The College Dropout Scandal

[00:01] SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.

[00:06] Announcer:

Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:15] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the program David Kirp. David is professor at the University of California at Berkeley, a contributing writer at the New York Times, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Education. He served on President Obama's 2008 Education Policy Transition Team and has previously appeared on Principal Center Radio to discuss his earlier book, Improbable Scholars, The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools. And we're here today to discuss his new book, The College Dropout Scandal.

[00:49] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:52] SPEAKER_00:

David, welcome back to Principal Center Radio.

[00:54] SPEAKER_02:

It's good to be back, Justin.

[00:55] SPEAKER_00:

So you call it a scandal. We have students dropping out of college at what are still fairly high rates. And this is a problem. Why do you see college dropouts as a problem?

[01:07] SPEAKER_02:

Well, it's interesting that you say problem and I say scandal. Because one of the folks at Oxford Press, the reviewer, said, you really want to call it a problem? I said, no, it's a scandal. And the scandal is this. There are 2 million kids who are going to start college this year. 800,000 of them won't get the degree that they have their hearts set on.

[01:26]

That dropout rate, which is 40%, hasn't changed in decades. The cost of that to the students in terms of not just debt, but stunted futures is huge. The cost to society in terms of having educated citizenry who can fill the jobs and who can participate in the political system is huge. What makes now different from the past is that, as you say, we have strategies, known strategies the colleges can use to boost the graduation rate and shrink the opportunity gap between students I call new gen students, that is poor kids, underrepresented minorities, first gen students. Nonetheless, there's very little movement in those graduation figures. That's a scandal.

[02:07] SPEAKER_00:

You know, I think as K-12 educators, speaking for our audience and from my professional background, you know, we have always seen it as our role from the earliest days of K-12 to send students the message that they need to go to college, and to take very seriously our commitment to preparing them for college, even if they choose not to go. You know, we want every student to have the ability to go to college, to be ready, to believe in themselves, and yet in so many cases when students are getting to college, you know, they've been accepted, they've enrolled, they've paid their tuition, and yet they're not making it to that finish line of graduation. So David, what do you see as our role in creating this crisis in K-12?

[02:48] SPEAKER_02:

I think American primary and secondary schools are doing, by and large, the best that they can do. And as you say, trying to prepare students for college. I'd fault, if I was going to fault public education, it would be for those occasions where the school system has given up Often they're poor students, immigrant students, and said basically you're not college material. And I've run into a bunch of those examples, particularly when I was talking to people who were served by the City University of New York and other community colleges. I think that high schools could do a whole lot better job of making students feel comfortable about going to their teachers when they've got problems and talking to their classmates when they have problems as opposed to sort of skulking in a corner and figuring I can't do it, I'm dumb. Because that fact, the willingness to reach out is one of the big factors in student success.

[03:46]

And I guess the other thing I would say is if you ask high school guidance counselors or principals, what percentage of your kids are going to college? They can answer that question. Ask them, what percentage of your kids are graduating from college? They don't have a clue. And I think to some extent don't want to know because the figures are going to be depressing to them. They don't want to tell folks that, you know, Four in ten of you aren't going to make it.

[04:10]

One of the things that counselors can do is to point students and parents to the data that's collected on a place like collegeresults.org, which allows a student to compare the schools they're thinking about applying to. And they'll see that schools with identical student profiles can have very different graduation rates. And that schools with identical graduation rates can have very, very different opportunity gaps between what I call new gen students and everybody else. And that should be an important factor in influencing their choice. Parents and students don't know about it.

[04:45]

Guidance counselors and administrators are in a key position to get students and families to pay attention, not just to whether the courses are good or whether it's a nice campus or et cetera, but to whether in fact they've got a good shot at graduating.

[04:59] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and I think there's an interesting relationship that you note between the graduation rate and the supports that are provided. And you've studied some different colleges, some different universities that have done a better job of providing support. But it's not simply a matter of instruction. I mean, obviously, the quality of instruction at the college level matters a great deal. But there are other things that certain colleges are doing that do make a difference, especially for those new gen students who need and depend on college. that support and those nudges.

