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Monday, December 19. 2011

Grad school attrition

I recently posted about the desirability of attrition in colleges due to substandard performance, expressing the view that low graduation rates are a good, not bad thing, and that they lend some credibility to an expensive piece of paper.


Competitive and highly-selective graduate schools, however, probably should have lower attrition rates as their standards for entry are so relatively high.


Here is some info on Medical School Graduation and Attrition Rates


Here's Law School Rankings by 1L Attrition Rates

Posted by The Barrister in Education at 13:17 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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My grad program had about a five percent attrition rate, although that is not what the departmental rolls suggest. There are people on the rolls who for all intents and purposes bailed out almost a decade ago. The time to completion is also growing longer. When I started grad school the average in my field to go from beginning MA to PhD in hand was 7 years. Now it is nine and still edging up. I finished in seven and was told that I should not push so hard!
#1 TXRed on 2011-12-19 14:39 (Reply)
Some medical schools had a planned pyramid system that would flunk out the bottom quintile. That was a long time ago and things may have changed. The school I attended in the 60s, and taught at recently, always planned for all first year students to graduate and lost less than a half dozen from each class in four years.
#1.1 Mike K (Link) on 2011-12-19 16:46 (Reply)
What would be even better would be to attrite the grad schools themselves. Very few graduate programs in any field have any real value.

Then, severe attriting of the undergrad colleges is needed, too.

An overall reduction of at least one half the undergrad schools and two-thirds the grads schools would be good.
#2 bob sykes on 2011-12-19 19:19 (Reply)
TXRed, they were complaining about their "lost" tuition.
#3 Sam L. on 2011-12-19 23:47 (Reply)
high failure rate of students can be caused both by poor students and poor teachers.

Depending on graduation requirements, a single poor teacher can cause a high attrition rate.
E.g. when I was in university, one of the courses had a failure rate among students of over 65%. These students (including me) got high grades everywhere else, but failed to graduate because of that single course.
Later took the same course at another institution, with another teacher and course material, and got grades comparable to if not higher than I'd got for all the courses I'd passed first time. Same for the others who switched institutions with me that year.
Another course was saved only or mainly by excellent written course material, all the teacher/lecturer did was recite that same material line by line, never adding any value.
In highschool, one teacher was so bad he got told bluntly by the school board that if even one of his students were to fail to graduate because of a failing grade in his course he'd be fired.

Going the other way I've seen teachers adjusting the grades of entire classes in order to ensure the average grade wouldn't be more than 10% over the minimum passing grade, as well as teachers adjusting them to ensure no more than a fixed, low, percentage of students would fail.


Thus high or low graduation rates in themselves say nothing whatsoever about the quality of the education received, or the quality of the student completing the education.
#4 J.T. Wenting on 2011-12-20 03:08 (Reply)
The "100 reasons NOT to go to grad school" blog has a post on the extremely high drop-out rates in most grad programs:

http://100rsns.blogspot.com/2011/02/46-you-may-not-finish.html

Clearly, there are a lot of people devoting years of their lives to degrees that they never finish. It's a bad situation.
#5 WG on 2011-12-20 11:09 (Reply)

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