stay with him you know i

don’t remember how i asked him

but a good friend of mine from high

school had a spare bedroom

and he let me stay there for a couple of

months

but still the economy was trash

i had no job no prospects

no money and all i could think about was

that crushing

depressing weight of feeling like a

failure i was a failure

unfortunately i’m not the only person

that could tell you a story like this

in fact the year that i dropped out 2008

9 million other students did the same

thing

nine million other people dealt that

same

crushing blow of realizing their dreams

of graduating from college

weren’t going to come true you see

once you drop out of college the odds

are

you’re never going to return and even if

you do

you most certainly won’t graduate

my story is over a decade old at this

point but i can tell you

as i sit here in 2021

it hasn’t gotten any better i wish i

could tell you different

and sure may not feel like it here at

vanderbilt where we consistently

graduate about 94 percent of our

students

but what about our neighbors here in

nashville

according to the latest data the

six-year graduation rate at belmont is

71 percent

lipscomb is 68 trevecca nazarene it’s 56

more troublingly at our neighboring

hbcus

fisk has a graduation rate of 50 percent

tennessee state university graduates

just 32 percent

of its students within six years both of

these

well below the national average of 62

percent

the story these numbers tell is

incredibly stark

but it’s not just happening in nashville

there are serious racial

and gender inequities in college

completion

the six year graduation rate for latinx

college students is 54 percent

for african americans it’s 42 full 20

percent lower than the national average

when you consider gender disparities in

high demand fields like

engineering white men

are six times more likely

to get a degree than

latinx women and over 11 times more

likely to get a degree

than african-american women the college

dropout epidemic epidemic

in our country is real and we as

americans have not figured out how to

reckon with it

you know i count myself among one of the

luckiest

college graduates that i know after more

than 10 years away from college

i went back to earn my degree in 2019.

now here i am at vanderbilt

working on my masters in higher

education administration

because i want to put my story to some

good use

helping other students succeed in

college

while my anecdote might feel pretty good

to hear it’s

tragically far from common as i speak to

you today

there’s almost 30 million people in the

united states with some college credits

but no degree

the national center for education

statistics

the largest source of post-secondary

data in the united states

didn’t even start tracking graduation

rate until 1996.

and today there’s only been one

longitudinal study published in 2019

that has analyzed the completion

trajectories of students who had some

college credits but no degree

they found that just 13 of these

students

who dropped out re-enrolled within five

years

and only three percent actually

completed their degree

i would argue the single biggest reason

for this is that these students are

almost

always left behind when they disconnect

from their institution

leaving college is never an easy

decision

and deciding to come back is even harder

yet the burden most often falls squarely

on the shoulders

of the students to motivate themselves

to return

at most schools there’s insufficient

support and a lack of

institutional focus around addressing

the challenges for students who don’t

graduate

a large number of institutions don’t

even have an office or a single staff

member dedicated to supporting the needs

of students who want to try again

even if institutions do support

non-traditional students

they often do so with minimal support in

the way of funding or staffing from

their institution

frankly if a college wanted to

successfully support the needs of

students who want to re-enroll after

dropping out

there’s almost no research out there to

tell them how to do it

there is some hope on the horizon though

thanks to the people like yolanda watson

spiva

and her team at complete college america

who are trying

to make it easier for former dropouts to

complete their

college degree they’ve come up with

several strategies

to help those comebackers succeed

such as accelerated coursework

year-round enrollment

flexible scheduling special scholarships

college credits for demonstrated

competencies

and dedicated coaching there’s also

work being done to preempt college

dropout from happening

in 2012 georgia state university one of

the most

innovative institutions in our country

launched a robust system of predictive

analytics to totally reimagine their

college advising model

after evaluating evaluating millions of

student data points

georgia state developed a system of over

800

different risk factors for dropout we

each which trigger

one-on-one advising interventions this

approach

combined with highly targeted financial

interventions like micro loans

which students can use to cover gaps in

tuition and fees

has raised the university’s completion

rate

by 23 percent over the last decade

and reduced time to degree by half a

semester

this has saved students 18 million

dollars in the process

according to timothy renick the vice

president of enrollment management and

student success

georgia state is currently the only

public university

in the nation in which black latinx

first-gen and low-income students

graduate at or above

the rate of the student body overall

that is to say that i dare to hope

since i decided to return to college the

burden of being a college dropout

has started to get less heavy to carry

but knowing that my story is a rare

exception

still keeps me awake at night

if there’s one thing i want you to take

from this talk is not that i

overcame the odds it’s that so many like

me

never do we need to stop privileging the

experiences of traditional students

start to widen our tent to embrace the

journeys of every type of learner

every student deserves to know that

college

is a life affirming experience even if

it takes them

one or two or three or ten

tries to walk across that graduation

stage