[05:30]

What were some of your findings from examining those colleges that have been more successful?

[05:34] SPEAKER_02:

Well, let me start broad and then narrow down. For one thing, colleges need to make student success a priority. And you'd think that would be pretty obvious, you know, kind of like the who's buried in Grant's tomb obvious, but it's not. Because colleges have other priorities like raising money and moving up the U.S. news scale and placating alums.

[05:54]

And you've got to really be dedicated to put student success on that list because there's no accountability for student success. Imagine if a high school was graduating 60 percent of its students. They're dropout factories. And yet colleges, you know, nobody in a college gets fired because of low graduation rates.

[06:10] SPEAKER_00:

And I think we've got to pause and I want to repeat that or kind of emphasize that for a second because to us in K-12, that is a little bit shocking, right? That not only are people not held accountable for the college graduation rate, but I think as you detail in the book, honestly, there are some slight incentives toward enrolling students that will not graduate. What are some of those slightly perverse incentives that exist at the college level?

[06:34] SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think if states are paying for students who come, who show up and sit in the seat, and not for students who graduate, then there is an incentive to admit as many students as you can because you get that state aid and to not worry so much about whether it is that they are going to graduate. A college can tell people in a college, the counselors there, the administrators there, If they look at the data, and that's an important part of what a strategy is, if they look at the data, they'll realize that if students, even in the first half of the first semester, students fail a paper or fail a course and nobody intervenes, nobody brings that student in and talks to them, no professor sits down with that student, that student is on her way out the door. And that's something that they don't pay attention to. Another difference is, I think this would surprise, maybe would surprise administrators and teachers, although we've all been to college,

[07:30]

College professors have, by and large, zero training in pedagogy. They go and they get their PhD or their master's in some subject matter. They learn biology or STEM or history or English or whatever, political science, whatever it is. And off they go into the classroom, which means what do they know about teaching? They know how they were taught. And by and large, many of them were taught badly.

[07:53]

And that's a problem for institutions. I mean, you talk about the importance of what's going on in the classroom. The hardest thing for college administrators to do is to say to faculty, look at the problems that are going. Look at what's happening in the gateway math class. What can we do about it? Look at what's happening in the other big courses, the other big required distribution courses like biology and political science.

[08:18]

Look at the failure rates. What can we do about that? That's tough for institutions to deal with. And those are the things that folks in K-12 Just take for granted that if you've got a problem, you're going to try to work out a way to deal with that problem. And some of it happens in teachers' colleges. More of it happens on the ground with coaching and mentoring and the like.

[08:41]

That's nonexistent at most universities. Now, community colleges are a different kettle of fish, and they do a far better job of focusing on teaching. There's one school that I spent some time in, Valencia College, which is in Orlando, where To get tenure in that system, professor has to do research, but the research isn't on her discipline or her field. The research is on testing a pedagogical innovation in her class, seeing if it works. That's a powerful incentive to pay attention to teaching. And indeed, I think, you know, at community colleges, because the people who are teaching there want to teach.

[09:17]

They don't have, they're not pulled in the direction of publishing and fancy journals. They do as good a job as they can. By the way, another thing I would say, you know, in terms of high schools is they need to encourage students to go to school full time. If you start part time, you have now cut in half the chances you're going to graduate right off the bat. And that isn't something that gets communicated to students.

[09:39] SPEAKER_00:

Should be. I don't think I've ever heard that statistic that going full time essentially doubles your chances of graduating versus if you, you know, work and take classes part time.

[09:48] SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. One of the programs that I love, actually, which is run by the City University of New York, which is an amazingly innovative institution. started at community colleges, now is being done at the four-year schools and has tripled graduation rates. One of the elements of that program is you've got to go to school full-time. That's a requirement. And that's because they know what that data looks like.

[10:10]

I mean, what else they do, as I describe in the book, I would call it, you know, Harvard does the Rolls-Royce model of supporting students. City University of Newark and Valencia College do the Kia model, right? They do a lot with much less resources. And the You know, they provide last dollar scholarships. They help pay for textbooks, which cost a fortune. It's one of the things.

