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Article: For graduation rates, time to carve a new yardstick.
- Article from:
- Diverse Issues in Higher Education
- Article date:
- July 27, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Cox, Matthews & Associates. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IN DEBATES ABOUT ACCOUNTABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION, FEW DATA POINTS ARE AS FREQUENTLY MISUSED AS graduation rates. Graduation rates measure attendance time, not outcomes, predicated upon a narrow cohort of "traditional" students (fewer than 25 percent of today's undergraduates) who start as full-time, first-time freshmen and graduate within six years at the same institution. Aside from traditional transfer students who are unfairly characterized as "dropouts"(even if they complete degrees on the same timetable elsewhere), this statistical blind spot is also biased against older, part-time students and many female and minority students, who are more likely to have the ...