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