- Only 80 public institutions graduate more than two-thirds of the first-time, full time students who enter their school.
One of the more astounding findings in this dataset is the reality that only 80 out of 535 four-year public institutions-or 15.0% of these schools-graduate more than two-thirds of their first-time, full-time students each year. That means that if the remaining 455 schools were a part of our country’s K-12 system, they would be considered “dropout factories” under the recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. 18 Specifically, the federal government has recognized that if a high school fails to graduate more than two-thirds of their students (a status which describes approximately 5% of all high schools in the U.S.) they are required to put in place some sort of support plan to improve their outcomes or face possible closure. 19 However, no such comparable scrutiny or intervention exists for any of our colleges and universities, no matter how inadequate their outcomes, allowing students to take out loans and receive federally-subsidized grants to attend schools with consistently puny graduation rates year after year.
And while low graduation rates are a problem on their own, what is even more disconcerting is the fact that a number of these institutions have particularly damaging outcomes for students coming from low- and moderate-income families.