A recent report that ranked the United States lowest in the world for college completion rates may not have any bearing at this university thanks to early academic intervention for struggling students, institution and state officials said.
According to a recent Harvard Graduate School of Education report, “Pathways to Prosperity,” the United States lags behind 11 industrialized countries in college graduation rates. But at this university, administrators said there is a concerted effort to ensure the state stays ahead of the curve and helps keep the nation afloat.
“We have to be competitive in terms of the content our students are receiving [in college] and their success in coming out,” said Mahlon Straszheim, the associate provost for academic affairs. “We are always comparing our students’ abilities with graduates around the world because we compete in a worldwide marketplace.”
Despite the successes, this university still has a way to go, officials said. When compared to its peer institutions, this university’s graduation rates still lag behind, according to the 2009 American Enterprise Institute report.
At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, six-year graduation rates were at 88 percent and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill saw rates of 83 percent.
Lisa Kiely, the assistant dean for undergraduate studies, said there’s always more to be done to ensure students graduate, but she was nonetheless pleased with the university’s progress.
Given the national trend, this state has fared better than most, according to a 2009 report by the American Enterprise Institute.
With a graduation rate of nearly 60 percent, this state ranked among the top 10 in the nation. And at this institution, graduation and retention rates have continued to rise and are dramatically higher than they were a decade ago, according to the university’s office of institutional research, planning and assessment.
In the early 1990s, the university had a six-year graduation rate of less than 65 percent. But that number jumped to 81.5 percent by 2004, the last year for which graduation rates are publicly available.
One-year retention rates — which count students who returned to the university after their freshman year — also improved from nearly 91 percent in 1999 to more than 95 percent in 2009.
Kiely couldn’t pinpoint any one initiative that caused the improvement but said it was most likely a mixture of several new programs and policies.
One example, she said, was the establishment of the Student Academic Success Degree Completion policy in 2005, which requires every student to develop four-year graduation plans and achieve certain degree benchmarks.
“It gives them short-term and long-term goals,” Kiely said. “It also makes students move to a more appropriate major, quicker, if that’s what they need.”
Warren Kelley, an assistant vice president of student affairs who served on a university task force charged with studying and improving graduation rates, pointed to the link between on-campus housing and successful graduation rates.
“We know that students who live in university housing as opposed to those who don’t … there’s about a 10 percent difference [in graduation rates],” Kelley said.
Strazheim, who chaired the graduation and retention task force, said professors administering mid-semester grades are vital to students graduating on time.
“We’re really encouraging faculty to [assign] a letter grade and not just a ‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory,'” Straszheim said.
He noted that starting last semester, students who were at risk of failing classes by the mid-term were singled out, and advisers were notified so that they could deal with the issue early. In addition, freshmen not yet considered on academic probation but who have a GPA of 2.3 or lower are monitored closely by their individual college to help get them back on track.
“We’re always working on retention and asking how we can advise students better,” Kiely said, “We focus on helping students sooner with things like midterm grades … every college works with students who are having academic difficulty.”
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