And, yes, there is a problem—one that hurts universities, government grant and loan programs and, worst of all, millions of young people who waste effort and resources as they go deeply into debt to fund college programs they never finish.
The numbers are astonishing—and deeply disheartening. Of the more than two million Americans who begin college programs each year, only a minority—some 41 percent—will complete their degree programs in the specified four years. The New York Times and College Atlas estimate that more than one one-third will never graduate.
What’s more, the dropout rate has been going up steadily since the 1970s. As more and more students begin university, an ever-smaller percentage of them manage to complete their programs.
Of course, leaving college before finishing a degree is no guarantee of failure in the years that follow, as celebrated Harvard dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have famously proved. But in general, the economic consequences of quitting a university without a diploma are disastrous: currently the annual income differential between those who complete a college education and those who fail to graduate stands at $21,000 a year—close to a million dollars over a lifetime of work. People without a college degree face double the unemployment rate of college graduates, and those who quit college before completion are at least four times as likely to default on their student loans.
It’s easy to understand why a resume showing “some college education,” but not a completed degree, might prove more detrimental to a job applicant than the unadorned qualification of a high school diploma. Some employers speak candidly about their reluctance to hire those who lack the grit or ability to complete a major undertaking, indicating a problem with follow-through and self-discipline.
In the light of all these factors, the biggest recent change in our college admissions process—the increasing disregard for standardized tests like the SAT and the ACT—looks especially misguided. Standardized tests may be an imperfect means to measure academic ability, and they hardly define an individual’s ultimate worth or promise. But more than 70 years of research shows that such tests do a better job of predicting success or failure in college-level work than do more subjective measures—like interviews, recommendations or even high school grades.
That’s right—grades awarded by teachers are inevitably subjective. The ability to make the correct selections in multiple-choice testing is not subject to any personal, individual bias, of either a positive or negative nature, on the part of test-administrators or designers.
In fact, multiple studies have shown that grades in secondary school reflect the most crude and unjust sort of bias, rewarding students for factors over which they exercise scant control. For example, researchers at the University of Miami produced a peer-reviewed study, reported in Newsweek in 2009, showing that physical attractiveness “has a positive and statistically significant impact on GPA for female students.” Seven years later, economists at Metropolitan State University of Denver determined that “students who were rated as attractive got better grades than those who were not.”
Such research undermines the core “racial justice” argument for eliminating consideration of standardized assessment tests. The lawsuits that recently forced the University of California system to disregard the results of such testing cited higher scores for white and Asian applicants as a reason to scrap the test as fundamentally unfair. But if, as social justice activists insist, racist bias permeates every aspect of our society, then doesn’t it stand to reason that subjective factors—including grades—would be even more profoundly influenced by such bigotry?
Statistics indicate that affirmative action has helped make it more likely for young Blacks to enter college than whites or Asians with similar backgrounds, but Black students remain far more likely to drop out. Some 62 percent of Blacks who begin college fail to complete a four-year degree within six years, as compared to 38 percent of whites. Such numbers indicate that the current college admissions process works poorly across the board and may well be perpetuating race-based inequality.
The widely held assumption that every high school graduate should pursue a four-year degree, with generous assistance from the government, needs rigorous reexamination. Otherwise, we will continue saddling even more frustrated students with pointless debt that often leaves them no better off than when their college experience began, and does nothing to promote long-term equality of opportunity.
Michael Medved hosts a daily radio talk show and is author, most recently, of God’s Hand On America: Divine Providence in the Modern Era. Follow him on Twitter: @MedvedSHOW.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
