Colleges as ‘Failure Factories’

Insidehighered.com has a story that describes cost of college dropouts to society:

Comparing American higher education unfavorably to its peers internationally as well as to U.S. high schools, he zeroes in, particularly, on about 408 four-year institutions that graduate fewer than one third of their students, and calculates the cost of those “failure factories,” as he calls them, at about $770 million in federal grant aid and lost tuition payments, to the government and families. How much longer, he asks, can the country abide such poor performance?

To assess the “cost” of these “failure factories” to society, Schneider calculates the amount of federal financial aid received by the 158,000 students who enrolled in a given year in the 408 institutions that graduated fewer than a third of their students. About 44 percent of those enrollees received federal grants averaging $2,405, and the average graduation rate at the institutions was 18 percent. He determines the total federal grants given to non-graduates from those institutions to be $120 million, and drops that figure to $90 million by assuming that 25 percent of them “eventually graduated from other institutions.” The report calculates the “lost tuition” paid by those students to be another $650 million.

Note that a previous post examined the graduation rate of the 3 Idaho universities.