Fool’s Gold: G.I. thinks university and community college graduation rates are important. High School? Not so much

by David Safier

The political season has distracted me from the Herculean task I have assigned myself of cleaning manure out of the Goldwater Institute’s Augean Stables. And believe me, I’m no Hercules.

But I couldn’t let Matthew Ladner’s recent Daily Email slip by without comment.

Ladner’s basic thesis is, Arizona’s Community Colleges don’t graduate enough of their students, so we should cut back on funding and raise tuition.

Eliminating state funding for these dropout factories could be a relatively appealing option. The results cannot get much worse for the community colleges, while removing administrative bloat and having students carry more of the financial burden just might help to improve matters. Students likely would approach their school work more seriously if they were paying more of the cost, and graduation rates would rise.

And of course, Florida has a higher Community College graduation rate, which Ladner points out. Natch.

Ladner has also used the graduation rate argument to slam Arizona’s Universities.

But he doesn’t seem interested in high school graduation rates. At all. Maybe that’s because on that stat, we regularly beat Florida, which has among the lowest high school graduation rates in the country.

Here’s a 2007 grad rate map from federal government’s Center For Educational Statistics website.

Arizona: 70.5% graduation rate. Florida: 63.6%. Florida’s rate comes in at number 45, the fifth lowest in the nation.

But maybe the U.S. government had an anti-Florida, pro-Arizona bias when Governor Jeb Bush’s brother was president (Yeah, right!). So let’s add in a few more studies to see how the head-to-head comparison comes out.

The conservative ALEC’s 2008 school report card puts Arizona’s grad rate at 63.3% and Florida’s at 59.4%.

The New York Times puts the 2008 graduation rates at 70.7% for Arizona and 66.9% for Florida.

[Note: Graduation rates are a slippery statistic which varies from study to study depending on the criteria used, which is why the numbers don’t agree. But so long as each study uses the same criteria for its state-by-state comparisons, the overall ranking is reasonably valid.]

Florida’s not looking good in a head-to-head graduation rate comparison with Arizona. Which is why you’ll never hear that comparison from Ladner, whose motto is, “All the stats that fit my thesis.”

High school graduation rates are an important stat, and state-to-state comparisons have a reasonable validity. But here are a bunch of reasons why Ladner’s Community College Graduation rates and comparisons with Florida mean very little:

• Ladner is using a 3 year completion rate. He doesn’t factor in the percentage of students in each state who are working and taking a few courses each semester or those who drop out for awhile then drop back in later, probably because he has no idea.
• Arizona has made it very easy for students to transfer Community College credits to our state universities, which encourages people to transfer to university rather than graduate from Community College. Ladner doesn’t mention the transfer rates in Arizona and Florida, probably because he has no idea.
• A higher percentage of Arizonans may be enrolled in our Community Colleges than in Florida, which would affect the graduation rate. Again, no numbers from Ladner.
• Ladner doesn’t respect the mission of Community Colleges, which is to encourage as many people as possible to further their educations. Many students simply take a few courses for personal reasons, for job training, or to increase their general attractiveness to employers. (If a job requires a high school diploma and someone walks in with 20 units from Community College, that person is at a definite advantage over someone who hasn’t set foot in college.) Some people finally wake up after snoozing through high school and decide to take some remedial courses along with a few credit courses to make up for what they missed. This is all part of the democratization of U.S. education. One of the strengths of our system is that people have endless second chances and endless opportunities to further our educations.

I could go on, but I won’t. Once again, Ladner has proven himself to be a good researcher — he really digs for his information — but more of a propagandist than a scholar. In this case, he damns Arizona’s higher education for its graduation rates, but he overlooks our high school graduation rates which, while not great, beat the “Florida Educational Miracle State” hands down, year after year.