My University's Graduation Rate: Poll Results and Analysis

As of now, not a single person has been able to guess the graduation rate at my university. The correct answer is 46%. This, of course, is very low. It means that less than a half of the students who are accepted into the university manage to graduate. Now that I am in my fourth semester of teaching at this school, I am beginning to understand why this happens.

Of course, many of our students end up dropping out for financial or family reasons, which is, obviously, not good. An absolute majority of our students work, and it's difficult to combine that with attending school full time. Still, there is something else, a sad reality that nobody seems to want to address. And the actual name of my university isn't that important here because I'm sure this happens in many places.* There is a dramatic difference between freshmen and the rest of the student body. This semester I'm teaching only higher level courses and the experience couldn't be more different from what it was like to teach a mostly freshman course last semester.

There is a certain percentage of students that come in who are completely unprepared for college. Any college. Actually, they would benefit from repeating the fifth grade. They often have trouble reading and understanding even a page of text (in their own language, of course.) These are the students who regale me with the pearls of the "Latin America is a city" and "Africa is a country in Latin America" variety. These are the students who don't know who the Jews are, who never heard of the Roman Empire, who don't know that Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, who believe that the US not only existed in the year 711 but also invaded Europe at that point in time, who think that the US won the Spanish Civil war, and who have no idea what the European Union is.

These students are not a majority, of course. Their presence in the first-year classes is not any less daunting because of that, however. Whenever I have to interrupt my lecture to explain how many continents there are and where they are located, other students get really frustrated and discouraged. One of my students told me that the class reminded him of high school at times because we kept spending time on discussing some very basic material. Obviously, I would love not to have to explain what the capital of Spain is and who Fidel Castro is, and so on.

All of this is just as frustrating for the weak students. One of them came to my office to scream in frustration because everything we discussed went completely over her head. She said she didn't understand a word of what we were discussing, and I believe her. From what I know of this student's basic reading and writing skills (or lack thereof), she will be dropping out at the end of the year.

I'm not sure at this point where these kids come from, and why their ignorance is so dire. Whenever I discuss this with people, they immediately start asking me about the students' race, which betrays a nasty set of stereotypes. This issue has nothing to do with race. The racial breakdown among the weak students is exactly the same as within the rest of the student body. Many of the weak students seem to be from fanatically religious backgrounds. (I already know that if a person starts an essay about the Hispanic Baroque with the words "I'm a young Christian woman," chances are this student will be from the soon-to-drop-out category.) Probably, these students don't know some of the basic middle school material because they were the victims of homeschooling. And don't even get me started on what a barbaric practice that is.

I don't know what goal it serves to accept people who have absolutely no chance of graduating. It isn't very honest because they invest money and time into an endeavor that is doomed from the start. As a result, we end up with a bunch of drop-outs who hate even the word college because of the horrible time they had while trying to achieve what for them is utterly impossible. The students who do remain lose part of their respect for their educational institution and for themselves because they are initially lumped into the same classes with people who are barely literate. The teaching faculty get jaded and disillusioned because every time you hear "what's a verb?" from a college student, you lose faith in the system of higher education.

This is why financial considerations cannot serve as a guiding principle of student enrollment. When we worship the numbers as our supreme deity, we forget that quantity is often the enemy of quality. Often it seems like as long as prospective students are breathing, there will be a college somewhere ready to accept them, take their money, and kick them out because they should not have been there in the first place. This dishonest practice ends up hurting the very concept of higher education.

*Please do not bombard me with comments and e-mails revealing to me the name of my university. I know it. If you know it too, good for you. If not, I don't think it matters all that much.