It may seem that the area is flooded with college graduates these days as commencement after commencement is celebrated, but it's nothing like it could be, according to a new national report.
Just 53 percent of American college students graduated with a bachelor's degree in six years from the schools they entered as freshmen, according to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank that called the nation's universities to task yesterday for the rate.
The report follows a challenge issued to the nation's colleges in February by President Obama to improve graduation rates and a $2.5 billion federal allocation in his proposed budget to help with the effort.
Locally, Gwynedd-Mercy, Penn State, La Salle, Princeton, Penn, and Swarthmore fared very well, finishing among the top 10 schools nationally in their categories.
No local schools finished in the bottom 10, but five fell below the national average: Cheyney, Lincoln, Widener, Philadelphia University, and Delaware Valley.
Pennsylvania's four-year higher-education institutions, collectively, performed well, posting the third-highest graduation rate in the country: 64.4 percent, according to the report. New Jersey was tied with New Hampshire for 12th with 57.3 percent.
Graduation rates were based on U.S. Department of Education data for nearly 1.2 million freshmen who entered college in 2001, and the six categories ranging from non-competitive to most competitive were as defined by Barron's Profiles of American Colleges, based on student demographics and admission standards. The study looked at 1,385 four-year colleges.
Authors of the report, "Diplomas and Dropouts," say that the data do not account for students who transfer, and that nationally, transfers likely would raise the overall graduation rate eight percentage points, to about 60 percent.
The report's authors also offer no analysis for wide-ranging rates among colleges with similar student bodies, but say they hope their study - a first of its kind for the group - will start a conversation about what it will take to raise overall performance.
"We simply want everybody making decisions in this process to have much better information," said Mark Schneider, a study author.
National and local education officials agreed yesterday that college graduation rates need attention, but cautioned that critics should consider that some schools are serving first-generation American and low-income students who often enter college in need of more support.
Some students also take longer than six years to finish because of financial problems or the need to work and attend part time.
Size of endowments, state funding, and other financial variations among institutions also are factors, they said.
"There's no question that we have emphasized access over the course of the past few decades with great success, but that we haven't focused as much on outcomes," said Barmak Nassirian, of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission Officers.
"Therefore, we do have a process in which people congratulate themselves just because they manage to pull the students into higher education and don't pay sufficient attention on getting them out with a credential."
Schools that performed less well offered myriad reasons, including that their missions center on serving students who graduate from lower-performing school systems in urban areas and need more remediation.
"We traditionally take students who come from underestablished educational systems in Philadelphia and the Chester area," said Cheyney spokeswoman Antoinette Colon.
Cheyney, a historically black State System school, was among the five worst in the North region in its less-competitive category.
It graduated 29 percent of its students in six years, the worst rate in the area.
Colon acknowledged the school was trying to improve.
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