David Kirp - The College Dropout Scandal

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David L. Kirp 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kirp, David, author.
Title: The college dropout scandal / David Kirp.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018038832 (print) | LCCN 2019006141 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190862220 (updf) | ISBN 9780190862237 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190862213 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: College dropoutsUnited StatesPrevention.
Classification: LCC LC148.15 (ebook) | LCC LC148.15 .K57 2019 (print) |
DDC 378.1/6913dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038832

INTRODUCTION
The Scandal and the Solutions

1 MOVING THE NEEDLE ON STUDENT SUCCESS
Strategies All Colleges Can Use

2 GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY
High Tech, High Touch

3 AGAINST THE ODDS
City University of New York and Rutgers University-Newark

4 UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA AND VALENCIA COLLEGE
The Power of Two

5 FOCUS ON FRESHMEN
University of Texas

6 THE PROMISE AND THE MINDSET
Long Beach State

7 BELONGING AT AN ELITE INSTITUTION
Amherst College

8 ENDING THE DROPOUT SCANDAL
Where Are the Leaders?

David Laude, until recently the graduation rate champion at the University of Texas, was musing about why undergraduates drop out. Students try their best, but there are all these evil things that can happen, from a bad test to a grandmother with a heart attack to a breakup with a girlfriend. The only way you can save that kid is constant vigilance, just watching for those momentsbefore they get sucked down, theyre pulled up and saved.

Heres the story that makes me angriest, because this was on my watch. This was an African-American male from the inner city, a first-generation college student with a 1350 or 1400 on his SATthe kind of kid that Harvard takes in a heartbeat, with a full ride. It was a miracle we were going to get this guy. He wanted to be an engineer, wear UT orange, all that. We were going to help this kid out, put him into a six-week summer program, all paid for, so he could take calculus early.

It was all looking good, everythings fine, hes a rock star. But the night before his first calculus test, his girlfriend calls to break up with him. He does what every self-respecting male does, he stays on the phone with her all night long, begging her not to break up with him. Then, distraught, he takes his first calculus test and fails it. He calls his mother on the phone, and tells her that hes failed the first test, and she gets in the car, drives here, picks him up, puts him in the car, takes him home, withdraws him from school, and says I told you so, they dont care.

This is a true story. What I said to those people who ran that success program: this is on us. That kid should have known that he could have come to one of us and said, I cant take this test, but he didnt know, and thats why hes gone. All it takes is that one little tiny thing like that, and then theyre not here. So when I think about whether or not [students graduate], its because of the hundreds of times that they faced this evil, and someone saved them.

Writing in Femsplain, Meghan Kehoemaster of sass, she calls herselftells a similar tale from her vantage as a dropout. I tried making an appointment with one of the school counselors early onnot only to discuss my lack of a financial plan, but to discuss how I felt like I was drowning. How fantastic Id become at faking it, how I had almost everyone fooled. Sometimes, I could even fool myself. The morning of my appointment, the counselor called and cancelled. I took it as a sign from the universe. A big ol middle-finger courtesy of some brand of wicked karma that wanted me to be miserable forever.

A Google search for stories about the lives of dropouts turns up almost nothing. Geoffrey Widdison, himself a decade out of college, who describes himself as engineer, reader, thinker, dreamer, explains why. We never hear those stories because theyre so ubiquitous as to be boring. Its like asking for stories of someone who started up a rock band that went nowhere or ran for political office against all odds and lost. Talk to any musician or political activist and youll get a hundred stories like that, and they all sound the same.

I have several friends and relatives who dropped out of college. Every one of them ended up working low-end jobs, usually in spurts between being unemployed. Some patched together basically decent, if poor, lives for themselves. Others completely lapsed into hopelessness and depression. Nothing much in there to make for an interesting story.

Washington Post reporter Kavitha Cardoza zeroed in on one such student, Christopher Feaster. Christopher lived in a homeless shelter during his high school years, and while homeless students face long odds against graduating, he was an academic whiz kid, the poster child for grit. He headed to Michigan State with a full ride, the first in his family to go to college, only to drop out a year later. It was an insanely big change, Christopher recalls. He had gone to an all-black high school in Washington, DC, and now he was surrounded by white students. He had to take remedial math, which left him wondering whether he was good enough to be at the university. He floundered academically, but no one reached out to him. He dropped out after failing his finals. Three years later, Christopher was struggling with homelessness and having a hard time getting a full-time job. He desperately wants to go back to college, Cardoza writes, but without a scholarship, hed have to take out loans. I dont think thats a good idea, he says. Not for me right now. Hes also afraid of failing again.

When studentsespecially poor, minority, or first-gen students, whom Ill refer to collectively as new-gen studentsdrop out, the feeling that theyre to blame for having failed, that theyre not college material, affects not just themselves but those close to them as well. Every [new-gen] student has a story of a cousin, a sibling, a friend, a neighbor who went to college but had to drop out. And that is what a lot of people use as a reason for students not to go.

Higher education is billed as the ticket of admission to Americas middle class. Thats true for students who earn a bachelors degreetheir lifetime earnings will be nearly $1 million more than those with only a high school diploma, and the gap keeps widening as more employers demand a university credential.