ANALYSIS: Graduation Rates Fall at One-Third of 4-Year Colleges 
 
 SORTABLE TABLES: Graduation Rates Over Time, by Type of Institution: 
 
 Public Research | Private Research | Public Master's | Private Master's | Private Baccalaureate Arts & Sciences 
 
 We compare here the graduation rates at four-year colleges for the six years ending in 2008 with the rates for the six years ending in 2003. Because rates can spike up or down in a particular year, we also show a separate comparison that tends to reduce the effect of those outliers on differences in colleges' rates over time. To make this comparison, we averaged each college's rates in 2003 and 2008 with rates in the immediately preceeding years, then compared the averages. To further illustrate changes over time at each college, we show in boldface type any rate that increased over the one in the immediately preceeding year. Figures are rounded. About These Data 
 
 ** Change in averaged graduation rates: the difference, in percentage points, of the average of the rates for 2001 and 2002 compared with the average of the rates for 2007 and 2008. 
 
 Institution Change in percentage points, 2003-8 Change in averaged graduation rates** Change in admissions selectivity 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 Clark Atlanta U 14 13 none 31% 31% 34% n/a 40% 44% 45% Trevecca Nazarene U 13 15 more 30% 37% 39% 40% 48% 48% 50% Stevens Inst of Tech 13 12 more 65% 66% 75% 72% 73% 76% 79% Yeshiva U 10 3 less 88% 72% 55% 81% 66% 84% 83% Adelphi U 10 12 more 48% 53% 53% 54% 61% 63% 64% Northeastern U 10 10 more 56% 60% 60% 61% 65% 66% 70% U of La Verne 10 11 none 47% 50% 47% 52% 51% 59% 60% U of Miami 9 10 none 65% 67% 71% 71% 73% 76% 77% U of Hartford 8 4 none 55% 52% 53% 56% 51% 54% 60% U of Tulsa 8 4 more 63% 55% 60% 61% 61% 63% 63% U of Southern California 7 8 more 76% 81% 82% 83% 84% 85% 88% Vanderbilt U 6 6 more 84% 83% 86% 88% 89% 91% 89% Biola U 6 7 more 63% 64% 62% 69% 67% 71% 70% Carnegie Mellon U 6 5 none 82% 81% 85% 86% 86% 87% 87% Brigham Young U 6 6 none 71% 74% 70% 70% 78% 78% 79% Clarkson U 6 5 none 66% 64% 64% 71% 70% 70% 70% George Washington U 6 5 none 73% 75% 79% 78% 79% 78% 81% New York U 6 6 more 78% 79% 80% 83% 84% 84% 84% Azusa Pacific U 6 7 more 55% 57% 62% 86% 56% 65% 63% U of Rochester 6 3 none 81% 78% 81% 80% 80% 81% 84% Clark U 5 5 more 71% 68% 69% 70% 72% 76% 73% Drexel U 5 6 none 57% 57% 57% 60% 60% 64% 62% Brandeis U 5 4 more 85% 84% 89% 88% 88% 89% 89% U of Chicago 5 3 none 89% 87% 87% 91% 89% 90% 92% Boston U 5 6 more 75% 75% 75% 77% 81% 82% 80% Florida Inst of Tech 5 4 none 53% 54% 54% 52% 57% 56% 59% Washington U in St. Louis 4 4 more 89% 89% 92% 91% 91% 92% 94% American U 4 6 none 66% 71% 73% 71% 71% 73% 76% Andrews U 4 5 none 48% 53% 38% 51% 57% 54% 57% Texas Christian U 4 5 less 64% 65% 67% 69% 68% 69% 69% Oral Roberts U 4 2 less 52% 50% 54% 54% 55% 52% 54% Samford U 4 2 none 67% 73% 68% 70% 71% 67% 77% U of Denver 4 5 none 69% 71% 69% 70% 72% 74% 74% Trinity International U 4 4 none 43% 48% 52% 37% 61% 47% 52% U of San Diego 4 5 more 67% 72% 73% 73% 75% 74% 75% Saint Louis U 3 3 none 72% 71% 74% 75% 75% 74% 74% Pacific U 3 6 less 53% 64% 65% 64% 59% 63% 