Graduation rates for North Carolina’s public universities must improve.
There’s almost total consensus on that point, especially with tuition rising steadily in recent years. Though North Carolina’s public universities have an overall graduation rate nearly 10 percentage points above the national average, there’s wide variance between schools.
That’s led to calls from pundits and policymakers to tighten admissions standards, force some students to attend community college or dramatically reduce tuition at campuses with declining enrollment.
“State lawmakers must create more pressure for schools to improve completion rates,” wrote Stephanie Keaveney in a commentary for the Pope Center for Higher Education. “As elected officials entrusted with taxpayers’ money, they must question why so many schools admit underprepared students.”1
Limiting college access has become a popular talking point, often portrayed as cutting waste.
But it would come at a cost.
Limiting admission to low-risk students — those with a high likelihood of graduating — would boost graduation rates. But it also would shut the door on thousands of students, reducing opportunity at a time when North Carolina needs all the skilled workers it can get.
“Higher education is a big mobility enhancer,” said Andrew Kelly, the University system’s new vice president for strategy and policy. “If you’re a believer in earned success, that people have a right to work hard and earn their success, you have to be concerned about access.”
North Carolina’s constitution says legislators must provide higher education to North Carolinians for as close to free as possible.2
It doesn’t say education is only for those with high test scores.
The state’s public universities aim for a delicate balance — keeping the doors open to those with a reasonable chance of success, but maintaining basic standards to keep unqualified students from wasting time and effort.
Within the University system, each institution serves a unique mission and a distinct student population. Some campuses enroll students mostly from strong schools, with solid preparation for college. Those universities have high graduation rates.
Other campuses specialize in higher-risk students with less preparation; many are first-generation college students. These institutions have lower graduation rates, but they serve a population that has more obstacles.
Students from low-income families face even more challenges to graduate during a period of rising tuition and limited financial aid. A significant number of dropouts can be attributed purely to a lack of resources; they have to go home to work. Additional financial aid would help.
“Colleges with lower graduation rates tend to admit a higher percentage of students with Pell grants, which usually go to lower-income students,” The Upshot’s Quoctrung Bui wrote recently. “This is why graduation rates are so tricky: The colleges that have the lowest rates are the very same ones that are taking the biggest chances on students.”3
According to UNC Chapel Hill demographer Jim Johnson, a growing percentage of minority students come from areas of concentrated poverty, making the leap to college even more challenging.4
North Carolina’s historically black colleges and universities face those challenges every day.
Over seven years, Winston-Salem State University walked a tightrope between access and completion, repeatedly raising admission standards so that by 2014, it graduated nearly twice as many students as it did in 2007.
To preserve access for students who no longer met admission requirements, WSSU also began a dual admission program with nearby Forsyth Technical Community College.5 With a new agreement to make transfers to universities smoother, community colleges play an important role in both student access and student success.
In trying to strike a balance, American higher education leans toward opportunity. In a country with by-the-bootstraps faith in self-improvement, public colleges offer a chance to those willing to work for a better future.
And they should.
“[A] true university is not merely a place where some fortunate few may come to know and to feel fine and beautiful things,” UNC President Edward Kidder Graham said in 1915. “It must also be a place where all men may learn to do well all things that need to be done.”6
That democratic approach to education contrasts sharply with tightly controlled systems in other parts of the world. In China, college is limited to students who perform well on a single test. The system is widely seen as holding back creative thinking that China’s economy needs.7
In the high-risk, high-reward free market of the United States, we’ve chosen to open the doors of opportunity. We tolerate risk because we value giving students a chance at success.
Speaking at UNC Chapel Hill in January, Fareed Zakaria of CNN pointed to educational access as a fundamental American value.
“The Founding Fathers were very different men,” Zakaria said. “But they saw education as something that clearly belonged to everyone, that everyone would have access to.”
Improving graduation rates is a challenge, and our public universities are doing plenty to get there.
But shutting the door on eager students is not the right solution, especially if we consider ours the land of opportunity. Our objective should be to help these students, not shut them out.
1 http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3380
2North Carolina State Constitution, Article IX, Section 9. http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/Legislation/constitution/ncconstitution.html
3 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/upshot/why-college-students-drop-out-follow-the-dollars.html
4 http://uncw.edu/soccrm/documents/GeographicDisadvantage.pdf, pp. 9-11.
5 http://www.highereducationworks.org/2014/09/a-chancellors-parting-thoughts-day-one/
6Graham, Edward Kidder. Education and Citizenship and Other Papers. 1919. Page 69.
7 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/world/asia/china-higher-education-for-the-poor-protests.html
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