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The Real Deal About USF's Graduation Rate

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By AUTAR KAW

Published: November 30, 2007

Regarding, " USF Pays Lip Service To Awarding Four-Year Degrees In Four Years," (Our Opinion, Nov. 21):

Last spring, when my daughter majoring in mass communications was registering for her junior year classes at the University of South Florida, she announced that she loved her history class so much that she wanted to be a double major in history.

Being a cheerleader for multidisciplinary education, I encouraged this announcement enthusiastically. However, on her part this was a bad move for USF because she will now graduate in four and a half years.

Last summer, a student asked me for advice: "Dr. Kaw, should I go for a full-time internship at a local power company while taking one or two evening classes?" Having attended an undergraduate institution where two internships of three and six months were required and having seen the tangible and experiential benefits of doing so, my advice was a categorical "Yes." Yet another bad move for USF as it will delay his graduation another semester.

The national rate for four-year graduation is 35 percent and the rate is declining steadily. At USF, the reasons are simple for low (21 percent) graduation rates:

•In addition to students changing/adding majors and opting for co-operative programs and internships, we have more students who need to work part-time to go to school.

•Half of our students are transfer students (USF transfers the most students of any public university in the nation; transfer students do not get counted in the on-time graduation statistics).

•More freshmen need remedial work, student populations in urban areas are more mobile and graduate elsewhere, and many are nontraditional, career-changing and older students.

Throughout the nation, the mosaic of our students has changed, and it is the duty of an institution to meet these contemporary needs.

However, public institutions are under tremendous pressure to improve their four-year and six-year graduation rates because lingering and part-time students take up space where freshmen could be placed while taxpayers foot almost two-thirds of the tuition bill.

Like any other aspiring public research institutions, UF, USF and FSU are in a status war - whether it is to improve their U.S. News & World Report ranking or being invited to the American Association of Universities (AAU).

Although no one will argue with the benchmarks behind such status, the categorical recognition that the undergraduate is the biggest consumer of learning is critical. That is why the Legislature needs to make sure that the differential tuition is used to hire faculty whose teaching assignment is mostly core undergraduate courses.

It would be in the best interests of the Tampa Bay community to give USF some time to improve its six-year graduation rates.

Residents should also convince lawmakers to simultaneously increase undergraduate tuition rates and need-based scholarships.

Autar Kaw is a proud parent of a University of South Florida undergraduate and a mechanical engineering professor at USF.

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