The following Editorial was published by the Toledo Blade today, January 27, 2012.  We have re-published it for you without change or comment.  A link to the article is also provided below.

 

 

Ohio's university system is supposed to be a pathway to a rewarding career, effective citizenship, and a good life. When nearly a third of freshmen do not return for their sophomore year and fewer than half of full-time students graduate in six years, as is the case at the University of Toledo, the system is failing.

 

UT officials vow to do better. University President Lloyd Jacobs says he and other executives are "working day and night to figure out how we can improve the likelihood of success of our students."

 

But the problem is of long standing. According to the Web site Collegemeasures.org, UT's first-year retention rate was 66 percent in 2004 and has shown little movement since then. The current dropout rate is about 30 percent.

 

UT has done a particularly poor job of graduating black students. According to university data, the rate of African-American males who graduate within five years is an abysmal 10.8 percent.

Part of the dilemma is open enrollment, the laudable but impractical notion that everyone with a high school diploma has the right to attend college. College is not for everyone. Many young people, despite graduating from high school, are not prepared for success in a rigorous academic environment.

 

State lawmakers have made a solution more difficult. The legislation that made UT a state university in 1967 did not permit it to establish regional campuses.

 

State universities that are allowed branch campuses, including Ohio State, Kent State, and Miami, send insufficiently prepared students to those sites to fill in their education gaps before they transfer to the main campus. That benefits the students and can favorably skew retention and graduation numbers.

 

At the same time, the General Assembly is phasing out, starting in 2014, state subsidies for remedial courses offered by public four-year universities on their main campuses. UT has reduced its remedial offerings to three courses, all in math, which will disappear soon. After that, students with deficiencies will sink or swim in introductory-level courses.

 

For students who are not academically, intellectually, or emotionally ready for college, open enrollment, the lack of branch campuses, and declining state aid for remedial courses conspire to steal their money, saddle them with student-loan debt, and destroy their confidence. Public universities that take the money of students who are likely to fail should be required to refund their tuition when the inevitable occurs.

 

UT has had a spotty academic reputation for years. It has not attracted enough top-notch professors to gain national recognition as either a research or a teaching institution.

Successive presidents have pushed UT to expand rapidly, to embrace its role as an urban university, and to become a business incubator and job creator. A recent suggestion to improve enrollment and retention numbers by recruiting more students from outside the region and from other countries causes some critics to charge that the university is just looking for more tuition-paying bodies.

 

UT's relatively poor record of attracting qualified applicants, retaining students, and graduating them on time will not be fixed overnight. A good start would be to end open enrollment.

Owens Community College and other two-year colleges can adequately meet the state's everyone-gets-a-chance mandate. State lawmakers should get rid of the branch-campus prohibition that prevents UT from considering that option to serve its undergraduate population.

 

The first step in maximizing students' success is treating them honestly.

 

 

 

Link to article:

 

Toledo Blade

 

How to spell success
Published: 1/27/2012
http://www.toledoblade.com/Editorials/2012/01/27/How-to-spell-success.html