MU spending millions on dropout students
MU's first-year retention rate is 85 percent.
Published Oct. 15, 2010
Roughly 30 percent of first-year college students at four-year colleges do not return for a second year, according to a recent study.
Mark Schneider, vice president of American Institutes for Research, led the study, entitled “Finishing the First Lap: The Cost of First-Year Student Attrition in America’s Four-Year Colleges and Universities."
Schneider and his team examined college data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, a federal system with information on colleges across the nation.
“The study was designed to estimate the costs to taxpayers of first-year college attrition,” Schneider stated in an e-mail. “The research team looked at grant money from both federal and state resources that comes to students who later drop out.”
The team combined this data with information from the College Board and Payscale.com to examine issues related to the costs associated with retention, said Patrick Riccards, AIR executive director for communications and public affairs.
The results are published on a website, Collegemeasures.org, which allows anyone to look at retention rates, graduation rates and more for individual colleges and universities.
Riccards said the study looked at issues that have been more or less ignored in the educational world in order to identify problems and inform the general public.
“Over the last five years, as a nation, we’ve spent over $9 billion on grants for students who don’t return for a second year of college,” Riccards said. “You have students arriving in college that may not know what all is going into it -- be it financially, emotionally or academically and, for whatever reason, don’t return for a second year.”
Riccards said the public needs to hold colleges and universities more accountable for their students. When the public makes an investment in a student’s first year of college, it is important to get a return on that investment. To do so, colleges and universities need to re-examine their efforts to keep students enrolled.
According to the study, MU spent $11.3 million on students who entered the school in fall 2007 but did not return the following year. MU’s graduation rate is 67 percent, placing it in the 89th percentile among public universities.
Not everyone agrees with the implications of the study. Clifford Adelman, a research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, is a former colleague of Schneider and questions the IPEDS data used in the study.
Adelman said data from the National Center for Education Statistics would provide a more accurate representation of transfer students who change states, instead of counting them as dropouts like the IPEDS does. With this data, the percentage of students returning to school would be much higher.
“(Schneider) pretends that there is no such thing as geo-mobility and that traditional-age students have their feet in cement,” Adelman said.
He said one issue with this data, which uses transcripts, is its age. The next long-term study in this forum will not be available for a few years. Adelman said other studies contain college transcripts for better data.
Riccards said the numbers used in the IPEDS study were provided by university presidents, adding to their credibility.
“The data we’re using is the best data, the worst data and the only data we have in the nation,” Riccards said. “Yes, we should collect better data. But, this nation has a misperception that when students drop out of college today, odds are they simply transferred or took a year off.”