MAKING SENSE OUT OF DEGREE COMPLETION RATES

It has been more than a decade since the U.S. Congress enacted the Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act, which requires colleges and universities to make public their six-year degree completion rates. Like several more recent state "assessment" initiatives, the reasoning behind this federal law was presumably to make higher education institutions more " accountable" by requiring them to collect and disseminate data reflecting institutional "quality" or "performance." As someone who has made a good part of his living from assessment activities and who has regularly encouraged college officials to carry out more and better assessments of their students, in recent years I've found myself in the rather peculiar position of cautioning administrators and policy makers about the hazards of assessment. Although an institution's degree completion rate is just one of several potentially misleading assessment indicators in widespread use today, its limitations illustrate a basic weakness inherent in several other popular assessment activities (Astin & Lee, 2003). © 2005, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.