Wed 9 Nov 2005
Xavier University is in serious trouble.
Warped wooden floors and ruined desks have been stripped out of Xavier University’s main campus building. Its 4,000 students are scattered across the nation. Half the faculty and staff have been laid off.
The nation’s only historically black and Roman Catholic college, which expected to be celebrating its 180th anniversary this year, was battered to the brink of financial collapse by Hurricane Katrina.
Things are so tough that Xavier has had to fire or place on unpaid leave more than half its employees.
Chemistry professor Heike Geissler learned of her termination last month at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., where she has been watching over eight Xavier students who enrolled there after Katrina.
“I don’t want to see Xavier going bankrupt or disappearing from the map, so I’m not mad or sad,” said Geissler, who taught there for seven years and was tenured in 2005. “I have to get on with my life. I’m very seriously considering leaving Louisiana.”
As are many others. Condolences to Geissler on her misfortune. At financially secure institutions like Williams, tenure is forever — just ask Aida Laleian! At places like Xavier, it’s not.
[President] Francis said Xavier plans to hold classes on its own campus [in January], though the water-damaged ground floors of many buildings may have to be sealed off. He expects roughly half the student body to come back for the winter semester.
Rene Turner, a 21-year-old Xavier senior in pre-medicine, hopes to be among them. She transferred for the fall to Williams College.
“I feel like that’s my home now,” Turner, of Kansas City, Mo., said of Xavier. “I have a deep connection there and have spent so much time there. I definitely want to graduate from Xavier.”
Good for her.
But should the rest of us mourn the loss of Xavier? I am not sure. Xavier has an amazing history, but its current practices are not always, shall we say, beyond criticism.
For example, only about 60% (see page 4) of the students that enroll at Xavier as freshmen graduate with a degree in less than 6 years. See page 9 for more details. Consider the enrollment by class of the main Xavier program in fall 2004.
Freshmen: 1,334 Sophomores: 793 Juniors: 534 Seniors: 557
Students only familiar with the tendency of Williams and other elite schools to graduate virtually everyone who enrolls may have trouble making sense of these numbers. Where do all the freshmen go?
They drop out. Places like Xavier — and there are many other financially-strapped institutions like it — are quite willing to let in the vast majority of students who apply even if they know that those students are highly likely to drop out and have nothing to show for their effort except a nice chunk of student loan debt.
In other words, Xavier lets in hundreds of students each year (and takes their money) even though it knows that there is a 90% chance that these students — the ones from the bottom 1/4 of its applicant pool — will never get a college degree.
Now, one might charitably claim that Xavier is just giving all these students a chance, that it is providing an opportunity to those who might not get an opportunity elsewhere. Perhaps. I take a much more cynical view. Xavier needs money. Accepting unqualified applicants and loading them up with student debt for a year or two generates revenue. Failing them after it becomes clear that they are not “college material” ensures the continued value of a Xavier degree.
Or am I missing something?
November 9th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
That is an indictment of students only familiar with elite schools catering primarily to an extremely fortunate customer base.
To put this into perspective, here are few universities from USNEWs online rankings with 6-year grad rates of 60% or below:
Howard
Northeastern
SUNY-Buffalo
U Kentucky
Washington State
U Tulsa
Drexel
SUNY-Stony Brook
U Arizona
U Kansas
U Minnesota - Twin Cities
U Oklahoma
U Utah
Oregon State
Kansas State
LSU
Oklahoma State
Pace U.
Mississippi State
Seton Hall
U Central Florida
U Idaha
U Maine - Orono (main campus)
U Rhode Island
U Texas - Dalls
U Wyoming
Arizona State
Rutgers
Texas Tech
U Mississippi
U North Dakota
George Mason U.
South Carolina State
Temple
U Arkansas
U Hartford
Ball State
Hofstra
Lousiana Tech
BTW, UMass-Amherst just barely escapes this list with a 6-year grad rate of 62%.
It is indeed true that all of the N’Awlins schools (and, indeed the city itself) are in desperate life or death struggles for survival. That includes Tulane (6-year grad rate = 73%). Unlike Williams, these schools all depend on tuition revenues for the bulk of their operating budgets. It is difficult to imagine even a best-case scenario in which their enrollments and tuition revenues do not plummet.
Tulane can hang on for a time while they spend down the endowment, but will be in a race to rebuild enrollment. They will, by necessity, become a much smaller, much less selective university to have any chance of survival. Why do you think they’ve asked colleges helping Tulane students to make a commitment that they will not accept transfer apps from these students?
Xavier and Dillard are in far worse shape. Xavier’s operating budget has been $77 million. Their total endowment is $55 million. Unlike at Williams where the majority of students are sufficiently well-heeled to write a check for $160,000 to cover four years, 89% of Xavier’s students qualify for financial aid (and that’s with a sticker-price tuiton of $10,000, about a third of Williams). 56% of Xavier’s students received Pell Grants (typically with a 40K per year max family income) compared to 5% at Williams.
Now factor that neither of these schools have a campus left — both were 100% flooded to the first floor ceilings.
November 9th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
In my opinion, it’s very unfair to attribute Xavier’s low retention/graduation rates to such cynical motives. There are a number of reasons besides flawed admissions practices that explain the low retention/graduation rates.
