Since 1990, college students have been working more hours and studying fewer, arriving less academically prepared, and saddled with higher tuition and fees. So why have graduation rates been rising?
One possible explanation, offered in a preliminary working paper, is that colleges are lowering their standards, making it easier for students to earn degrees.
“As schools face increased scrutiny and, in some cases, increased funding incentives, they may be responding by increasing graduation rates,” the authors, two professors and a student in the economics department at Brigham Young University, wrote. “The lowest-cost way to increase graduation rates is through changing standards of degree receipt.” The fact that the biggest increases in graduation rates are happening at public institutions supports this interpretation, they wrote.
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Since 1990, college students have been working more hours and studying fewer, arriving less academically prepared, and saddled with higher tuition and fees. So why have graduation rates been rising?
One possible explanation, offered in a preliminary working paper, is that colleges are lowering their standards, making it easier for students to earn degrees.
“As schools face increased scrutiny and, in some cases, increased funding incentives, they may be responding by increasing graduation rates,” the authors, two professors and a student in the economics department at Brigham Young University, wrote. “The lowest-cost way to increase graduation rates is through changing standards of degree receipt.” The fact that the biggest increases in graduation rates are happening at public institutions supports this interpretation, they wrote.
Their paper is being circulated by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. The institute distributes papers for comment and discussion before they are peer-reviewed or published.
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If standards are being lowered, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, said Jeffrey T. Denning, an assistant professor of economics at BYU and an author of the paper. Students who just miss the grade-point cutoff for remaining enrolled at an institution might be successful if given some leeway, he said. He and his co-authors aren’t passing judgment on how stringent standards should be, he explained on Twitter.
A couple things to add:
It’s not clear what the right standard is. I think people may read this as a normative paper which we try to avoid.
Also, we acknowledge the limits of the methodology we use. We find evidence consistent with our explanation but more work is needed.
The increasing completion rates since 1990 mark a turnaround from two decades of declines, from the 1970s to the 1990s. The authors, including Eric R. Eide, a professor of economics at BYU, and Merrill Warnick, who was an undergraduate in the department when the paper was written, set out to determine why that was. The numbers were perplexing.
Recent trends would lead one to conclude that graduation rates should be declining, not climbing, they noted. Students are working more hours at their jobs, arriving less academically prepared, and spending less time studying, recent studies have shown. Nevertheless, grade-point averages, which predict graduation rates, are rising. So how is that happening?
One likely explanation, they concluded, is that standards for receiving degrees are dropping. “If degrees have less-stringent requirements, graduation rates could increase in the face of declining student preparedness,” they wrote.
That’s hard to prove, though, without knowing how many hours students spend studying, how much content is covered, and how much students actually learn. But rising GPAs in the face of factors that should be causing them to drop hint that standards are slipping, the researchers surmised.
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The increases in completion have coincided with policy shifts in many states, beginning in the 1990s, that now tie at least a portion of public colleges’ higher-education appropriations to graduation rates. Performance-based appropriations give colleges an incentive to increase completion rates.
Three national data sources showed that college-completion rates have risen consistently since 1990, the authors wrote. The trend affects both men and women at public and private universities, as well as elite and nonelite institutions.
The exception was for-profit colleges, where the rates declined. Combining colleges’ data weighted by enrollment, the six-year graduation rate increased from 52 percent to 59.7 percent from 1991 to 2010.
“Trends in the college wage premium, student enrollment, student preparation, student studying, labor supply in college, time spent studying, and the price of college would all predict decreasing college-graduation rates,” they wrote. “Despite the bulk of the trends predicting decreasing graduation, we document that the college-graduation rate is increasing. These trends foreshadow what we find in our analysis and present a puzzle.”
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Declining standards aren’t the only possible explanation for the higher graduation rates, Denning said. Colleges have stepped up student-success programs, intervening to help struggling students with better tutoring and advising. But spending on such programs didn’t appear to increase significantly during most of the period they studied, he said.
They then looked at whether students were picking easier majors, but found no evidence of that.
Some have reacted to the paper by saying there’s too much pressure to pass everyone.
I definitely think the fact that we fail essentially nobody has something to do with it
— 〈 Berger | Dillon 〉 (@InertialObservr) June 10, 2019
“Some of the reaction is that ‘kids these days have it so easy,’ and that makes me uncomfortable,” Denning said in an interview. “If standards are changing and most students are graduating, that might be a good thing.”
Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of Complete College America, said the nonprofit organization, which aims to increase graduation rates, has seen no evidence that standards are being lowered.
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“Rather, we have seen that a focus on ensuring students are taking the right courses and the right number of courses is leading to greater success at these institutions,” she wrote in an email. That includes “creating clear academic maps and conducting degree audits to eliminate unnecessary course work.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, student success, and job training, as well as free speech and other topics in daily news. Follow her @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.