67% U of Pennsylvania 3 3 none 92% 92% 94% 94% 94% 95% 95% Worcester Polytechnic Inst 3 2 none 74% 77% 79% 74% 75% 76% 79% Southern Methodist U 3 2 more 70% 72% 71% 71% 74% 71% 74% Rice U 3 1 none 92% 90% 91% 90% 93% 90% 93% Case Western Reserve U 3 4 more 76% 78% 81% 77% 78% 81% 80% Baylor U 2 1 none 72% 70% 72% 72% 74% 72% 73% New School 2 7 n/a 50% 59% 61% 57% 60% 62% 61% Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst 2 3 none 78% 81% 81% 81% 82% 82% 83% Catholic U of America 2 6 none 65% 69% 73% 70% 68% 75% 71% Pepperdine U 2 3 none 75% 80% 77% 80% 79% 79% 81% Tufts U 2 1 none 88% 90% 91% 90% 92% 89% 92% Duke U 1 1 none 93% 94% 94% 93% 94% 94% 95% Illinois Inst of Tech 1 6 none 56% 62% 61% 69% 68% 67% 64% Johns Hopkins U 1 2 none 88% 88% 88% 88% 92% 90% 89% Massachusetts Inst of Tech 1 2 none 91% 92% 92% 94% 93% 93% 94% Yale U 1 1 none 95% 96% 96% 96% 96% 96% 97% Boston C 1 3 none 87% 89% 89% 91% 91% 91% 91% U of Notre Dame 1 1 none 95% 95% 96% 95% 96% 95% 96% Seton Hall U 1 1 less 56% 59% 57% 56% 58% 57% 61% Cornell U 1 2 none 88% 92% 92% 93% 92% 92% 93% Long Island U-C.W. Post Campus 1 3 none 37% 40% 36% 43% 47% 42% 41% Wake Forest U 1 2 none 87% 87% 86% 88% 88% 89% 88% U of San Francisco 1 -1 none 67% 66% 66% 67% 65% 65% 67% Tulane U 1 2 none 73% 74% 73% 73% 71% 76% 74% California Inst of Tech 0 2 none 86% 88% 89% 90% 89% 89% 88% Columbia U 0 1 none 92% 92% 93% 92% 93% 93% 93% Northwestern U 0 0 none 93% 93% 92% 93% 93% 93% 94% Stanford U 0 2 none 93% 94% 95% 94% 95% 95% 94% Georgetown U 0 0 none 94% 93% 93% 93% 94% 93% 93% Marquette U 0 0 less 76% 76% 77% 80% 78% 75% 76% Dartmouth C 0 -1 none 95% 95% 95% 93% 94% 93% 95% U of the Pacific 0 -1 more 69% 68% 70% 65% 68% 67% 68% DePaul U 0 0 none 63% 64% 61% 63% 64% 62% 64% Harvard U 0 -1 none 98% 98% 98% 98% 98% 97% 98% Howard U 0 6 none 58% 65% 60% 67% 67% 69% 65% Fordham U 0 3 none 73% 79% 77% 78% 78% 80% 78% Duquesne U 0 1 less 70% 72% 69% 68% 70% 72% 72% Princeton U 0 -1 none 97% 97% 97% 97% 96% 95% 96% U of Bridgeport -1 2 none 36% 41% 51% 34% 43% 42% 41% Lehigh U -1 0 more 83% 86% 84% 85% 86% 83% 85% Pace U New York Campus -1 0 none 52% 56% 59% 56% 56% 53% 55% U of Dayton -1 0 more 76% 76% 74% 79% 77% 76% 75% Syracuse U -1 2 none 77% 81% 79% 79% 82% 82% 80% Brown U -1 -1 none 95% 96% 96% 95% 94% 95% 94% Loyola U Chicago -1 -3 none 70% 68% 65% 67% 70% 65% 66% Polytechnic Inst of New York U -2 -2 more 50% 55% 43% 45% 50% 47% 53% Hofstra U -2 -1 none 55% 56% 51% 55% 56% 53% 54% Saint Mary's U of Minnesota -3 -6 none 62% 60% 58% 65% 61% 53% 57% Widener U -3 -6 none 60% 59% 60% 57% 60% 52% 56% St. John's U -4 -6 none 69% 64% 66% 64% 59% 61% 61% Emory U -4 -2 more 88% 91% 86% 91% 87% 88% 87% U of Saint Thomas -4 -1 more 70% 76% 71% 74% 74% 72% 72% George Fox U -4 0 more 59% 66% 61% 59% 66% 62% 62% Nova Southeastern U -6 0 none 40% 47% 42% 39% 42% 46% 41% Wilmington U -8 -13 none 53% 47% 49% 38% 45% 35% 39% Spalding U -13 -14 more 40% 46% 49% 49% 29% 24% 33% Barry U -16 -10 less 44% 57% 39% 50% 34% 39% 41% Immaculata U -18 0 less 50% 65% 53% 60% 56% 67% 47% Alliant International U-San Diego -19 -16 n/a 34% 30% 88% 34% 45% 20% 11% Golden Gate U * -27 -12 less 47% 37% 6% n/a 50% 50% 10% 
 
