Public colleges and universities in Arkansas have a graduation problem that cannot be solved with a magic potion. In fact, college educators and administrators have been working for years to increase the statewide graduation rate.
According to figures published in March by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, only 50 percent of the students who enter public two-year and four-year post-secondary institutions in the state graduate with some kind of degree after six years.
This includes students who graduate from schools other than their original institutions. The figure represents a new way of tracking graduation rates; in the past, it was common practice to count only students who entered and graduated from the same institution within six years.
These most recent figures show the national six-year completion rate at public institutions to be almost 63.5 percent, with only five states posting graduation rates markedly lower than the Arkansas rate (Arkansas is in a virtual tie with Montana).
What can be done to raise the college graduation rate? Educators and politicians have been asking this question since at least 1979, when the first national college student retention survey showed almost 28 percent of all students entering four-year colleges in 1972 left school prior to the start of their second year. This was the first clear indication that student retention and graduation rates were suffering nationwide.
The problem was deemed so important that Congress in 1990 began requiring colleges and universities eligible for Title IV funding to make their six-year graduation rates public. At the time, Congress noted that just 43 percent of students attending four-year public colleges and universities graduated within six years.
In the last 40 years or so, many scholarly studies have shown that grade-point average in the first college semester is closely related to student persistence (not dropping out) and, therefore, to retention and graduation. Consequently, some research also has investigated the factors that affect grade-point average throughout a student's college career.
While much of the original research in this area focused on intellectual factors such as high school grade-point averages and ACT scores, by the mid-1960s, researchers began looking at other factors such as parental educational level, socioeconomic status, amount of faculty-student informal interaction and time spent working while enrolled in school. Not surprisingly, some relationships were found.
Using this line of inquiry, Professor Kwasi Boateng, who teaches in the School of Mass Communication at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Professor David M. Keith, who teaches in the Department of Mass Communication and Theatre at the University of Central Arkansas; and I recently completed research that identified five specific lifestyle habits related to mass communication students' grade-point averages.
They just happened to be success-related habits that we found were also highly characteristic of the mass communication faculty at these two universities.
The five critical lifestyle habits were (1) being well-organized, (2) being punctual, (3) being reliable, (4) liking to read, and (5) taking care to do excellent work. In general, the higher students rated themselves on these five habits, the more likely it was that they would have grade-point averages higher than students who rated themselves lower on the five habits.
The implications of these findings are threefold. First, it's not unreasonable to think that students could develop these habits and perhaps enhance their grade-point averages and their chances of graduating.
Combining this premise with the faculty-student interaction research, a second implication is that statewide graduation rates might benefit if faculty would specifically encourage these habits during informal discussions with students. In addition to their existing orientation programs, some training related to these critical habits might have long-term rewards.
A third implication is that these five habits, as well as other success-related habits, might be emphasized by parents and teachers of elementary and middle-school students. Turning some attention to habit-building in pre-teens could be more beneficial than attempting to build habits in teenagers whose lifestyles are less flexible than those of younger students.
One caution concerning lifestyle habits and student success is that a number of complicated factors contribute to grade-point averages, student persistence and college retention. Therefore, lifestyle habits most likely are pieces of the larger puzzle that represents college graduation rates.
There is no magical solution to improving the statewide graduation rate at public institutions, but any promising steps that can be taken to enhance the rate are worth the effort.
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During his 30-year college teaching career, Bruce Plopper published a variety of research related to college student success. He retired from UALR in 2012 as professor emeritus.
Editorial on 07/18/2014