|
news
CSULB plagued
by low grad rates
By Akira Hayakawa
Summer Forty-Niner
Cal State Long
Beach has been reported to have low graduation rates, causing
concern across the university.
Recent reports
compared graduation rates of California State University campuses
with University of California schools as well as private institutions
such as Stanford University.
CSULB has lower
graduation rates than the aforementioned universities. For
example, 34.7 percent of entering freshmen graduated from
CSULB within six years while UCLA has a rate of 80 percent
under the same conditions, according to each university's
most recent catalog.
Vincent Novack,
director of Institutional Research, said these differences
occur because the type of students at CSU campuses differ
from that of other research institutions.
"We are not
as selective as some of these institutions," Novack said.
"Institutions with which CSULB is often compared take
students of the best of the best. The CSU is a reasonable
cost, and that also aids accessibility."
Also, graduation
rates available are only tracked in four categories, which
are one-year, four-year, six-year and eight-year continuation
rates. This means students who take more than eight years
to graduate are not counted.
Those may include
students who go to school a few years, take a break for whatever
reason and come back to graduate. They may be in school for
only six years substantially but took more than eight years
to actually graduate.
It is an individual
choice to graduate as soon as possible or to take their time,
according to Cal State Long Beach President Robert Maxson.
"A low graduation
rate is bad if students who want degrees are not able to finish
those degrees," Maxson said. "It is not bad if it's
the student's choice to take fewer courses and go."
"The problem
we have now is [that] the students who don't graduate from
here, we don't know what happens to them," Novack said.
"They could drop out for longer than an eight-year period."
Novack added that
CSULB loses 20-25 percent of freshmen from the first year
to the second.
"The thing
the Institutional Research wants to address is ... did they
graduate somewhere? If they did, I wouldn't look at that as
a failure."
Assessing graduation
rates is complex, and cooperation with other colleges, CSU
campuses and UC schools is necessary to figure out whether
students who left CSULB, finish their degrees at other institutions,
Novack said.
"I don't really
think those statistics tell the whole story," he said.
In addition, most
students do not leave for academic reasons but for personal
reasons. Novack said students are under increasing burden
whose factors include family, work, finance and commuting.
Trends have changed
over some 20 years, too. A traditional college student used
to be a male, white, full-time student who did not work outside
of school and was economically dependent on his parents ?
which has now become incredibly rare, Novack said. Now, most
students work at least part time, and many students work full
time, he said.
Some students transfer
to another institution, which has a better program that they
want to learn. On the other hand, some go to another because
such majors as graphic arts and film are hard to get in and
they can not wait.
Graduation rates matter to the university for several reasons.
"I think low
graduation rates give people the impression that students
are leaving maybe for the wrong reasons," Maxson said.
"I think it's probably not good for the university's
reputation to have a very low graduation rate."
"This is a
factory, [and] our product is education," Novack said.
"So, we all care very much whether people stay here or
the people graduate."
"Graduation,
successful completion, is one measure of our success,"
he said. Measuring a success of such a complex thing as college
education is really hard, he added. "If someone graduated
from here, you can say the institution has been successful."
John Karras, director
of Student Transition and Retention Services, said incoming
students trust the university to help them get a degree. Thus
the university has a responsibility.
"We kind of
feel that we owe it to them to try to set up an environment
here," Karras said. "We don't want students who
want to graduate, to leave Cal State Long Beach and never
graduate [from anywhere else] because that doesn't benefit
the institution, doesn't benefit the society."
Therefore, CSULB
is trying to increase its graduation rate. Some of the efforts
include increasing the availability of services such as tutoring
and advising.
"There's a
lot of effort made campus-wide to try to stimulate retention,
to identify people who might have a problem based on their
academic history, based on their economic situation or whatever,"
Novack said. Academic advisors are studying to identify students
who are academically in danger of dropping out. They try to
reach those students rather than waiting them to visit the
advisors, he said.
"The university
is working very hard to make sure that students, who want
to graduate, desire to graduate in four years, can graduate.
And the way you do that is by offering more courses,"
Maxson said. "We have improved that dramatically."
|
