You are listening to an audio presentation from Vanderbilt University's Peabody
College Center for Community Studies Colloquia. This file is an excerpt of a
lecture given by Michael W. Kirst regarding higher-education completion rates,
on December 1, 2006  on the Peabody College campus of Vanderbilt University. The
total running time for the full lecture is 1:37:30; this excerpt runs 1:20.

[begin excerpt]

Michael W. Kirst, a Stanford professor who was a co-author of a report on the
gap between aspirations and college attainment, said that 73 percent of students
entering community colleges hoped to earn four-year degrees, but that only 22
percent had done so after six years.

"You can get into school," Professor Kirst said. "That's not a problem. But you
can't succeed."

Nearly half the 14.7 million undergraduates at two- and four-year institutions
never receive degrees. The deficiencies turn up not just in math, science and
engineering, areas in which a growing chorus warns of difficulties in the face
of global competition, but also in the basics of reading and writing.

Kirst: Okay, the completion rates are over 80% in the selective, but much lower
in non-selective... it's very hard to do this -- to find out how many kids
complete; they move from institution to institution, but as far as we can tell
for community colleges, the U.S. Department of Ed(ucation)'s numbers show that
77% of the entering students in community colleges want a B.A., and about 23%
ever get one. Most institutions with that success rate would be under some fire
and criticism, but you don't hear a peep about this. Baltimore community
colleges enrolled 1250, and four years later they had 15 with either an A.A.
degree, or a transfer, and the rest had all fallen by the wayside. Yet Baltimore
community colleges are fine, financially -- when you talk with college
administrators in the bar, they'll tell you their financial model, which
is... it's a "churn" model. As long as the numbers coming in the front equal the
numbers going out the back, and the side door, my F.T.E. (Full-Time Enrollment?)
is high enough, and I'm paid by F.T.E. So, it costs you a lot of money to really
remediate and work with these students, councel them while they're in
remediation, so "churning them through" is a, you know, low-cost, good way of
operating the school.

[end excerpt]

Thank for for listening to this excerpt from Vanderbilt University's Peabody
College. For further information on this topic, please visit our web site at
http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu .