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News From Higher Ed: Good Students Have Higher Graduation Rates Than Poor Students!

Only in higher education would this be news, but Constance Brittain Bouchard, Distinguished Professor of Medieval History at the University of Akron, knows that many higher educationists don?t seem to know it, instead preferring to blame professors or structural racism of something other than student performance for poor graduation rates.

At the University of Akron, she writes:

Our incoming students are classified as honors students, standard admits, or provisional admits, based on high-school GPA and standardized tests. (Incidentally, provisional admits receive more one-on-one advising than standard admits.) The provisional admits, as a group, are much more likely to have a weak educational background, to have messy personal lives (e.g., being a single parent), to work more than 20 hours a week off campus, and to be trying to attend college without financial assistance from their families. All of these various students end up taking the same classes, at the same time, in the same rooms, from the same professors, indicating that variation in student success cannot be the result of variation in teaching.

Not surprisingly, the honors students have a high graduation rate and the provisional admits a low one. When students do not do the reading or hand in assignments, when they miss too many classes and either drop the course at the last minute or fail to take the final exam, they cannot make progress toward graduation, no matter how engaging the teaching.

There must be some social science studies somewhere exploring the mystery of why better students graduate at higher rates than poorer students.

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 30, 2010 (boomark / email).