 * Institution enrolled relatively few students (50 or fewer in 2002) who met the federal government's criteria (like full-time attendance) to be counted in the graduation rate for the six-year period ending in 2008. In some cases, those students may represent a small minority of all students enrolled at the institution. A college's graduation rates can rise or fall significantly over time because of small year-to-year variations in the number of such students who enroll and complete degrees. 
 
 About These Data 
 
 The Chronicle analyzed changes in graduation rates reported by more than 1,000, four-year public and private nonprofit colleges and universities. We examined only institutions classified as research, master's, or Baccalaureate Colleges—Arts & Sciences by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2005. 
 
 These rates, which colleges report annually to the U.S. Education Department, are calculated as the percentage of all first-time, full-time students entering in the fall seeking bachelor's degrees who completed bachelor's degrees within six years. At some institutions, this definition excludes a significant number of students, for example, those enrolled part time. 
 
 The column labels showing a single year -- 2002 through 2008 -- refer to the final year of six-year periods. The six-year period ending in 2008 was the most recent for which comprehensive data were available from the Education Department when The Chronicle published these tables. The six-year period ending in 2002 was the first for which all colleges participating in federal-aid programs were required to report the data to the Education Department. Figures are rounded. 
 
 In these tables, we compare rates for the six years ending in 2008 against rates from five years earlier, in 2003. 
 
 A college's graduation rate sometimes spikes up or down in a particular year. To account for such fluctuations, The Chronicle also averaged the graduation rates for 2002 and 2003 and compared those sums with the averages of the 2007 and 2008 rates. That approach yielded results similar to those shown when only 2003 and 2008 were compared. 
 
 Colleges typically describe their graduation rates using a similar but slightly different set of data, which includes students who completed any degree program, such as associate degrees. The Education Department recommends examining only students seeking bachelor's degrees when comparing four-year institutions because it facilitates consistent comparisons and because producing bachelor's recipients is a core mission of those institutions. 
 
 The Chronicle's analysis recognizes that a college's graduation rate may rise if its admissions become more selective. Greater selectivity typically brings more academically prepared students, who in turn are more likely to complete degrees within six years. Conversely, graduation rates can slip when institutions become less selective. We labeled institutions that became more or less selective during the period covered by these graduation rates. The source was Barron's Profile of American Colleges, which assigns colleges among seven tiers of selectivity. We recorded whether a college changed tiers from 1996-7 to 2001-2. 
 
 Other changes in student demographics could also have increased how each institution's rate changed over time, and this analysis did not further account for those effects. ||||| Photo courtesy Creative Commons 
 
 I recently reported on PayScale’s newest batch of college rankings, which compare how much a school’s graduates earn to how much they pay for tuition. In other words, it calculates each institution’s financial return on investment, which seems a far saner way to look at the value of a degree than anything that U.S. News, for instance, has cooked up. (In case you were wondering, PayScale ranked Harvey Mudd College at No. 1, with a $1.094 million 20-year net ROI on $116,800 tuition; MIT, Caltech, and Stanford came in at Nos. 2, 3, and 4, respectively.) 
 
 Jordan Weissmann Jordan Weissmann is Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent. 
 
 But not everybody feels so warmly about the idea of judging schools according to their ROI—particularly academics, who expressed qualms last year when President Obama proposed his own ratings system for colleges that would take into account how much graduates make. With the PayScale list out, Cedar Riener, a professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College, took me—and PayScale—to task with a blog post titled “The Absurdity of Ranking Colleges by Graduate Salaries.” Riener was particularly irked by my decision to focus on colleges at the very bottom of PayScale’s list that offered alumni a negative return—meaning students spent more on their education than they made back in extra earnings. 
 