1) Even without the extreme challenges faced by NOLA schools, most colleges and universities have pretty inflexible financial aid budgets and policies. Schools like Williams can be much more responsive to changing family financial circumstances. During my time teaching at a wide variety of colleges and universities, I’ve had numerous students forced to quit or step out for a period of time for financial reasons. My initial, and naive, response to this was one of disbelief due largely to the generous accomodation Williams made to deal with my own rather bizarre, and inconsistent, financial aid needs. I quickly learned, thought, that such generosity is the exception, not the rule.
2) Along the same lines, at many colleges and universities, students themselves carry much more of the burden for financing their own education. In my experience, such students are much more likely to go part-time or withdraw altogether as a response to day-to-day circumstances.
3) The NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement) confirms that a very high percentage of students nationwide transfer schools during their college careers.
It is very easy to compare other schools’ policies negatively to those at Williams. Williams is, by almost any measure, an extraordinary exception when compared to colleges and universities nationwide, not just those in its peer group. In all fairness, though, such judgments MUST be based on more than just a comparison to a very elite group of colleges. By way of comparison, the NYT this Sunday noted that only 150 colleges admit fewer than 50 percent of their applicants, and a lot of those, including places like Tulane, U of Chicago, Dickinson, and Carnegie-Mellon, admitted more than 40 percent of applicants. While most alums view Williams as a very special place, I think that even we underestimate at times just how rarefied the conditions at our alma mater are.
November 9th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
BTW, Tulane’s President understands the enormity of the challenge facing the N. Orleans colleges.
As he pondered the difficulties in keeping faculty and staff, he quickly was confronted with the fact that New Orleans public schools are closed indefinitely. So, he made a financial offer to the school board and arranged to take over a local grammar school and a high school, which Tulane will operate as charter schools so that their employees have a place to send their kids to school.
Since they no longer have campuses of their own, Xavier and Dillard will both reopen using Tulane’s facilities, which would otherwise be underutilized for the foreseeable future.
It’s easy to see the challenge. As a parent, I don’t think I’d send my kid back to New Orleans in January if there were other options.
November 9th, 2005 at 4:26 pm
Honest question: Where are the admissions stats of the kids who dropped out? Since you mentioned that the drop out rate corresponded to the least qualified applicants, I skimmed the report looking for the admissions stats but couldn’t find them.
I would have assumed that the drop out rate was correlated to financial aid. My friends who dropped out or took a year off Williams always had financial or family problems. The financial aid office simply couldn’t replace the sorely needed income I would have made had I stayed back home.
As an aside, I was an at risk admit. I wasn’t within the Williams SAT range. I couldn’t afford the SAT books, let alone an SAT class. I ended up excelling academically at Williams and won several Williams and national academic honors. Not tooting my horn, but underscoring the fact that my admission scores had nothing to do with my struggle at Williams. I almost dropped out twice because of money and family issues.
November 9th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
There are many complexities here.
At the University of Kentucky, since it was mentioned, the University has repeatedly raised academic standards– including in the current year. The explicity argument of the Presisent, Regents and University Senate is that to do otherwise would be to take on students who are not prepared for the workload at UK, and who will fail and drop out.
The result, speaking objectively, is the drastic reduction of minorities at UK. This year’s entering class was well less than 10% black, and as you can guess, in a state-funded institution, this is a political bomb.
You can slice and dice this as you wish; I mean merely to point out that it is not necessarily the universities pushing for student bodies who will not graduate.
Behind lowering graduation rates at non-elite institutions lie a variety of factors– including increasing enrollments. The most disturbing series of considerations may be those recently charted in the New York Times by David Brooks. In describing “The Education Gap” in America, Brooks argues not only that a college degree is now out of the reach of most Americans– and that financial barriers are not the main issue, rather that “it has to do with being academically prepared, psychologically prepared and culturally prepared for college.”
In short, the students coming to most of the institutions above are unable or unwilling to take the actions necessary to benefit from a college education. In Brooks’ view, they lack a series of key enablers– from confidence to willingness to take risks– that are necessary to take advantage of college.
If true– and Brooks marshalls a series of distrubing statistics– this suggests that Universities must create very specific intiatives to address the underlying pedagocal problems.
President Simon at Michigan State, among others, has responded to Brooks with an aggressive defense of her university’s efforts, while warning of the difficulty of this in a world where less that one in four parents believe that education is important to success.
And as another thread has recently mentioned, focusing on such issues can often be far away from the focus of the modern college President.
November 9th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
I have to say, there are ways in which this data indicates a virtue of the American educational system. We give almost anyone a chance to go to college. We also give them a chance to fail. It is telling that the rates flatten out after freshman year — maybe the problem is not Xavier’s (or that of scads of other institutions as we have been shown) but rather the students’. At some point when is it a student’s job to get his or her education and not the university’s job to hold that student’s hand? It seems especially relevant to point this out in light of the fact that we also seem to oppose grade inflation — so should we not inflate their grades but also not deflate them, when deflation seems to be the one that is most absolutely earned?
Now do not get me wrong — all universities ought to work hard to keep students who are qualified. But college is not a babysitting service. All of the nincompoops in elementary schools preaching self esteem aside, let’s be willing to let students fail (and let’s acknowledge that it might be a good thing that Williams students succeed as they do).
dcat