Look who graduates?

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I have railed against the destruction of our educational standards, since the athletes on teams rarely graduate- and those that do rarely graduate on time. The good thing is that at least the costs for four of their years (if they graduate) are covered. So, they won’t be accruing debt as they fail to achieve a proper education. (No, this does not mean they all don’t learn. Amazingly, this year’s MIT football team was without a loss- yet, and they are in the football championships.)

I’m sure you heard about the “program” at UNC. You know, the one where there is no required attendance  and the students are granted wonderful grades. It turns out this program wasn’t just available to their football team- but to slews of folks who probably had no right to take up space at the university, at the expense of the many who desperately wanted that chance to obtain a wonderful education at the university.

(Here is a blurb from Business Week about this [purported] scandal : The latest in a series of university-sponsored investigations revealed that over 18 years—from 1993 through 2011—some 3,100 students took “paper classes” with no faculty oversight and no actual class attendance. Almost half the students enrolled in the phony courses were athletes.

Many of the basketball and football players “were directed to the classes by academic counselors” assigned to advise athletes, UNC said in a written statement. “These counselors saw the paper classes and the artificially high grades they yielded as key to helping some student-athletes remain eligible.” In other words, to keep members of UNC’s top-rated basketball team on the court, professional “counselors” encouraged flat-out academic fraud.

Kind of brings a lump to your throat, doesn’t it? Yup, a real lump of clay.)

So, I was ready to swallow my words and apologize when I read this piece in the New York Times. Now, I don’t know the agenda of Tamar Lewin- but these are tweaked results- the ones aiming for notoriety. Because if you read the true research she quotes, from Complete College America in Indianapolis, you would think that only 19% of the students earn a degree in four years from most universities. That would mean that our football scholars were much more successful than the average student.

Lewin in the NY Times

But, of course, that is simply a deliberate misstatement of facts. Notice- it’s not a lie. It’s just how one elects to skew data. Forget how they (the “Complete College America” group) slice and dice the data. The raw numbers tell the REAL story.

The study covered almost 30 million folks. (29,939,931 to be exact.) So, it wasn’t sample size that skewed the data.

But, here’s where the facts fall. Of those 30 million student, 15.49% (4.6 million) were age 20 or less at last enrollment. Another 24% (7.2 million) were between the ages of 20 and 23. Considering that most folks consider college matriculation to occur for folks who will graduate by the age of 22 (18 at the end of high school, 4 years later makes them 22), that’s the “normal” range.

And, we know that the older we get (no matter how much we desperately want an education), the harder it is for us to get to school regularly. We typically have families, work, and other life pressures. Which means that finishing college in four years gets a darn lot harder, if and when we attempt to do so later in life.

It’s also why most grad students (at least those contemplating obtaining a PhD or MD) jump right in as soon as they finish college- or at best after one year of work.  Because these programs are even more demanding than undergraduate degree requirements, and life’s pressures clearly are an impediment to completion.

It gets better. (Or worse, depending upon your point of view). Of those examined in the total study, only 26% (8 million) of the total studied were enrolled in four year institutions- the rest were in 2 year programs or mixed programs.  And, we already knew that those who start in 2 year programs rarely finish in four years.  Both because a low number finish that program in the stipulated two years and because of loss of credit when one transfers.

(There was no data as to how many of the 8 million students registered in four year programs  were attending not-for-profit institutions- and we all know the problems of those for-profit schools. (The US government has been clamping down on these for-profit schools, which seem to function by having students load up on debt- with little chance of completion.)

So, those graduation rates for non-athletes I’ve been reading (the one’s the universities and colleges provide) are, indeed, correct- and roughly four times the results quoted by this ‘interesting’ study.   A whole lot better than the results one would expect from Lewin’s article- and a sore sight better than their fellow students who happen to be on athletic teams.

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