[10:31]

One of the other things that guidance counselors need to tell students is don't just look at tuition. Look at the fees. Look at the expenses like the $1,200 you'll be paying a year for textbooks. They support that. They support student transportation, the public transportation, which costs a lot. But when I talk to these students, I talked to a couple of them yesterday because I'm writing a piece for The New York Times about the new college programs.

[10:54]

What mattered most? What mattered most was the advising. And both of them said, you know, my advisor was kind of like my second mom. That's pretty amazing. That's what you're looking for. I'm sure that administrators in high schools where they're feeders to particular colleges and universities have some connection to those places, but they need to dig more deeply into things like that.

[11:16]

What if you're in a university where the ratio of students to guidance counselors is 1,000 to 1, 1,200 to 1. You might as well have nobody sitting on that chair. You can't do anything if you've got 1,000 students. And again, colleges that are equally easy to get into have very different ratios of students to counselors. And since good counselors are so important, it's another one of those neglected factors. So I'd urge people in the K-12 world to really know what what they are the schools that they are feeding lots of students to what they're about in these ways to what extent what's their dropout rate what are they doing to address their dropout rates are they using any of the any of the tools that that i lay out in the college dropout scandal and which any college administrator with a pulse knows what are they doing they really need to push and ultimately with the aim of collaborating they need to work with those schools and

[12:11]

A lot of that is on the universities. The universities have got to take seriously the fact that they depend in so many ways on the quality of the secondary education their students get and not as, unfortunately, too often happens, kind of ignore or even look down their noses at those local high schools. I mean, the high schools, obviously, they are the lifeblood of higher education. And they are, most of the students that are graduating from high school and going to college are going to the places where the big state public universities where the problem I'm describing, the dropout problem is most serious and where most of the good ideas are. have been born or being tried out.

[12:51] SPEAKER_00:

Well, and I want to return to a recommendation you made earlier that people go to collegeresults.org and actually look up some of the universities that you're sending students to, that your students tend to enroll in. And while we've been talking, I went ahead and looked up my alma mater and your alma mater, which are very different institutions, David. And it's shocking just to see the six-year graduation rate, the underrepresented minority six-year graduation rate, The average net price after grants. I mean, there's a lot of surprising data there that could really be helpful in steering students toward universities and colleges that may be more affordable than they think. You know, I think there's been a lot of discussion among college counselors about the problem of under matching where students go to less.

[13:37]

prestigious universities than they're capable of attending because they think they're more expensive than they are and they don't really account for financial aid and tuition assistance and things like that that really could make them quite affordable. And I think it's fair to say that you went to a much more elite undergraduate institution than I did, but the average net price is the same and the graduation rate is much higher. So I think, you know, comparing those two institutions really could be eye-opening for a counselor in making those recommendations.

[14:06] SPEAKER_02:

It's really important that counselors and students and families understand the difference between sticker price, which can look eye-popping, and as you say, the real cost. And if a family is eligible for Pell Grants, many places, they basically are going to go to college for as little or less as they'd be paying if they're going to a big state school. Amherst College, which is my alma mater, does really well in terms of overall graduation rates. But if you dig into those numbers...

[14:35]

There's a gap between the new gen graduation rate and the overall rate. And I tried pushing the college to look at that. I've had a hard time, but I've gotten this, you know, I've gotten this sort of rationalizations. And again, that's another factor that students need to take into account. I looked at two universities in the State University of New York system, equal profile in terms of admission. So the graduation rate at one of them is 73%.

[15:02]

At the other one, it's 61%. The graduation rate for the new gen students at the first of those colleges is 74% higher than the overall graduation rate. And that's, by the way, less atypical than you might think. The graduation rate for those same students at the other college is 60%. So you do the math, you know, you have a 25% more of a chance of graduating. You look at the odds.

[15:28]

If you go to university one than if you go to university two. And students and counselors don't know that. Where did I get that information? I got that information from that website that you just referenced. It's very helpful information. It's not the whole story.

