AMERICAN.COM

In his interview on “The Today Show” Monday, President Obama called for the nation’s schools to boost student performance and restore national competitiveness by embracing extended learning time. With the United States trailing other industrialized countries in classroom time by at least a month, Obama rightly urged longer school days and a longer school year as ways to help bring students up to speed in the global economy, as well as to mitigate the aggravating effect of summer vacation on the achievement gap.

Save the historically questionable “agrarian calendar” cliché (for interested readers, historian Kenneth Gold has more to say on this urban myth), Obama’s assessment of this outdated system is spot-on. When the summer vacation took shape centuries ago, it was in-line with the cutting-edge education philosophies of the day that warned against overtaxed minds and overheated classrooms in the summer months. However, as AEI’s director of education policy studies Rick Hess argued in the Washington Post, “It’s time to acknowledge that 19th-century school practices may be a poor fit for many of today’s families. It should be much easier for interested families to find schools that operate into or through the summer.” Indeed, while today’s children of the well-off spend their summers at sleep-away camps or in tutoring sessions, music lessons, and the like, their less fortunate peers are often left spending their unstructured and unsupervised vacations vegging out at home.

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Imag by flickr user visual.dichotomy.

In a recent piece for The American, AEI’s Mark Schneider reports that four-year institutions of higher education (IHEs) graduate less than 60 percent of their students in six years, according to 2008 NCES data. This high attrition rate is clearly nothing to sneeze at, particularly for the 40 percent of students who are burdened with the substantial costs of tuition, room and board, and other associated expenses without getting a degree in return. But before we start to bemoan this sorry state of affairs, it is worth noting that we lack a clear benchmark against which to compare our current level of success. Without a sense of how we have done in the past, historian John Thelin warns, we lack the historical perspective necessary to gauge how the performance of our institutions of higher education has evolved over the past century.

As Thelin argues in a recently released AEI working paper (here), dropping out is no new fad. After combing through college reports and piecing together century-old graduation trend data, Thelin finds that students at the nation’s top schools 100 years ago fared little better than the average student does today. For example, Harvard College students—likely the most privileged and distinguished among their peers—had a four-year graduation rate ranging from 65 percent to 75 percent in the early 1900s; Amherst College vacillated between 50 percent and 85 percent; and the University of Kentucky, the only public university of Thelin’s sample, had rates as low as 30 percent. Not only did schools in this era fail to do much better than their modern counterparts with a more selective group of students, Thelin reports, but they also did so with only a cursory attempt to collect accurate graduation records.

Achieving President Obama’s goal to raise American college graduation rates to the highest in the world, as both Schneider and Thelin point out, is a mammoth undertaking that will require dramatic rethinking of how we approach modern higher education challenges. Without better data systems and a realistic assessment of our track record so far, the administration’s ambitions may simply be out of touch.

Olivia Meeks is a research assistant at AEI.