The Black & Magenta Blog

Ohio is joining a federal initiative set at increasing the number of students who graduate, according to an article in today’s Dispatch. About half of all college students don’t graduate.

Ohio ranks 35th in the country in the number of residents ages 25 to 64 who have bachelor’s degrees, according to the article.

From the article:

The 17 states taking part in the alliance had to pledge to make college completion a priority by:

• Setting state and campus-specific graduation goals.

• Creating plans to reach those goals.

• Collecting and publicly reporting the state’s and schools’ progress in closing the gaps.

Ohio’s strategic plan for higher education calls for schools to raise the graduation rate by 20 percentage points and enroll 230,000 more students by 2017. The state also wants to increase the number of degrees awarded to minority and first-generation students, who are the most likely to drop out after the first year, said Eric D. Fingerhut, Ohio’s higher-education chancellor.

As a carrot to encourage colleges to focus on student success, the state is moving away from funding schools based entirely on student enrollment, instead using measures such as how many students complete their courses and get degrees.

Ohio’s private, liberal-arts colleges, like Muskingum, have the best graduation rates; 66 percent complete a degree within 6 years. At Muskingum, 41.6 percent graduate within 4 years of enrollment, 58.6 percent within 5 years and 60.7 percent within 6 years, according to 2007 statistics from Scholarships.com.