Center gives dropouts new path to degree
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PHILADELPHIA -- Like many young Americans, Julia Capece went straight from high school to college. Halfway toward her bachelor's degree, Ms. Capece decided to move out of her parents' home. She tried juggling work and school, but living on her own and keeping up with tuition and coursework proved too much.
Ms. Capece finally gave up and dropped out, becoming one of 37 million Americans who have some college credits but no degree. That's more than 20 percent of the working-age population.
At a time when there's more of a push than ever to increase the number of Americans with college degrees, close to half of the people who start college end up walking away. Some give up only a few credits away from graduation.
But it's not just dropouts who pay the price. Students who quit college cost governments about $3 billion a year in state appropriations to colleges and universities, as well as federal and state grants to students, according to Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research. And that's only for beginning full-time students who drop out during their first year. If every dropout were counted, the cost would be much higher.
Now public policy groups, private foundations and higher education officials want to persuade people who quit college to come back.
A program called the Center for Adult Learning in Louisiana, or CALL, sponsored by the state's board of regents, offers courses that take less than half as long to complete as traditional college courses, and it awards credit for what students already know through a process called "prior-learning assessment." All of this is meant to help people with some college credits complete their degrees.
One of CALL's success stories is John McGee, who had spent seven years in the military and more than a decade as a manager at a Louisiana casino when he went back to college as a working adult. Despite his experience, Mr. McGee had to take the same introductory courses as an 18-year-old, leaving him bored and frustrated.
Through CALL, Mr. McGee tested out of five introductory courses by passing a series of exams. He took the rest of his classes online in the accelerated format, and he finished an associate's degree in less than a year.
But formidable obstacles remain -- including universities themselves, which are set up in a way that doesn't do much to stop students from dropping out in the first place.
That's because, historically, there has been little incentive for colleges to focus on completion, said Sallie Glickman, co-founder of a Philadelphia program that helps dropouts return to school. Most public college and university budgets are based on how many students the institutions enroll, not how many they graduate.
"All the money, all the resources, all the energy" have been focused on getting higher enrollment, Ms. Glickman said.
But Bryan Cook, director for policy analysis at the American Council on Education, which represents presidents and chancellors of U.S. colleges and universities, said getting dropouts to come back may not be worth the cost and effort.
"Doing this is extremely costly to institutions ... so it becomes a cost-benefit analysis," Mr. Cook said. "If you're only going to increase your graduation rate by a tenth of a percent, is it worth spending $10,000 to do that?"
First Published December 5, 2011 12:00 am
