How much does a low graduation rate bother you?

Lemaitre1
Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:37:38 +0000

I would consider a 60% graduation rate in six years very good for most state universities, it is certainly higher than all but a couple of the California State Universities where 40% is more typical.

The fact is that most state universities do not have very high admission standards compared to elite private colleges, and admit large numbers of students who are really not capable of doing college level work. As a result about half of them either flunk out or drop out when they realize that graduating is not a realistic possibility for them. There is a lot of political pressure to make admission to public universities as inclusive as possible and therefore to set minimum admission standards that almost any high school graduate can attain. Schools like Harvard, MIT and Caltech make no pretense of being accessable to average students and rarely accept a student not capable of doing college level work and the result is predictably high graduation rates.

California is a good example. The campuses of the University of California (UCs) have considerably higher admission standards for freshmen applicants than the California State Universities (CSUs). However the content and rigor of the courses offered at UCs and CSUs is about the same. The CSU students who enter as freshmen and have to meet the same academic standards as the UC students do to earn their degrees, but are generally not as academically capable, graduate at about half the rate of students who enter UCs as freshmen.