Obama sets goal of world's top graduation rate

Despite facing one of the highest college dropout rates in the industrialized world, the nation was issued a lofty challenge by President Barack Obama last week: for the country to have the world's highest rate of college graduates by 2020.

"That is a goal we can meet," he said to applause before a joint session of Congress.

University administrators lauded Obama's challenge as "a great direction" for the country and said the university and the rest of the university system are already in line with the president's goals, but national rates have a long way to go.

Overall, the university system is enrolling, retaining and graduating more students, Chancellor Brit Kirwan said, citing a dramatic increase during the last 10 years.

As of the class of students who first enrolled at the university in 2004, the university's four-year graduation rate was 58 percent, according to a recent university system report, nearly doubling the rate from 10 years ago, when the four-year graduation rate was 30 percent. More than 80 percent of students who enroll at this university graduate in six years. The rates are from a Board of Regents report that will be presented to the board's education policy committee tomorrow.

"We are absolutely in line with President Obama's goal," Kirwan said.

According to the National Report Card on Higher Education published in 2008, the United States is seventh in the world for college participation, behind Korea, Greece, Poland, Ireland, Belgium and Hungary, but the nation ranks 15th for the number of degrees completed per 100 students enrolled. According to the study, the United States graduates 18 out of every 100 students who enroll in a college or university, compared to 26 per 100 students for the leading countries, Australia, Japan and Switzerland.

"While so many people across the globe getting an education is a very good thing, it doesn't mean [the United States] should sit back and fall behind," said Patrick Callan, the president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. "And we have fallen behind."

Kirwan led the Commission on Access, Admissions and Success in Higher Education, a committee that analyzed the global gap in retention and graduation rates. Their final report was sent to Obama's transition team and other governmental and higher education groups. The experience led Kirwan to believe reaching the No. 1 spot in the world for graduation rates by 2020 might not be as achievable as the president seems to think.

"I applaud the president's goal because I think we have to set a high aspiration, but 2020 is a very optimistic goal for the United States because we've allowed ourselves and our nation to slip behind other industrialized nations," Kirwan said, noting the United States has the highest college dropout rate in the world among industrialized countries. "There's so much that has to be done in order to restore the U.S. leadership in this area."

But despite the disparity, many university officials and higher education experts say the goal is achievable.

"I think [Obama's plan] is realistic," Callan said. "We can certainly do this. But this cannot be done on the federal level alone - we have both public and private universities in this country, and we have 50 states to think about. This will take an effort on the part of all those entities to get us from here to there."

Kirwan said many universities across the country - like this one - already have plans in place that aim at decreasing their drop-out rates. The university's strategic plan - the 10-year plan that aims to make the university one of the nation's top public research institutions - highlights improving retention and graduation rates as primary goals.

"This is one of the highest priorities of the strategic plan," Provost Nariman Farvardin said. "There are a whole host of programs and initiatives outlined in the plan that are aimed at making sure students who come to this university get out of this university in a fine amount of time and with a degree in their hands."

But Kirwan said the problem may be out of universities' hands. He said often the problems that lead to students dropping out of college have their roots at the K-12 level - national high school graduation rates have fallen from 77 percent in 1972 to 67 percent today - or lie with state-controlled standards that are inconsistent across the country.

"There's a huge gap between the material students learn in high school and what they are expected to know when they start college, and as a result, colleges across the country are spending too much time on remedial education," Kirwan said. "Another issue is, in our country, we've allowed standards to be determined state-by-state, which 100 years ago was understandable, because people grew up and spent most of their lives in a single state. But today that's not the case."

Kirwan, who added that Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) created a council intended to increase coordination between public K-12 and higher education officials, said keeping college affordable and instituting national standards for high-school-level education are necessary steps toward accomplishing Obama's goal.

"I think Maryland is off to a great start in closing this gap," Kirwan said. "But we, and the nation, still have a very long way to go."

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