College Uncovered

JON [00:00:00] Akhil Kollengode is a college student in a hurry.

Akhil [00:00:03] I want to get money as quickly as possible, but I'm also pretty determined on what I want to pursue in the sense of my career. So I wanted to be able to obtain that career or the job as quickly as possible.

JON [00:00:17] Kollengode is on a fast coffee break between classes at the University of Minnesota, Rochester, where he's enrolled in a degree program to get his bachelor's in just three years. That includes staying in school all summer.

Akhil [00:00:31] I actually really enjoy it. I in high school and all throughout my childhood, I felt like summer was honestly a drag for me.

JON [00:00:40] For a lot of other students. The time it takes to get through college is a drag. But here's what colleges don't want you to know. Most students take longer than four years to earn bachelor's degrees. It's a massively wasteful and expensive problem that few families know about or plan for. And colleges have been getting away with it. Thanks to a deft and little noticed political maneuver by a famous senator more than three decades ago. Welcome to College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the Ivy to reveal the inner workings of colleges. I'm John Marcus with The Hechinger Report.

Kirk [00:01:22] And I'm Kirk Pizzo with GBH. Colleges often keep their operations under wraps, but we're here in our first season to shed some light on how college admissions really works. Today on the show, graduation frustration.

JON [00:01:37] More than nine out of ten nervous, fresh faced freshmen who enter four year colleges and universities expect to earn a bachelor's degree within, well, four years. That's according to a nationwide survey out of UCLA.

Kirk [00:01:51] I mean, John, that's basic, right? College takes four years to get a degree, a relatively set number that's been the standard, since medieval times in Europe.

JON [00:01:59] Okay. We can explore that later. But here's the problem. Fewer than half of students heading to college will manage to graduate in four years. The actual percentage who finish in four years is 43%. Many will take six years or more to graduate. So, Kirk, if you were a private business and your customers got what they paid for, only 43% of the time, you'd be out of Business.

Kirk [00:02:23] Right? And the numbers are even worse for black and Hispanic students.

JON [00:02:28] We took a look at federal data from colleges and universities, and 110 didn't have a single student who graduated within four years. These include several satellite campuses of Kent State University and a branch campus of West Virginia University. I asked Yolanda Spiva about this. She's the president of the advocacy group Complete College America, which has been trying to improve these numbers.

Yolanda Spiva [00:02:53] This is the only industry where that has become acceptable. I mean, like any other, enterprise that has stated, has, you know, lower than stated goals being accomplished on a year over year basis, writ large. It just would be unacceptable.

Kirk [00:03:10] Okay. So for that majority of students who take longer than four years to finish, that means the already high costs of college could be as much as 50% higher. They also could be working those years instead of still in school continuing to pay tuition.

Lori Carroll [00:03:26] We've been squandering human potential in higher ed for a long time.

JON [00:03:30] That's Lori Carroll. She's the chancellor of the University of Minnesota, Rochester, and she wants to speed up college. She's one of the leaders of a project called College in Three. I asked her why it's a priority now.

Lori Carroll [00:03:44] Well, why haven't we been talking about it sooner? Might be another question. There are lots of reasons that innovation is being considered more broadly. And certainly the enrollment downturn at the end of the pandemic, in terms of the national statistics, is part of that and the public perception of higher ed.

JON [00:04:05] Carroll says people are catching on to higher education as little secret about how long it really takes to graduate. They didn't go to college to churn forever through elective classes. Many students have families to support or struggle to afford tuition. So a lot of students can't afford to wait, and they're increasingly impatient.

Kirk [00:04:25] Impatient, and demanding better. A survey by the think tank New America found that more than 80% of people think federal funding for colleges and universities should be tied to their graduation rates.

Lori Carroll [00:04:38] I think if they are impatient that the they have an appropriate emotion, right? And that for the most part, this is very much on us in higher education.

JON [00:04:51] There are a lot of understandable reasons students take so long to graduate, and not all of them are the college's fault. Students might arrive in college and prepared and have to retake courses, or they take time off for family obligations or to earn money to pay tuition. Many students change their major and they end up taking courses they don't need, so they have to rush to take the ones they do.

