American College Students: Going Average

Memo 11 (Week 12)

Gordon (Guoping) Feng, 11/18/2014

With American higher education heading to universal enrollment, college students and graduates are no longer an elite group, but increasingly resemble the “average” American (Igo, 2007, as cited in Goldrick-Rab & Cook, 2011, p. 254). Not only is the absolute number of enrollment is going up, so is the diversity and heterogeneity of the student composition, with many now having work and family life besides study. This increasing diversity has brought both benefits and challenges, such as over workload, financial shortfall, and mental stress. Like students, institutions are more varied than ever, with notable proliferation of for-profit institutions in recent decades: From 1976 to 2006, for-profits skyrocketed from 2% of all postsecondary institutions to nearly 1 in 4 today (Goldrick-Rab & Cook, p. 259). Their enrollment reached over 2 million in 2010 but experienced a slight decline (3.1%) in 2011(NCES, 2014). If we compare for-profits with public community colleges, we can find significant differences. First, in terms of debts, 38% graduates earning associate’s degrees from public 2-year colleges in 2007-08 had some level of loan debt, but for associate’s degree gainers from for-profit institutions, the corresponding number is 98% (College Board, 2010, as cited in Goldrick-Rab & Cook, p. 260); only 8% of public 2-year college graduates have loan debt between $20,000 and $30,000 and 5% owe $30,000 or more, and for for-profit school graduates, the corresponding numbers are 25% and 19% (NPSAS 2007-08 data, as cited in Goldrick-Rab & Cook,  p. 260). Not surprisingly, the default rate for students attending public 2-year institutions is 16.2% 4 years after entering repayment, and the corresponding number for those graduating from for-profits is 27.2% (Government Accountability Office, 2009, as cited in Goldrick-Rab & Cook, p. 260). Obviously, public community colleges should be a better choice to people with financial strains. Nevertheless, compared with students in those public colleges, for-profit school goers are disproportionately women, African American or Latino, and single parents (Baily, Badway & Gumport, 2001, as cited in Goldrick-Rab & Cook, p. 259). Then why do so many people with disadvantaged background choose for-profit institutions? Is it that they make decisions on inadequate information, or simply are cheated into such programs? A glimpse of the graduation rates may shed some light on this question. The 2008 cohort graduation rate (within 150% of normal time) in public 2-year colleges was a mere 20.2%, but this number for for-profit school graduates was 51% (NCES, 2014).

Indeed, access has been the most noticeable achievement for American higher education in the past decades. Also, the gap between the poor and the well-off and rich in terms of college access has been narrowed: the proportion of students from low-income families entering college after high school rose from 23% in 1972 to 45% in 1990, and then to 55% in 2007; the increase for middle and upper-income students were not so much (Goldrick-Rab & Cook, p. 263). But compared with admirable access rate, the graduation rates, especially for low socioeconomic status students, are very bleak. For example, only 11% of these students earn a bachelor’s degree within 6 years, while 55% of their more advantaged peers do so (Engle & Tinto, 2008, as cited in Goldrick-Rab & Cook, p. 263). Students from poor families often delay entrance into college, often work and sometimes support their family while studying at college, experience financial, physical, and mental pressure, and it’s not surprising they fare hard on campus (considering the mere 20% graduation rate of public 2-year colleges). Maybe it’s time for Americans to reconsider the taken-for-granted ideology of “college for all”.

References

Goldrick-Rab & Cook, 2011. College students in changing contexts. In Altbach, P. G., Berdahl, R.O., & Gumport, P.J. (2011). American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political and Economic Challenges. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kena, G., Aud, S., Johnson, F., Wang, X., Zhang, J., Rathbun, A., & Kristapovich, P. (2014). The Condition of Education 2014. NCES 2014-083. National Center for Education Statistics.

Questions for Class Discussion

1.Do you think universal access to higher education (college for all)  is a good or bad thing?

2.Do you think that today’s college students are academically better or worse than those in the past, for example, when you were a college student?

3.Quote: Compared with students at public 2-year colleges, students at for-profit institutions are disproportionately women, African American or Latino, and single parents (p. 259).

What do you think are the reasons disadvantaged group choose for-profits?

How would you compare public community colleges with for-profit institutions? Which do you think serve students better?

4.Quote: Among students who enrolled in postsecondary education for the first time in 1995-96 nearly 1/3 waited a year or more after graduating from high school before attending college. Among 1992 high school seniors, 16% delayed their entry into college following high schools (p. 264).

How do you think of the “gap year”, the interval between graduating from high school and entering college. Some say that freshmen often lack purpose and direction at college, and having experiences in society may help lessen this problem, while some studies find that this gap period negatively affects college readiness and completion. What’s your view?