According to a study, only 55 percent of college students are graduating within six years. This raises an interesting question as to why nearly half of college students are failing to graduate. Colleges should be doing more to get a larger amount of students to graduate than merely 50 percent. When taking a closer look, one sees that typically more competitive schools have higher graduation rates than less competitive schools. Fredrick M. Hess believes that the practices of higher education institutions play a role in the higher graduation rate at competitive schools. These “practices” may in fact be the cause, but possibly, they are worse than less competitive schools. Grade inflation can be related directly with graduation rates being higher in more competitive schools. As mentioned in my prior post, a higher percentage of A’s are given out to the more competitive private schools than public schools. This can be seen in the graph below.
Giving out more A’s would of course increase the graduation rate. While the number of graduating students is very important, a higher graduation rate could be revealing a worse underlying problem: grade inflation. Although a low rate of graduation certainly is not a good thing, a higher graduation rate is not necessarily better if it comes at a sacrifice of the quality of a degree. A higher graduation rate as the result of grade inflation allowing students to slip by is a serious problem. A low graduation rate cannot be fixed by giving out better grades. This only worsens the problem. When looking at how grade inflation and graduation rates are intertwined, it is clear that they are two serious problems without simple solutions.
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