For students who attend nonprofit colleges, their chances of graduating are about as good as a coin flip.
“Students who start at four-year, nonprofit colleges only have about a 50-50 chance of graduating, according to a new report released Wednesday,” Lydia Wheeler wrote for The Hill.
The report, published by Third Way, a “fresh-thinking” and moderate think tank, analyzed private colleges and their success of getting students to graduation.
“These four-year institutions promise to educate and graduate young men and women and prepare them to succeed in the working world. We rely on these schools to be mobility engines for low and middle income people,” Tamara Hiler, Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, and Megan John wrote.
That has been a foolish reliance of the American people on those colleges.
“We found a stunning level of institutional failure in fulfilling this mobility promise to students,” they wrote.
Colleges have excelled at increasing enrollments and tuition revenue. They’ve disappointed in terms of carrying students to degree completion.
“This degree of institutional failure goes well beyond the current discussion about rising tuition costs to the very essence of what colleges spend billions of dollars purporting to do: provide an education worthy of the time and cost associated with it,” they wrote.
The statistics are bleak and brutal.
“In only 266 schools (26 percent of all four-year private, non-profit colleges) did more than two-thirds of full-time freshman with federal loans manage to earn a degree within six years of enrollment,” they wrote.
In the top quartile of private colleges, one-third of students don’t complete a degree, but they have to repay those loans. The bar for success is shockingly low.
The probability of debt struggles, however, is high. “Just 63 percent of students who entered with federal loans earned yearly salaries and wages that exceeded $25,000” within six years, they wrote.
With a high cost of living and rental payments due, it’s a struggle to repay those loans. When they default, the federal government has a hard time recovering those loans, not to mention the financial pressure on those dropouts. The Obama administration has been careful to avoid recognizing a spike in loan defaults. The amount of loans in default has increased by $15 billion compared to a year ago.
The report also found “no discernable connection between price and quality,” concerning given the high levels of student loans and defaults.
For what is to be done, Third Way recommends “skin in the game” and greater accountability throughout the higher education system, in addition to a priority on degree completion and a “return to the core mission of instruction.” More transparency with “college-specific outcomes data,” a greater proportion of Pell Grant recipients in high-performing schools, and more government funding for larger numbers of Pell Grant students in colleges.
More federal funding is a proposal worthy of skepticism, but greater accountability and a focus on college completion instead of enrollment could boost average graduation rates.
