By Mary Nguyen Barry, Education Reform Now Policy Analyst
Ever since President Obama proposed a new college ratings system that would determine different levels of federal aid for high and low performing institutions, colleges and their lobbyists have cried that it’s an “impossible” task or that any ratings system must include a “risk adjustment” for student characteristics.
But it’s not impossible to rate colleges based on access, affordability, and student success measures. Guidance counselors and others have used the web tool College Results Online for the past 10 years. And yes, the final Obama system should adjust college ratings for student characteristics – but not in the way the no-college-accountability crowd wants.
Because what critics really mean by “risk adjustment” (but only say in private) is that the Administration should have lower graduation expectations for some students based on their race or family income. That’s what George W. Bush, for all his failures, was right to criticize years ago as the soft bigotry of low expectations.
President Obama’s new college ratings system should adjust for student characteristics by considering students’ academic preparation, not immutable characteristics like race and gender or factors out of their control like parental education and family income. On top of that, the ratings should adjust for institutional characteristics – like size and funding. It wouldn’t make sense to compare graduation rates at Southern Vermont College with those at Harvard University. Those two schools enroll students with completely different levels of academic preparation, not to mention their differences in size, wealth, and selectivity. But it makes all the sense in the world to compare Southern Vermont to similar colleges that serve similarly prepared students in terms of SAT/ACT scores and incoming high school grade point average – two important factors that impact completion.
When you do that “peer comparison,” you’ll see that Southern Vermont does a middling job of its educating its students: only one-third (35%) of full-time students graduate within six years of initial enrollment. But it does a particularly poor job of educating its underrepresented minority students – only 17 percent graduate within six years. Defenders may want to attribute these low graduation rates to the fact that 60 percent of its freshmen are from low-income families, 15 percent are from underrepresented minority groups, and that many are weakly prepared for college, with a median SAT score of 925 out of 1600.
But that can’t explain why their peer colleges – like Anna Maria College and American International College, both in nearby Massachusetts – graduate their students at much higher rates. Anna Maria graduates nearly half of its students (47 percent) and one-third of their minority students (31 percent). And though American International College has similar overall graduation rates (39 percent) to Southern Vermont, they graduate their minority students at a rate over twice at high (38 percent). Both of these colleges also serve high proportions of low-income, underrepresented minority students with low academic preparation.
Examples like these abound. And what’s helpful about the peer institution comparison technique is that it does a particularly useful job of identifying extremely low-performers. In fact, 9 times out of 10, a college with a graduation rate below 15 percent will fall in the bottom of their peer groups as identified by College Results Online.
Private Truett-McConnell College in Georgia, for example, was at the bottom of Southern Vermont’s peer group with a 9 percent six-year graduation rate. Meanwhile, peers like Averett University in Virginia and Cazenovia College in New York graduate their students at much higher rates (40 percent and 47 percent).
Or consider Texas Southern University (TSU), a public university in Houston, Texas, with its 12 percent graduation rate. Peer colleges – like Prairie View A&M and North Carolina Central University – graduate their students at rates more than three times as high, at 36 percent and 43 percent.
Even the for-profit, Phoenix-based Western International University with its 3 percent graduation rate can look up to the higher graduation rates of many of its for-profit peers.
The Obama administration doesn’t need a contentious risk adjustment formula linked to family income or immutable student characteristics to rate college performance. It should simply identify high and low-performers based on how they stack up to peer institutions serving students who are similarly academically prepared.
Students who are of color, are the first in their families to go to college, or come from low-income families aren’t a risk. They’re individuals. On the other hand, the data shows that some colleges are a risk, because absent any magical statistical adjustment their graduation rates are both appallingly so low and overwhelmingly worse than peer institutions serving similar students. Those are the institutions the Obama college ratings system should warn people against. And if bottom performers can’t turn around with notice and assistance, they eventually should be shut down. No excuses.