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Public higher education is a major investment for state governments and families. As the proportion of the cost of education that states have funded has decreased over time, tuition has increased to keep pace with rising education costs such as salaries, employee benefits, technology, and energy. States face difficult choices, once they have funded mandated programs, between higher education and K-12 education, social services, and health care in an environment in which tax-increase legislation rarely passes. Families also wrestle with budgets in which tuition increases compete with dollars allocated for other purposes. While neither state governments nor families doubt the value of higher education, both are inclined to spend precious dollars carefully, and both want to know what they get for their money.
States and families have gravitated toward graduation rates as the outcome measure of choice in their assessment of the performance of higher education. Graduation rates figure prominently in the most widely used assessment of colleges and universities: the annual ranking published by U.S. News and World Report. U.S. News ranks schools based on peer assessments and reported data related to retention, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, graduation rates, and alumni giving. Although reputation receives the greatest weight (25 percent) in the rankings, reputational variance is relatively small, diminishing its value as a way to differentiate among institutions. More significantly, U.S. News bases 16 to 20 percent of an institution’s ranking on its six-year graduation rate.
That measure, along with the closely related measure of student selectivity (15 percent), tells most of the story. Indeed, Robert Zemsky, Gregory Wegner, and William Massy, in Remaking the American University, compared their own analysis of higher-education market segmentation to the U.S. News rankings and determined that “all one really needed to know was the six-year graduation rate for any set of institutions to order them ... .” Graduation rate is the “high-stakes” measure of success for American public higher education.
Howard Cohen has been a professor of philosophy and chancellor at Purdue University Calumet since 2001. He is the author of two books and numerous articles on social philosophy. Nabil Ibrahim joined Abu Dhabi University as chancellor in 2007 after serving as vice chancellor for academic affairs at Purdue University Calumet, where he was also a professor of mechanical engineering and principal investigator on 32 research and technical projects.
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