Nevada has been selected the as first state to take part in a project designed to improve the nation’s dismal college graduation rates, which threaten the country’s economic survival in a global economy.
“Educational Equity and Postsecondary Student Success,” a national project funded by the Ford Foundation, will focus on improving college completion rates particularly among minorities, low-income and first-generation students.
“We know that we have a population in Nevada that is increasingly both minority and low-income, and we have a number of initiatives ongoing right now to try to identify those students and figure out why they are not going college, getting through college and out into the work force,” Chancellor Dan Klaich, of the Nevada System of Higher Education, said.
Minorities, low-income students and students who would be the first in their families to go to college are most at-risk of not entering college after high school or failing to complete their degrees if they do enroll, Klaich said.
Focusing on those groups as part of the overall effort to raise graduation rates in Nevada is important for two reasons, he said.
“Number one, because from a moral standpoint, it’s the right thing to do. Every student has an innate ability to learn and we have an obligation to give every student a chance to learn,” he said.
“And if you don’t believe in doing the right thing, then look at it as a pocketbook issue. If students can’t get the education they need to enter the work force, they will wind up in the social system or the prisons, which is more expensive to our society in the long run than if we got them to lead productive lives,” Klaich said.
The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, a regional organization that coordinates efforts to improve higher education among 15 states, including Nevada, is working on the project in partnership with the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education.
The Center for Urban Education will use data from Nevada to find specific ways to increase college completion rates in the state.
Nevada was selected as the first state for the national project because it has all seven of its public post-secondary educational institutions under one administrative body. That allows researchers to look at issues affecting graduation rates from a system-wide perspective rather than from separate institutions, said Magdalena Martinez, the lead investigator on the project and the NSHE assistant vice chancellor of academic affairs and student services.
Martinez said the economic downturn has spurred interest in the important role of post-secondary education in the future of the nation, including President Barack Obama’s goal that the United States regain its status as the country with the best-educated population in the world by 2020 in order to compete in the global market.
“What the project hopes to do is look at student data over the course of six years to have a better understanding of what are the points of critical success, where are those points at which we are losing students, what are the interventions that will best facilitate student success and how do we align our policies so that student success increases,” she said.
Historically, low college completion rates have been attributed to a failure to prepare students academically for the more stringent requirements of college courses, Martinez said.
“The belief was that under-represented students don’t complete college because they are under-qualified, but research has shown us that even when students enter college academically prepared, a large number don’t complete college,” she said. “This project will look at why they don’t by looking at the critical milestones in their educational trajectory. By doing that, we might be better able to identify interventions that will help them be successful.”
The graduation rate at Nevada’s four-year institutions is less than 50 percent, and the state’s community colleges far worse, with graduation rates that ranged from 4 to 20 percent in 2008.
For minority students, graduation rates dipped even lower, dropping by an average of about 5 percent more at Nevada’s two universities and its one state college, and by an additional 2 percent at the four community colleges.
Many factors can contribute to lower graduation rates for students of color, said Lonnie Feemster, president of the Reno-Sparks branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“Usually it is not just one thing. There can be conscious or subconscious racial bias, like less inclusion in study circles, and sometimes the kids pull themselves down,” he said.
The lower graduation rates for American Indian students could stem in part from their almost “being wiped off the planet in the process of taking their country away from them,” Feemster said.
African Americans haven’t fared much better after generations of enslavement, he said.
“Even if we could eliminate racial bias — which we haven’t — we still will not achieve diversity without overcoming this disparity in graduation rates, so I do think it is a critical issue. If you have certain groups of the population not graduating from high school or college, you will not have the type of diversity that corporate America, or in our case, corporate Nevada, wants,” Feemster said. “Those groups are not going to be represented in upper management or leadership positions where they can provide diversity at all levels in our community and state.”
Perhaps a sign of the economic downturn, the number of low-income students enrolling in college in Nevada has dropped, from 25 percent in 1999 to 13 percent in 2008.
To reverse that trend, the Nevada Board of Regents has decided to increase the percentage of money set aside from tuition increases that will go to provide aid for low-income students.
Nevada 2008 Graduation Rates
Native American/Alaska, native Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, White
Community colleges: 7.5%, 8.5%, 4.7%, 9.9%, 9.9%
*U.S. average: 17.8, 24.2, 11.5, 15, 22.9
Four-year institutions: 22.2, 47.5, 35, 37.7, 45.2
* U.S. average: 34.9, 63.4, 38.4, 43.1, 56.2
Source: Nevada System of Higher Education
* Source: National Center for Education Statistics graduation rates are for 2007, the most recent data available
