The College Dropout Scandal by David Kirp

Author:David Kirp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bringing Student Success to Scale

In 2012, David Laude moved into the provost’s office. His assignment was to meet the “70 percent by 2017” goal, which meant expanding the TIP model across the campus.

Today, the TIP-style initiatives that Laude launched serve two thousand freshmen, a quarter of the class, whom the data-mining deems least likely to graduate in four years. A dozen years earlier, when he first offered a bespoke experience to fifty chemistry students, he had to guesstimate whom he should select, but by the time he took on his new assignment the university was using a statistical model that incorporated everything from high school grades and SAT scores to first-gen status to make this calculation. “We now know that the overwhelming reason students are unlikely to graduate on time is family income. College completion is primarily an economic issue,” says Laude.

To secure campus-wide buy-in, Laude had to convince skeptical, sometimes hostile, professors and administrators to embrace a new way of thinking about undergraduate education—if the “everyone deserves an A” philosophy of teaching worked in chemistry, there was no reason it shouldn’t also work at the business school.

In making his pitch, Laude could count on Bill Powers’s forceful backing. Against the advice of some graybeards, who warned him that curriculum reform was the graveyard of presidents, Powers made revamping undergraduate education his legacy issue. Big-enrollment lecture courses were converted into what are referred to as “flipped classes”—students come to class having already read the basic material online, prepared for problem-solving activities in the classroom. And every undergraduate had to take a seminar that lifted them out of their disciplinary comfort zone, as well as obliging students habituated to a diet of multiple-choice exams to write essays.

Powers didn’t miss an opportunity to underscore the benefits of earning a bachelor’s degree in four years, and this message brought key administrators on board. “What I was able to do,” says Laude, “was to say, ‘all of us, we’re all going to start working in the same direction’ and they all agreed to it.”

Like everyone else, professors respond to inducements, and the quality of instruction improved when the university introduced financial incentives, including a $7,500 salary boost, for excellence in the classroom. Instead of ridding themselves of students who didn’t catch on immediately, more professors strove to help them. In first-year chemistry, the failure rate was halved; in biology, it shrunk by more than two-thirds; and in statistics, it was reduced by three-fourths. The GPA at UT climbed to its highest level in the history of the institution. The courses didn’t get easier, the students didn’t get brighter, and the faculty didn’t embark on a grade-inflation campaign. What changed was the professors’ attitudes toward their students.

TIP’s multi-pronged approach had proven itself, and in almost every college it serves as the template for the academic success programs. The particulars vary, however, since undergraduates in different fields butt up against distinctive barriers. Laude believed that, in these matters, the colleges, rather the central administration, knew best.

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