Discount rate?

• Author: Bhayani, Paras
• Position: LETTERS - Letter to the editor

Thank you for your chilling and eye-opening report on Chicago State University ("College Dropout Factories,' September/October, 2010), and in particular for demolishing the argument that their appalling statistics are due to demographics and not their own incompetence. I am a high school teacher on Chicago's South Side, where I teach eleventh- and twelfth-grade math. We are in the thick of preparing for college admissions and are speaking to our students daily about where they would like to attend and which colleges might be a good fit. We all knew that Chicago State was bad, but your story showed just how bad. Next time a student tells me he or she wants to apply there (we are located just three and a half miles from their campus), I will simply hand him or her a copy. I have sent your story to my charter network's college counselors, and am considering sending it to all the Teach for America corps members and alumni who teach high school here on the South Side.

Paras Bhayani

Via e-mail

We on the Faculty Senate at Chicago State University found the article "College Dropout Factories" to be an intellectually lazy hit piece. First, the very premise of measuring graduation rates is biased in favor of traditional residential universities, where full-time students constitute better than 95 percent of the student population. At Chicago State, most students are commuters, and better than one-third of the undergraduates attend part-time. There is only one dormitory on campus. The school also serves mainly transfer students. But graduation rates simply measure how many full-time, first-time freshmen make it to a degree. A student who enrolls for one semester or quarter at another college, then transfers and graduates from Chicago State, for example, is simply not counted.

Second, the student you profiled to demonstrate the problems with CSU was identified as a pre-engineering student who has transferred to another institution. As CSU only houses a pre-engineering program, all preengineering students must transfer to other institutions in order to receive bachelor's degrees in engineering--and are thus not counted in CSU's graduation rate!

Third, the article failed to mention the initiatives CSU has undertaken recently to address retention and graduation of first-year, full-time freshmen. For example, last year the university created the Office of the Freshman Year Experience--a student-centered support mechanism that provides advising, mentoring...