You know, I got to wonder. Is it due to a shit school or shit students? Is a graduation rate the fault of the school or the student?
Yes. <whynotboth.jpg>
Students mostly fail to graduate when they run out of money or flunk out. The flunking out may cause the running out of money, since that breaks your schedule. In most cases, people who attend 4-year private schools are not running out of money.
People may flunk out because they are dumb. But if they are dumb, the admissions department should have caught that and not let them in (unless the goal is to fleece as many rubes as possible and let them flunk out as long as they pay their bills with student loan money. Which is what the for-profits do. With their online-diploma degree mill bullshit. Oh, wait... Liberty does that.)
Faculty also definitely play a role - some teachers are just better than others. I've had a few of each kind, and it's definitely harder to pass a class when the professor isn't really able to communicate the who/what/when/where of the course content, which assignments are due when, what they need to include, etc.
The real grey area is with borderline students - when you accept a student with a mediocre essay and a 20 on the ACT, they can probably do this college thing if they work hard (not all of them do), but that's where your advising staff comes in - that student should be guided to different (DON'T SAY REMEDIAL) classes, a study skills class, etc., (and maybe even, although nobody says this out loud, guided
away from certain majors, certain classes, and especially certain professors) and that doesn't always happen. So that kid flunks out, when their just-as-smart-and-hard-working counterpart with a different course load and different professors succeeds.
Then there's the paperwork side of things. I knew a lot of people who ended up one class short of graduation, or who "took a year off" because of some paperwork snafu - and an unfortunate number of those people never went back to finish. An aggressively competent advising and clerical staff who effectively badger kids into graduating on time can have a big positive effect on a school's grad rate.
tl;dr: students sometimes fuck up, but a school is mostly responsible for its grad rate, since it picks which students get to go there in the first place, and should filter out the rubes.
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