Beyond Basketball, A College Quality Problem

The NCAA has now crowned its mens basketball champion, the Florida Gators. The public has watched them excel on the basketball courtnow if only we could get a glance at performance inside their classrooms.

Higher Ed Watch has questioned the excessive value placed on athletic achievement, often at the expense of academic achievement. Many of the elite basketball schools do little to ensure that their non-NBA bound basketball players leave with a degree. But Florida deserves some credit for graduating 67% of its mens basketball playersamong the top 14 teams in the 65 team field.

However, this focus on basketball players is really a gimmick (one that weve used as well). Basketball player academic performance provides a nice headline during the tournament. In the past week, news organizations have picked up on the student-athlete story, but have failed to branch out to the larger, more pressing issue: low overall graduation rates and large white-minority graduation rate disparities.

The average overall graduation rate of schools that made the Sweet 16 is 68.4%. Thats shocking. More than a quarter of all students at these schools drop out. These are students who go through "normal" admissions channels (versus athletes, who are often subject to lower standards as "special admits"). These are students who attend college with the sole goal of getting a degree. Whats happening to these students is the more important story.

When disaggregated by race, the overall graduation rate picture becomes even bleaker. On average, Sweet 16 teams are graduating only 56% of their black students, in comparison to 70% of their white students. And worse, only half of their black male students (versus 67% of their white male students).

The "colleges failing students" storyline doesnt end with the attainment of a degree. Too often a degree doesnt indicate rigorous student learning. Many people who graduate from college are ill-equipped to enter and succeed in the workforce.

Two-thirds of college graduates are not "proficient" in prose literacy, meaning they cannot use information from continuous texts to make inferences, according to the National Survey of Americas College Students. A survey by a business consortium found that more than a quarter of employers believe that four-year college graduates (and almost half of employers believe that two-year graduates) are deficient in basic knowledge of "writing in English" and "written communications."

Why isnt this story being reported by the media? Higher education policy discussions are usually limited to finance issues, because most assume there is no college quality problem. In contrast, K-12 education policy discussions tend to focus on quality issues, because the finance issues are difficult, expensive, and less pressing for the middle class.

But college quality is the sleeper issue in higher education. If higher education policy continues to ignore the quality issue, political support for student aid eventually is going to shrink, as it has for K-12 education. We have suggested incentives for students to graduate with workforce ready skills. For example, our College Access Contract would give more financial aid to students that graduate from "rigorously" accredited institutions or demonstrate competence on a basic skills test, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment.

The bottom line is that colleges that dont graduate their students are failing, and colleges that graduate unprepared students are failing as well. Both need to be held accountable, and both need to improve.