2006_02_01_archive

Institutional Graduation Rates by Academic Selectivity

Institutional graduation rates are largely determined by the academic

qualifications of the students they admit. More selective admissions

institutions tend to have higher graduation rates than do less

selective institutions as Astin pointed out more than a decade ago.

The institutions that have higher or lower graduation rates than the

rates predicted by the academic qualifications of their admitted

freshmen differ from their peers in ways that offer useful insight

into more and less successful institutional retention strategies such

as academic and social integration, first-year experience and learning

communities.

But there is another more troubling aspect to selective college

admissions: the criteria used in selection (SAT, ACT, high school

grades and class rank) are so highly correlated with family income

that colleges could substitute the students' parents' federal income

tax return for test scores, letters of recommendation, essays and

campus visits to build similar entering freshman classes. These

class-based admissions criteria tend to exclude students born into low

income families. And this exclusion diminishes low income students'

chances of ever graduating from college.

We have recently re-analyzed a data file on institutional graduation

rates prepared by the Higher education Research Institute at UCLA.

Astin and his colleagues gathered graduation status at 4 and 6 years

on a sample of 56,818 freshmen who started college in 1994 at 262

baccalaureate-granting institutions. From this file Astin published

Degree Attainment Rates at American Colleges and Universities (January

2005). We used this file to calculate graduation rates for freshmen

from different family income levels at institutions with different

levels of admissions selectivity. Controlling for SAT score our

analysis finds that at all levels of family income and all levels of

SAT scores graduation rates increase with admissions selectivity.

For example for 1994 freshmen from families with incomes of $0 to

$25,000 and SAT scores between 1001 and 1099, six year graduation

rates by institutional selectivity were:

Low selectivity 53.6%

Medium selectivity 61.3%

High selectivity 69.3%

This pattern holds across family income levels, SAT score ranges, and

institutional types and controls.

My conclusion from these findings is that the exclusion of students

from low income family backgrounds by class-based admissions criteria

at selective admission colleges and universities diminishes the

overall graduation prospects for students born into low income

families. It also inflates the graduation prospects of students born

into affluent families. In other words the current college admissions

system is enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor.

Higher education has utterly failed to grasp the key role it now plays

as the gatekeeper to the American middle class. The alternative paths

to the middle class through family farming and manufacturing

employment in earlier stages of economic development no longer exist.

Who gets into higher education and who gets into selective admission

colleges now determines who gets to most fully experience the American

lifestyle. The class-based admissions criteria currently employed by

selective admission colleges and universities are dividing educational

opportunity along the line of inherited--not earned--privilege. I