Kirk [00:05:14] Sure, but colleges and universities can also slow them down. They pile on extra requirements for graduation. They fail to provide enough sections of required courses. Here's Yolanda Spiva.

Yolanda Spiva [00:05:26] Again. Definitely, the availability of courses is a big one, and oftentimes the availability of courses, it can be based on capacity on the campus. It can also be based on the whims and the preferences of the faculty member. If they don't like to teach a course in the spring or in the summer or in the weekends or evenings.

Kirk [00:05:46] But one of the more egregious things that colleges and universities have done is move the finish line.

JON [00:05:52] Exactly. So let's explain what we mean by that. It it involves a little history and some clever politics. Amazingly, colleges and universities at one time didn't disclose their graduation rates at all. Nothing. No numbers, no publicly available data. Then, in 1989, there was a scandal over the academic performance of student athletes at some schools, student athletes never graduated. So in 1989, Kirk, can you guess the top song that year?

Kirk [00:06:23] I was pretty young at the time. I'd say something by Guns N roses or maybe Michael Jackson, perhaps Madonna.

Look Away Song [00:06:30] Will you call me up this morning? Talking about the new love you found?

JON [00:06:36] No. It was Look Away by Chicago, which is what everyone apparently was doing when this law got passed.

Look Away Song [00:06:42] Found someone else. I guess I won't be coming round. I guess it's all the day.

Kirk [00:06:52] John, this is your gym. You can be honest.

JON [00:06:54] Yeah, actually, it's a pretty terrible song. Anyway, at the time, then Senator Bill Bradley wanted to require that colleges report the graduation rates of student athletes. You know, you may remember that Bradley played college basketball at Princeton.

Kirk [00:07:08] Right before playing for the Knicks and then running for president.

JON [00:07:11] Right, exactly. Here's a clip from ABC news at the time.

ABC News Clip [00:07:15] At one of every three colleges, fewer than 20% of the players graduate and only one of 13 to more than 80% graduate. Which is which? Which colleges graduate almost everyone and which almost no one. The bill would require colleges, for the first time, to make the answers to those questions available to prospective college athletes and their families.

Kirk [00:07:38] Since athletic eligibility covers five years. Bradley proposed the seemingly noncontroversial idea of making colleges report the proportion of their students who graduated within five years.

Senator Bradley [00:07:50] It's a pretty hard thing to be opposed to. I mean, motherhood and apple pie and graduation rates are all kind of in the same category.

Kirk [00:07:57] That's Bill Bradley making his pitch. Back in 1989. He might have thought it was motherhood and apple pie, but colleges were not on board and they fought back. Here's Dick Schultz, who was executive director of the NCAA at the time.

Dick Schultz [00:08:12] I think our presidents feel this is something we ought to be doing, not the federal government.

Kirk [00:08:16] So, John, you spent weeks tracking down what happened next, right?

JON [00:08:20] Right. It was sort of a mystery what happened. And I was curious about it. And what I learned was that the late Senator Ted Kennedy quietly slipped a last minute amendment into the bill. The amendment defines successful graduation as obtaining a degree within six years, six years, not four, not even five. And suddenly that became the national standard for measuring our graduation rates. Kennedy, of course, represented Massachusetts, which you might have noticed, Kirk, has a few colleges, just a few. Okay, so so here it is. Kennedy's amendment is slipped on to page 24,450 of the Congressional Record. Kennedy also amended the bill so that it counted only full time students and first time students, those entering college for the first time. Which has the additional effect of making overall graduation rates look even higher than they are, being allowed to count six year graduation rates as a quote unquote success. Took colleges off the hook. And today, if you look at the main federal website where consumers can compare colleges, it's called the College Scorecard. It shows the graduation rate for students who take not four years, not six years to finish, but for some reason, eight years.

Kirk [00:09:39] Eight year. Wait, wait, why eight years? I thought the law says six, which is bad enough.

JON [00:09:44] I thought the same thing. And I've asked repeatedly. But the US Department of Education has consistently refused to explain why this is.