 Like many in higher education, Riener thinks some colleges are simply too different from one another to be judged on a single scale. You can’t mash together Harvard, with its well-off and well-prepared student body, with an institution like second-to-last-ranked Fayetteville State University, where 78 percent of students received Pell Grants in 2012. There’s no logical way to compare engineering and tech schools, which dominate the top of PayScale’s list, to art schools, which tend to fall at the bottom. He writes: 
 
 Sure, a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, but saying that a mineral engineer makes twice what an artist does, and therefore this particular art school isn’t worth it, that just seems absurd, but it is exactly the logic that their ROI tanking system encourages, and that Weissman’s [sic] article adopts in using language like “to be blunt, these schools make students poorer.” No they don’t. I imagine that most students entering art school are fully informed (by parents, teachers, classmates, strangers in the grocery store) that their choice is disastrous and they will never find a lucrative job doing art. They choose to pay for training anyways. Is the art school making them poorer? 
 
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 My short answer is: Yes, the art school really is making students poorer if it delivers a negative ROI. And there’s nothing absurd about holding colleges accountable for what their students earn. 
 
 The art school question is actually a small piece of a much bigger quandary: When we look at the earnings of a college graduate, and try to decide whether their education was financially worthwhile, whom should we compare them to? PayScale answers this in a reasonable, though imperfect, way. They calculate the predicted lifetime earnings of alums from each institution, then subtract the cost of their schooling and the pay that the median high school graduate can expect to make over their working life. The ROI is whatever’s left. So when the site says that certain schools offer a money-losing proposition, it means that typical alums fare worse than the typical American with a 12th-grade education. 
 
 Many students would like to know whether their college education is likely to leave them poorer than an adult who started their career right after prom. 
 
 In a more ideal world, with better data available, PayScale would be able to compare students from similar race and class backgrounds, and who work in similar industries. Attending the Maryland Institute College of Art might be a less lucrative choice than getting a job working in a Ford factory or becoming the manager of a Chipotle. It’s certainly a less promising option than going to a higher-ranked arts program like the Rhode Island Institute of Design or the Art Institute in Chicago, which both offer positive returns. But is it a more financially ruinous decision than trying to become a painter or photographer without a B.F.A.? PayScale doesn’t say. Likewise, some historically black colleges (such as Fayetteville, Savannah State University, and Shaw University) rank at the bottom of PayScale’s list. But the results might turn out differently if their alms were compared to other African-Americans—who systematically make less than whites—with similar family incomes who decided not to get a degree. 
 
 Be that as it may, I think many students would like to know whether their college education is likely to leave them poorer than an adult who started their career right after prom. And it’s strange to argue schools should be let off the hook because their students have dimmer earning prospects to begin with, or choose less remunerative majors. It might not be absolutely necessary to rank colleges based on ROI. But in the age of massive student debt, it is absolutely fair and far from absurd to ask whether schools are charging appropriate tuition, given students’ realistic earning prospects. 
 
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 Moreover, there is a very wide—and very accurate—consensus in academia that holds that for-profit universities vastly overcharge their students, given the actual value of their degrees. Why not apply that standard to traditional higher ed as well? To put it another way: It may be that art schools are at a disadvantage compared to engineering programs because painting don’t pay very much. But it may be equally true that some art schools are a rip-off. 
 
 At the same time, overemphasizing salaries would be dangerous. As Riener argued in so many words on Twitter, judging colleges based on their students’ expected salaries could theoretically penalize schools that admit low-income students, who have lower earnings expectations to start with. If the government were to use a ranking system just like PayScale’s to reward or punish colleges, it would almost certainly be a disaster—college administrators would start jettisoning poor and minority students like sailors bailing water out of a ship.
– Which colleges pay off? PayScale crunched the numbers to compute the best returns on investment—by comparing the cost of a degree against what its students earn upon graduation—and Huffington Post rounds up the best of the bunch: Massachusetts Institute of Technology: annual ROI: 12.6%; 30-year ROI: $1.69 million California Institute of Technology: 12.6%; $1.64 million Harvard: 12.5%; $1.63 million Harvey Mudd College: 12.5%; $1.63 million Dartmouth: 12.4%; $1.59 million Stanford: 12.3%; $1.57 million Princeton: 12.3%; $1.52 million Yale: 11.9%; $1.39 million Notre Dame: 12.2%; $1.38 million University of Pennsylvania: 11.8%; $1.36 million See the Huffington Post slideshow here and PayScale's complete rankings here.