The Pressure of Accountability

What happens when you hold colleges accountable for graduating students:

The state of Tennessee gave colleges their marching orders: Raise your graduation rates, or else.

If graduation rates decline, so does state support for that institution. So state colleges and universities are getting creative in their efforts to make sure the students they enroll leave with diplomas in hand.

Campuses are bringing on extra advisers, bulking up tutoring and remedial classes, fast-tracking majors and cramming extra-credit courses into the gaps between semesters, all in an attempt to lock students on track to a degree.

There are two important things to note here. The first is what colleges in Tennessee are not doing in response to increased accountability for graduation rates. They’re not lowering academic standards. They’re not restricting access to only the best students. Second, all of these interventions–increasing advising, assisting students in need of support, cutting bureaucratic requirements, and updating their course calendar–are really simple things that we’ve known about for decades. These things work. They improve graduation rates, especially for at-risk students. (Oh, and by the way, for-profit institutions have been doing many of these things for years.)

So what’s taken public colleges and universities so long to adopt practices that are commonly known to improve outcomes? It took outside pressure and a budget crisis. The lesson is that if you hold colleges accountable for doing the things they should be doing, they’ll start doing the things they should’ve been doing all along.

Tagged as: College Graduation Rates, Student Engagement