In his first speech to Congress earlier this year, President Obama emphasized that low graduation rates are a threat to America’s international competitiveness and challenged the nation’s colleges and universities to improve. Weeks later, his first budget proposal included an unprecedented $2.5 billion in new funding to improve graduation rates. While the administration recognizes the urgent need to tackle this challenge, the depth and breadth of the crisis is staggering. At a time when college degrees are valuable in job searches, fewer than 60 percent of students graduate from four-year colleges within six years. For many institutions, graduation rates are far worse.
 
A new AEI report, Diplomas and Dropouts: Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students (and Which Don't), by Frederick M. Hess, AEI's director of education policy studies; Mark Schneider, a visiting scholar at AEI and vice president of the American Institutes for Research; Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector; and AEI research fellow Andrew P. Kelly spotlights the dramatic variation in graduation rates across 1,300 of the nation’s colleges and universities. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the report's authors examine graduation rates across schools with similar levels of admissions selectivity, as denoted in the widely used Barron's Profiles of American Colleges. The substantial differences found between colleges and universities within the same selectivity category strongly suggest that institutional practice, not just student quality, influences completion rates. Following presentations by two of the authors, Geri Malandra, senior vice president of the American Council on Education; Diane Reese, recently named one of the top ten school counselors in the United States by the American School Counselor Association; and Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus of George Washington University, will discuss the report's findings and recommendations. Frederick M. Hess will moderate.