Schools for scandal.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

It's in the nature of social progress that conditions which today strike us as obviously morally outrageous--that women were not allowed to vote or blacks to be served at restaurants--were once considered the natural order of things. Three decades ago, almost no one thought it unjust that there were no parking spaces reserved for the disabled, or that airline passengers were forced to breathe in other people's cigarette smoke. We are now in the middle of a similar mass awakening to the unfairness of banning gays from marrying and serving openly in the military.

What is the next great injustice that we do not yet recognize as such but soon will? How about the way the higher education system screws millions of lower-income students? In this current issue, our annual College Guide, Benjamin Miller and Phuong Ly take a hard look at the roughly 200 colleges and universities in America with the worst records of graduating their students (page 20). These colleges make up 15 percent of the total and disproportionately serve working-class and minority students. They are akin to the 15 percent of high schools Barack Obama and other would-be reformers have dubbed "dropout factories" for having scandalously low graduation rates--on average about 50 percent. But the average graduation rate at the 200 "college dropout factories" is 26 percent. America's worst colleges, in other words, are twice as bad as its worst high schools.

This is an appalling waste of human talent. The students who go to these colleges are, by and large, strivers. They are the ones who made it out of the bad high schools. When they then try to improve their lives by seeking a college degree, they are steered--via relative tuition costs and geographic convenience--toward precisely those institutions where they are most likely to fail. Lest you think the fault lies not with the colleges but with the students' lack of academic preparedness, consider this: enroll those same students in different colleges and their chances of graduating double or even triple.

Most Americans understand that there is something profoundly unjust about poor kids being stuck in failing K-12 schools, and as a nation we've spent decades trying to do something about it--through desegregation, Title I, No Child Left Behind, and so on. But the existence of hundreds of failing colleges isn't seen as a scandal. In fact it isn't seen at all. This blindness...