<p>
</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure they do. Look at UM-Dearborn’s 2012-13 Common Data Set. There’s no place for them to enter the number of students who transferred out. They’re just asked how many first-time, full-time, degree-seeking freshmen started in 2005 and in 2006, and of those, how many graduated 4, 5, and 6 years later? The 4-year graduation rate is just an average of these 4-year rates over a couple of years. Any first-time, full-time, degree-seeking freshmen who transferred to Ann Arbor, MSU, or any other college would count against UM-Dearborn’s 4-year grad rate. So would anyone who started full-time but then went to part-time and didn’t finish in 4 years–because they needed to work, for example, or because their family added a child, or any of a million other common scenarios you’ll find at any commuter-oriented urban institution. Nor does UM-Dearborn get credit in its graduation rate for any students who started at another institution (e.g., WCCC), transferred into UM-Dearborn, and graduated in 4 years.</p>
<p>By the way, even using these narrow and sort of screwy definitions, UM-Dearborn’s 4-year grad rate is more like 16% to 18%. Its 6-year grad rate is more like 50%, with most of those graduating in 5 years, not 6. I’ll bet a very large fraction of the other half are students who transfer to another 4-year institution. And that doesn’t begin to tell the story of the work UM-Dearborn is doing. Its entering freshman class usually has fewer than 800 full-time, degree-seeking students. But it typically enrolls well over 800 transfer students each year, and it awards over 1,200 undergraduate degrees each year. That tells me that at least two-thirds of the people graduating from UM-Dearborn either started at another school (often a community college), or were part-timers. So if roughly half the freshman class eventually transfers out and two-thirds of the graduating class did not enter as full-time, first-time freshmen, either because they entered as part-timers or because they transferred in from another school, that suggests the 4-year graduation rate–a statistic basically designed with a traditional 4-year residential college experience in mind–is almost totally irrelevant for a school like UM-Dearborn.</p>