A national commission on higher education last week issued recommendations for universities across the country to improve their individual student success rate, recommendations that parallel changes at the University of California in recent years.
The National Commission on Higher Education Attainment – a group created in 2011 by the American Council on Education on behalf of President Barack Obama– issued an open letter that calls on every college and university president and chancellor in the U.S. to make undergraduate student retention and completion a “critical campus priority.”
The official recommendations include assigning ownership among presidents and faculty for improving degree completion rates, easing credit transfer, streamlining degree requirements and improving support and counseling systems.
The letter also encourages universities to use data in better understanding what groups of students are struggling academically. The letter, however, cautions against universities using a “one-size-fits-all” strategy to improve graduation rates.
The commission’s letter also suggested different ways to involve faculty and departmental counselors in improving the academic experience of undergraduates.
But Gary Orfield, a professor of education, said he thought the commission’s recommendations do not put enough emphasis on the importance of support staff and departmental counseling.
“At large research universities like the UC, faculty are hired for research and often have no training in providing counseling to undergraduates,” Orfield said.
He said he thinks academic and personal counseling systems like department counselors, trained in serving undergraduates, are more fundamental to helping students complete their degrees than faculty or even administration.
Additionally, the UC has already implemented a number of the recommendations made by the national commission, said Todd Greenspan, interim chief of staff for the UC. Increasing degree completion is one of the University’s top goals, he added.
An annual accountability report introduced by UC President Mark Yudof in 2008 and the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey, a comprehensive UC-wide survey on all aspects of undergraduate life, have really helped campuses break down and identify key trends among different student demographics for degree completion, Greenspan said.
According to the accountability report from 2012, four year completion rates at the UC have jumped from 37 percent in 1992 to 60 percent in 2005 — higher than the average four year completion rates for Association for American Universities, according to the accountability report.
Two-thirds of departments in the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences have to reduce upper division credit requirements for their majors to 45, a rubric known as Challenge 45, to ensure timely degree completion, Greenspan said.
Kenneth Ramos, a fifth-year Native American studies student and chair of the Campus Retention Committee, works with academic and peer counselors to identify areas that students need the most help in.
He said it was reassuring the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment’s letter prioritizes student retention, and that the university has already taken on many of the proposed changes.
But the letter does not make recommendations on for how universities and colleges will cope with increased state and federal disinvestment.
About one-third of states saw double digit drops in funding for higher education in 2012, the letter stated. State disinvestment in the California public education system has prompted double-digit tuition increases at the UC.
Orfield said this reality comes at odds with the national higher education commission’s call for increasing student retention rates.
“Doing these things costs a lot and additional cutbacks at the federal level further set back (campus) services.” Orfield said.