[15:43]

And it's worth if you're looking at the local college and you see, my God, it looks so much worse than peer institutions and college results lists those peer, you know, says you want to see the comparisons, we'll show them to you. Well, then pick up the phone or go visit, you know, that your local institution and say, what's going on here? And they may have an explanation and they may be trying to do new things. Or they may just say, wow, we didn't know that.

[16:08] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk, if we could, about the role of belonging, because I think we've all heard from former students who maybe got into a faraway institution and were excited to enroll in college, but then got there and just felt like a fish out of water, felt like, oh, you know, I grew up in the city and this college is, you know, a land grant university or, you know, just for some reason felt like they were a fish out of water. How can high schools and high school guidance counselors help students establish that sense of belonging in college life?

[16:37] SPEAKER_02:

I think, as I mentioned before, they need to do a better job of preparing them for what is an astonishing transition. Just think those kids, you know, in, you know, whether they're going from a city to someplace in the middle of nowhere, or they're going from someplace in the middle of nowhere to a city, um, same kind of culture shock. Yeah. They're on their own for the first time. You know, mom isn't making the meals or doing the laundry, you know, that's on them. Um, They've got to find somebody else to talk to when they've got problems because, you know, the telephone isn't quite the same as being able to sit down with, you know, the neighbor or the coach or the minister or your parent or whoever.

[17:15]

They're not around anymore. What can you do? And that's something that, you know, I could imagine, you know, a pretty intense college prep seminar or course, you know, that you give seniors, but you introduce them to those things and not just, you know, let me show you why college is important, but let's Let's dive into this. And I think one of the things they can do, colleges are beginning to use these very short online psychological experiences that basically are designed to show that lots of students are in the same boat as the kids you're describing. Lots of students feel they don't belong. It's not just the fish out.

[17:54]

Everybody, in some sense, is a fish out of water when they leave high school and go to college. And there are ways of overcoming that. And as I was saying, convincing students that it's okay to talk to their teachers and convincing teachers they should be reaching out to students even more than they're doing so. They're not just teaching a class, they're teaching kids and encouraging students to form study groups. That's developing the kind of habits that will help those students succeed when they go to college.

[18:20] SPEAKER_00:

So I think we've all seen on TV or heard from friends and family members, you know, the guidance counselor who is kind of the bad guy in the story and told a high school student that they couldn't do it, that they could not pursue their college dream. And I wonder what you see as the way that pattern plays out where today, you know, guidance counselors do not want to be in the position of crushing dreams, but at the same time, they do want to steer students toward opportunities that will be successful for them. And we've talked about this idea of full-time college enrollment, that that vastly increases your chance of graduating. For a counselor who doesn't want to be the bearer of dire statistics, who does not want to discourage a student, but does want to connect the student with opportunities that will be a good fit for them. What are some of your top recommendations?

[19:11]

And I know we've talked about, you know, knowing the data about the colleges. Anything else that guidance counselors can do to really match students well with opportunities that will take them toward their goals?

[19:22] SPEAKER_02:

So one story that absolutely infuriated me, this girl who said to me, her counselor in 10th grade said, you know, you're just going to get pregnant You know, why don't you just drop out and save the taxpayers some money? That's the worst that I've heard. I think the flip side of that is that student came to community college having failed all of the entrance exams. You know, the quant exam, the reading and writing exams, was scared of decimals and negative numbers. And two months later, she and her classmates were simplifying square roots. That is, you know, moving from third to eighth grade.

[19:59]

And in English, you saw those kids discussing ambiguity in a V.S. Naipaul short story. When they came, they were writing three-paragraph essays, the kind of stuff that you do in third grade. So I think one important thing is not to underestimate the potential of these students. And another is to realize that community colleges are open to everybody.

[20:18]

And if a student is serious about getting an education, going full-time to a community college, the virtue of which is those teachers are going to be there for you. in a way that may be less true in a big impersonal state institution. And finding the people there who can help you, who you can talk to. And again, this has to do with the ability to, you know, the counselors in the schools, ability to tell students, go talk to your teachers when you're having problems. Don't just sit on them. For the weakest of students, you know, who want to go to college, that's a great place to start.

