17 states to fight dismal college completion rates
More than a dozen states have formed an alliance to battle dismal college completion rates and figure out how to get more students to follow through and earn their diplomas.
The Associated Press
BOISE, Idaho —More than a dozen states have formed an alliance to battle dismal college completion rates and figure out how to get more students to follow through and earn their diplomas.
Stan Jones, Indiana's former commissioner for higher education, is leading the effort with about $12 million in startup money from several national nonprofits including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
About one in every two Americans who start college never finish, said Jones, who founded Complete College America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, last year.
The U.S. has focused on access to higher education for the past several decades, and states need to turn their focus toward how many students actually graduate after they get in, even if it means using a funding structure that is based on degree completion instead of attendance, Jones said Tuesday.
"It's going to take a substantial amount of work over a substantial amount of time in order to get the kind of improvement we need," he said.
The campaign's goal: Make sure 60 percent of adults between the ages of 25 and 35 hold an associate or bachelor's degree by 2020, up from the 38 percent that now claim this status.
The benchmark falls in line with President Barack Obama's desire to once again make the U.S. the leader in college attainment by 2020. The U.S. led the world in the proportion of citizens with college degrees for decades but has been overtaken by other countries in recent years.
Obama stressed the importance of higher education in his State of the Union speech, saying "a high school diploma no longer guarantees a good job."
At least 17 states have pledged to consider policy changes and draft ambitious plans to boost their college completion rates: Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont and West Virginia.
The states have also committed to addressing the gap in earning degrees between low-income and minority students and their classmates.
Nationwide, about half of white students who enter college complete a degree. That compares with about one-third of African American and Hispanic students, said Jeannie Oakes, director of educational equity and scholarship at the Ford Foundation, which is backing the campaign launched this week.
"That's a huge problem," Oakes said.