College Drop-out Factories? I Guess this is a Thing Now

Hmm now there needs to be something done about places like this.

School reformers, including President Obama, often talk about high school “dropout factories.” These are the roughly 2,000 public high schools, about 15 percent of the total, with the nation’s highest dropout rates. The average student at these schools has about a fifty-fifty chance of graduating, according to the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. But the term “dropout factory” is also applicable to colleges. The Washington Monthly and Education Sector, an independent think tank, looked at the 15 percent of colleges and universities with the worst graduation records—about 200 schools in all—and found that the graduation rate at these schools is 26 percent. (See the table at left for a listing of the fifty colleges and universities with the worst graduation rates.) America’s “college dropout factories,” in other words, are twice as bad at graduating their students as the worst high schools are at graduating theirs.

The bottom 200 schools only have a 26% graduation rate? That is absolutely awful. Especially when people are going into debt in order to fund 1 or 2 years of college then end up dropping out.So they borrow a bunch of debt that cannot be gotten rid of and they don't get a college degree to prop up their earnings. It seems these places are kept in business due to perverse economics:

As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.” 

As long as there is another group of minority students that will fill the seats the next semester armed with their financial aid, their student loans, and state money. WW1 trench warfare does sound like a very apt metaphor for these schools.