Kirk [00:09:51] This is your government doing this, folks, with an assist, of course, from the army of lobbyists that universities and colleges deploy in Washington. We'll be talking about that in a future episode for now. Yolanda Spiva says students and their families don't realize that colleges are even doing this.

Yolanda Spiva [00:10:10] So I mean it for the student one, it's misleading. It's false advertising. And even though there's the little caveat in the teeny tiny print, most students, of course, are not necessarily seeing that. So it's misleading. And it gives the student, a little bit of false hope.

JON [00:10:28] Another way of looking at it is like measuring the performance of an airline by the percentage of its flights that take up to twice as long as scheduled to reach their destination. I mean, the most basic promise colleges and universities make to consumers is that their students will graduate in four years, and yet they aren't even held to account for this. A cynic could assume it's because the longer students are stuck in school, the more they pay.

Kirk [00:10:54] Students definitely want to get out of college faster, though, but they have to do it on their own. You can see how fed up they are with how long it takes to get through college. Look at all of them earning college credit through dual enrollment classes in high school, or by taking Advanced Placement courses. Those are good ways to speed up. By the way, if you don't want to get stuck in the endless churn of college later on and pay for all that extra time. 7 million students also take courses in the summer, mostly at community colleges. That's because most four year colleges are shut down in the summer. Shutting down like that is a holdover from a time when gentleman farmer students had to bale hay and help out on the farm or air conditioning when it was so hot you couldn't stay in cities during the summer.

JON [00:11:39] Faculty also write or do research in the summer, and their contracts often say they don't have to work. But Lori Carol, back in Rochester, Minnesota, says that's another missed opportunity.

Lori Carroll [00:11:50] The the empty spaces on nearly every college campus are another part of what is being wasted.

Kirk [00:11:58] Maybe even empty air conditioned spaces, right?

JON [00:12:02] I mean, you'd think that colleges would want to stay open in the summer rather than have these giant, empty campuses that are costing them money to maintain and not bringing in any revenue. I mean, again, imagine any other private business just basically shutting down and sitting empty for three months of the year.

Kirk [00:12:20] Of course, it's also true that students who speed through college might miss out on the social life, the extra curricular activities, and athletics. Listen to a Kilcullen go describe it.

Kilcullen [00:12:31] I'd say the community aspect and the friendships. I think that is one thing I'm not super happy about in the sense of acceleration, because right when I'm starting to build the relationships, they're already going to be done and I'm already going to be out of here.

JON [00:12:45] But those are luxuries for many students, Carol told me. It's not only the smartest and well organized who want to speed up.

Lori Carroll [00:12:51] That's not what we're doing here. We are not designing for that kind of student. The entire intention is to create programs where all students, can have a greater chance of success. And a component of that is it's going to cost less, and it's because it's shorter.

JON [00:13:14] I asked you, Linda Spiva from Complete College America. So what's the big hurry?

Yolanda Spiva [00:13:18] Well, the hurry is that most of our students are not. Our learners are not there because they have all the time in the world, right? There's something whether it's providing for their families. If it's for, you know, legacy building, if it's for, you know, there's a, there's a goal around upward mobility, economic and social that will allow them to provide for their families and lead better lives and reach the American dream. So there is a hurry for those individuals, and it may not feel like it for the institution.

Kirk [00:13:53] This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I'm Kirk Carapaz, and I'm John Marcus.

JON [00:13:59] You can. Find some ideas for getting done with college quicker at complete college dot org.

Kirk [00:14:04] Our show is created by John.

JON [00:14:06] And Kirk and it's edited by Meg Woolhouse.

Kirk [00:14:08] Gary Mott and David Goodman are our mics engineers.

JON [00:14:11] All of our music is by college bands. Our theme music is groundswell by Left Roman out of MIT. I'm glad it's not by Chicago, Kirk.

Song [00:14:20] When we both breathe, as though we were better off as friends.

Kirk and Jon [00:14:27] If you don't like this one. I'm pretty sure you danced that chick in 1980 1989. No, you love this. You love this music I do not. College uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

JON [00:14:39] We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email and tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you're with a college or university, tell us what you think the public should know about higher Ed.

Kirk and Jon [00:14:50] Thank you so much for listening.