Rate of finishing college a failure in Idaho, nation

By Staff and Associated Press

Idaho has joined a national initiative to battle dismal college completion rates and figure out how to get more students to follow through and earn their diplomas.

Gov. Butch Otter and the Idaho State Board of Education announced Tuesday that the Gem State joins 16 other states to band with Complete College America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit committed to boosting college graduation rates.

"While college will never be everyone's choice, there are postsecondary educational opportunities available that apply to far more Idahoans than are now taking advantage of them," said Gov. Otter in a statement.

According to information provided by the State Board of Education, Idaho is in the bottom 10 of all states in degree completion.

Cyndie Hammond, director of Lewis-Clark State College's center in Coeur d'Alene, said the public universities and colleges in North Idaho already collaborate for many of the same reasons addressed by the nonprofit alliance of states.

"It's something that we've been saying here for years, that post-secondary education plays a vital role in the economic growth of the region," Hammond said. "We're all on the same path, it appears."

Stan Jones, Indiana's former commissioner for higher education, is leading the national effort with about $12 million in startup money from several national nonprofits, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

About one in every two Americans who start college never finishes, said Jones, who founded Complete College America last year.

The U.S. has focused on access to higher education for the past several decades, and states need to turn their focus toward how many students actually graduate after they get in, even if it means using a funding structure that is based on degree completion instead of attendance, Jones said Tuesday.

"It's going to take a substantial amount of work over a substantial amount of time in order to get the kind of improvement we need," he said.

The campaign's goal: Make sure 60 percent of adults between the ages of 25 and 35 hold an associate or bachelor's degree by 2020, up from the 38 percent that now claim this status.

The benchmark falls in line with President Barack Obama's desire to once again make the U.S. the leader in college attainment by 2020. The U.S. led the world in the proportion of citizens with college degrees for decades but has been overtaken by other countries in recent years.

Obama stressed the importance of higher education in his State of the Union speech, saying "a high school diploma no longer guarantees a good job."

North Idaho College spokesman John Martin said the Coeur d'Alene campus supports any effort to keep students in college.

"Community colleges play a huge role in this because we provide access and affordability so our Idaho students can go on to four-year universities," Martin said.

At least 17 states have pledged to consider policy changes and draft ambitious plans to boost their college completion rates: Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont and West Virginia.

"It's certainly the biggest effort of its kind to recognize the magnitude of the problem and address it in a systematic way," said Pat Callan, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. "We don't know how well it'll work of course. ... It's gonna be a tough go. This is not an easy set of problems."

The states have also committed to addressing the gap in earning degrees between low-income and minority students and their classmates.

Nationwide, about half of white students who enter college complete a degree. That compares with about one-third of African American and Hispanic students, said Jeannie Oakes, director of educational equity and scholarship at the Ford Foundation, which is backing the campaign launched this week.

"That's a huge problem," Oakes said.

Public universities across the country are launching similar campaigns to boost graduation rates.

California State University, the nation's largest four-year system with 23 campuses and more than 400,000 students, announced in January an ambitious initiative to boost the percentage of students who graduate in six years from 46 percent to 54 percent by 2016.

And while some question the likelihood those efforts will succeed amid deep cuts in state funding for public higher education, there could eventually be money at the federal level for those states that are successful, Jones said.

A bill to oust private lenders from the student loan business and put the government in charge includes grant money for programs to improve community colleges and college graduation rates, among other things.

"Our expectation is through the course of this next year, there may very well be federal dollars available," he said.