By Matthew Ladner
The Center for Social Organization of Schools at John Hopkins University coined the phrase “dropout factories” to describe high schools in which 60 percent or fewer of the students graduate.
The same term can be used to describe Arizona’s community colleges. High schools have advantages such as mandatory attendance laws that keep younger children in classes. So I use a more lenient measuring stick for higher education. For community colleges, I consider the graduation rates for full-time students three years after they enroll, rather than the standard two-year completion rates.
Sadly, every Arizona community college qualifies as a dropout factory. The average three-year completion rate is 18.2 percent.
Is this just the inevitable result for community colleges? The answer is no. Florida’s average three-year completion rate is 86 percent higher than Arizona’s. The Florida community college with the lowest graduation rate would rank third highest overall in Arizona.
Arizona lawmakers will struggle to balance the 2010 and 2011 budgets when the next session begins in January. Eliminating state funding for these dropout factories could be a relatively appealing option. The results cannot get much worse for the community colleges, while removing administrative bloat and having students carry more of the financial burden just might help to improve matters. Students likely would approach their school work more seriously if they were paying more of the cost, and graduation rates would rise.
Learn More:
Goldwater Institute: Community colleges have administrative bloat and low graduation rates
Goldwater Institute: Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education
The Economist: Declining by degree – Will America’s universities go the way of its car companies?
Dr. Matthew Ladner is vice president of research for the Goldwater Institute. Prior to joining Goldwater, Ladner was director of state projects at the Alliance for School Choice, where he provided support and resources for state-based school choice efforts. Ladner has written numerous studies on school choice, charter schools and special education reform. Ladner is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and received both a Masters and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Houston. Ladner previously served as director of the Center for Economic Prosperity at the Goldwater Institute and as vice president of policy and communications at Children First America. 
The quality of instruction at Arizona’s community colleges is worth an investigation as well. When I first moved to Arizona a few years ago, I took a course on the Arizona Constitution at Estrella Mountain Community College.
The class was a waste of time and money. Lecture time was spent watching DVDs of Arizona’s history and the homework assignments were insulting. We were assigned to complete a Word Search puzzle that was downloaded from the kids section on the governor’s website.
Needless to say, I refused to waste time on the Word Search puzzle and was publicly castigated by the “professor” in class.
Here is the link to the kids page where we got our assignments:
http://azgovernor.gov/Kids.asp
As a community college mathematics professor, I believe there is several significant facets of this issue that are being overlooked.
Situation 1: A student starts at the community college but does not complete an associate’s degree before moving on and completing a bachelor’s degree at a 4-year university. In terms of these statistics, the student is counted as a community college dropout despite the fact that the student used the community college as a spring board to complete a bachelor’s degree.
Case 2: A university student comes to the community college to complete a few courses for the student’s bachelor’s degree. Again, in these statistics, this student is counted as a community college dropout despite the fact that the community college provided the student with exactly the courses the student needed to complete the bachelor’s degree. (I typically see this each semester.)
Case 3: A student is working full-time and attending school part-time, completing 6 credits per semester. An associates degree is typically 60 – 64 credits. It will take this student 10 semesters (5 years) to complete the associate’s degree. Yet according to these statistics, this student is a dropout since the student didn’t complete the degree in three years.
I believe a more complete/accurate picture would be obtained by looking at the proportion of community college students which graduate with an associate’s degree or bachelor’s degree from ANY institution within a 10-year period.
The first line should read
“As a community college mathematics professor, I believe there are several significant facets of this issue that are being overlooked.”
I neglected to update the “is” to “are” when revising that sentence.Sorry!
Mr. Wilson-
A couple of items to note: first the federal data track full time students enrolling in a Fall semester. You are of course correct that many community college students enroll as part time students, or even take a single course here and there, but these are not the students that the federal data are intended to track.
On your point about transfering to 4-year institutions, in Arizona, the universities themselves have very low graduation rates. All three institutions are in the low 30s for on-time graduation. So while it certainly is the case that some students successfully wind up graduating from univerisities after starting at a community college, there is very good reason to believe many of those transfer fail to complete their schooling at a four-year institution.
All of the possible sources of error that might impact Arizona’s numbers also would apply to Florida, and Florida’s graduation rates are 86% better than Arizona.