[20:53]

And I think you can talk about You don't have to sit there and say, you know, dear, only a third of students graduate from community college. That's not very helpful. I think you can talk about what it takes to be successful in college. And if you're serious, you've got to buckle down. You've got to do better than you're doing here. And you're capable of doing better.

[21:12]

If you tell students, if you write on the – we did this experiment in California where they took the state financial aid application that gets sent out. They added one sentence, you know, we look forward to seeing you, you know, as freshmen in college, something like that. That increased the number of kids who filed that form by about 10%. So, you know, it doesn't take a whole lot. One of my favorite stories I write about in the book is a guy who starts out in prison for attempted murder. He's in a car where somebody in the car is shooting at another gang person.

[21:51]

And winds up now, he's entering his third year in University of Miami Law School. It's a long and wonderful story. And he winds up, he goes to Valencia College. He gets out of prison and he gets out of, that itself is an interesting story. And he applies to community colleges and they all send him catalogs. And Valencia sends him a catalog with a post-it note, which says, we're excited about seeing you.

[22:14]

That's it. How many words is that? Five words, right? How hard is that to do? If students really believe that they can do it with help, they need to work hard. When they don't get something right the first time, it doesn't mean they're stupid.

[22:31]

They can rework questions again. And if they get really stuck, there's somebody they can talk to. That's all stuff that schools can do. And the data on really simple interventions in sixth, seventh, eighth grade, and the effect it has all the way through on discipline, on grades, on graduation, on college going. Really simple things that teachers and counselors can do starting in middle school with kids who are disaffected from school. Basically telling them, you know, we care about you.

[23:04]

Asking kids to write little essays about what they value the most. Just that makes a difference. And it makes a difference, I think, because those kids are saying, gee, somebody actually, for the first time, somebody cares about me and what I think about something. So there's a lot. that high schools can do, and middle schools can do, and elementary schools can do, to get kids past the I'm dumb theory. I mean, a substantial number of African American boys come to kindergarten believing that they are just dumb.

[23:35]

And it's particularly true for that group. They've bought into the worst version of the genetics, genetics is everything view of life. They don't know that that's what they've done. schools really need from the start to address that issue. And again, there are ways of doing this. You can talk about growth mindset, important strategy.

[23:57]

Carol Dweck's book mindset is something that every high school teacher and administrator ought to read. You can talk about belonging. You can demonstrate that you care about these students, that you're not giving up on these students. Here's another story. Um, one study, which is now being replicated on a bigger scale involved, uh, one of these online experiences, but it was given to teachers and not to students. It was given to eighth grade math teachers.

[24:21]

And the hypothesis was, you know, if you get high school math teachers to understand what's going on in the heads of adolescents, particularly male adolescents, what they're about, and so what they're acting out behavior is, you know, what they're saying to you when they're acting out. And if you can understand that, you know, that's going to make all the difference in the world. Well, the end of that year, we're talking about middle schools, the end of that year, Just exposing eighth grade math teachers to that experience cut the suspension rate in half. I mean, this is one of those jaw dropping. The researchers don't believe it. They're going to crunch the data 19 different ways.

[24:59]

It stands up to review. So, you know, message message to folks in schools, high expectations, high demands. You can do it. You got to work hard. We're here to help. That's the message of Improbable Scholars as well.

[25:15]

It's exactly what it is that that school system does. And it's why it's so successful educating a group of poor immigrant kids from non-English speaking families that many, many school systems give up on and has a graduation rate of 85 percent and has 75 percent of those kids going to college. That's the secret sauce. There's a secret sauce. Care about your students. Figure out ways of encouraging your students and pushing them hard.

[25:40] SPEAKER_00:

Very well said. And I will refer our listeners to that interview that we did a while back on Improbable Scholars. Just search for David Kirp, K-I-R-P, on our website. And the new book is The College Dropout Scandal. David Kirp, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[25:56] SPEAKER_02:

It was a real pleasure. Thank you.

[25:58] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.