Dropouts in debt

More than a third of students at Pennsylvania's public colleges drop out before junior year. Less than 40 percent graduate in four years. The rate of graduation within six years is 55 percent, but many of those students are adding up to two years of cost and debt. Even though the commonwealth's colleges have higher success rates than most state schools, these numbers are troubling.

"We simply have to do better," noted Frank Brogan, chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. That's the right attitude.

The state is trying to figure out why so many students drop out through a survey of all 14 of the colleges in the system. The colleges plan to conduct an exit interview with every departing student.

The colleges should also be identifying those who are struggling and taking steps to help them finish before they're ready to quit. New Jersey's state colleges, which have among the highest success rates in the nation, should consider bolstering student retention programs as well.

Brogan is right to get ahead of increasing calls for better college performance. His attention to graduation rates comes as the federal government is working on long-overdue efficiency standards for higher education. College costs are an increasingly heavy burden on lower- and middle-class students and their families. Institutions can begin to justify such investments with degrees that lead to good jobs, but not with the water parks, ice cream trucks, and other amenities being deployed to lure applicants.

As states have cut back or failed to increase aid to colleges, more of the cost has fallen on students. Seventy-one percent of the Class of 2012 was in debt, owing an average of $29,400 each, according to the Project on Student Debt. And as hard as it is for a graduate to pay off a loan, it's harder for dropouts, who must face their debts without the economic benefits of a degree. That's like having a mortgage but no house.

College students and their families aren't the only ones who deserve higher-performing institutions. Nationally, taxpayers spend $180 billion a year on federal student aid and tax benefits for higher education, with too little accountability for that spending. "Regardless of outcomes," the Education Trust noted in June, "nearly all colleges continue to receive taxpayer dollars, year after year after year. Federal dollars flow to institutions that graduate almost all their students and those that graduate almost none."

The trust recommends that the government work with the stragglers to improve their results over a few years. If they fail to improve, the group says, the government should cut their student aid.

That "tough love" approach isn't as tough as what dropouts experience in the workforce. The threat of aid cuts would offer a dose of reality to an industry that has been treated as if it's above criticism.