Alec Ward | Leave the door open

Fair enough | A college president’s plan to increase attrition may be dishonest, but it’s fundamentally sound

By Alec Ward 01/26/16 10:51pm

Unless you read The Chronicle of Higher Education with the near-obsessive frequency that I do, you probably don’t know much about Mount St. Mary’s University or its president, Simon Newman.

If you do read the Chronicle, however, you might know that President Newman has generated controversy in the higher-ed community in past weeks with his plan to encourage academically borderline freshmen to drop out prior to the tuition-refund deadline. He claims this plan is actually better for students who the university considers likely to struggle than encouraging them to muddle through.

The proposal has been particularly controversial not only because it would encourage rather than seek to prevent student attrition, but also because of Newman’s apparent ulterior motive of improving the school’s “retention rate.” This stat, calculated as the number of students who drop out freshman year, is used by the government and by college rankers as a metric for student satisfaction. Students who drop out before the tuition-refund deadline, however, are not counted in the calculation.

Newman has explicitly stressed the importance of boosting the school’s retention rate in emails and, in a truly unfortunate choice of phraseology, compared his plan to euthanizing sick rabbits.

I’m interested, however, in what happens if we examine what I see as the more fundamental question: Should colleges seek to identify students who are likely to drop out — or just be miserable — and encourage them to leave early?

It seems indubitable that some number of students arrive at college unready to handle its myriad challenges, particularly at less-selective institutions. Maybe they lack some of the foundational academic skills needed to thrive in their chosen programs. Maybe they were pressured into college by over-eager parents and teachers and don’t want to be there at all. Maybe they’re emotionally unprepared to live away from the support networks of family and home. In any case, isn’t it better for these students to be encouraged to consider dropping out early and avoid taking on debt instead of setting themselves up for years of misery-inducing academic turmoil? I think so.

Certainly, no student should be forced or coerced out of school. In our college-obsessed society, however, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if not-insignificant numbers of students enroll without ever seriously considering whether college, particularly a liberal arts program, is really what’s best for them at that point in their lives. It would be all too easy for a school to simply take those students’ money and let them fail out in time, but in my view, it’s both more honest and more compassionate for schools to encourage students to ask those tough questions early.

One could, of course, make the case that a university’s obligation to its students’ success as students begins at the moment of enrollment. This is particularly true at a school like Penn, where an exacting admissions process theoretically screens for the unready. But even at Penn, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that circumstances as I have described might result in a handful of students arriving every year who are not ready for the academic rigor a school like Penn demands. Many students come from elite private schools where the pressure to attend a prestigious university is intense, no matter what the individual’s actual desire is. More than one person I knew from high school gained admission to an elite school only to find it wasn’t what they wanted or needed at that point in their life. Some of them had to forfeit tuition because of it, or experience a mental health crisis before they were encouraged to seriously interrogate their choice to be there.

The way I see it, universities should encourage their students to ask these questions sooner rather than later. Ideally, such encouragement would begin prior to admission, but with admissions offices nationwide so focused on boosting their applicant numbers, that seems unlikely. All the institutional incentives align to encourage unprepared high schoolers to apply, and inevitably some of them are admitted.

A school’s most responsible option under these circumstances is to recognize this. A longer grace period for tuition refunds (the College’s current one is two weeks), an orientation or Freshman Fall programming frankly disclosing the University’s expectations, guided prompting of serious self-interrogation and promotion of the truth that there is no shame in putting off higher education are certainly warranted in the name of integrity, if nothing else.

ALEC WARD is a College junior from Washington, D.C., studying history. His email address is alecward@sas.upenn.edu. Follow him on Twitter @TalkBackWard. “Fair Enough” usually appears every other Wednesday.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.