The Years That Matter Most by Paul Tough

Author:Paul Tough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

VI

Staying In

* * *

1. The Graduation Gap

There are certain American universities where almost every student who enrolls as a freshman goes on to graduate—if not in precisely four years, then in five or six. At Princeton, for instance, the six-year graduation rate stands at almost 97 percent, meaning that only a few dozen students from each entering class fail to collect a Princeton diploma. But at most institutions, things don’t work that way. Nationally, only about 60 percent of students who start a four-year degree manage to graduate in six. At two-year colleges, including community colleges, the dropout rates are much higher—only three in ten students earn a degree or certificate within three years.

Until recently, most administrators who led American colleges and universities didn’t really see this as their problem to solve. Some students succeed; some students fail. That’s the students’ business. Sink or swim. In the last few years, though, things have begun to change, and many colleges are now trying to address what has turned out to be a surprisingly challenging question: If you want your students to graduate, what do you do?

In 2012 the University of Texas in Austin became one of the first large public institutions to make a serious effort to answer this question, appointing a chemistry professor named David Laude to be the school’s first “graduation-rate champion.” Laude, who was in his midfifties and had been teaching at UT for twenty-five years, was given a very specific mission along with his new title: to increase the university’s four-year graduation rate to 70 percent. At the time, only a little more than half of UT’s freshmen were graduating within the traditional four years.

When Laude took on this new role, the university was in turmoil. Texas’s Republican governor, Rick Perry, had publicly supported a proposal from a conservative Texas policy institute to reorganize the state’s public-university system to make it more efficient and businesslike, more accountable to both students and taxpayers. Under the new plan, faculty at UT and other Texas universities would be ranked by their scores on student evaluations, and they would be compensated according to the amount of tuition revenue they generated. Students would be treated like customers, engaged in an essentially commercial transaction: exchanging their tuition fees for future earning power.

Perry’s proposals hit the UT campus in Austin like news of an approaching meteor. Many faculty, alumni, and administrators viewed them, with alarm, as an attack on the traditional role of the public research university. Bill Powers, UT’s president, was technically a state employee, serving at the pleasure of a board of regents appointed by the governor. And yet he publicly rejected Perry’s plan. His administration issued an official rebuttal to the institute’s proposal, arguing that while students should indeed be treated with respect, “they are not customers in the traditional sense. The higher education experience is not akin to shopping on iTunes or visiting Banana Republic.” Texas Monthly reported that the regents were considering firing Powers for insubordination.

Under pressure, Powers and

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