Editorial: Don’t tinker with City Colleges graduation rates

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Two weeks ago, City Colleges Chancellor Cheryl Hyman boasted that the colleges’ graduation rate has reached a record 17 percent, more than double the level just five years ago.

We would be more impressed by that had we not read a news story Monday detailing how City Colleges calculates its graduation rates, going so far as to give diplomas to dead people.

City Colleges really should focus on what counts, providing young people — many of them of limited financial means — with a solid education.

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Crain’s Chicago Business reported Monday that City Colleges gives diplomas to dropouts, including people who have died. The system also hands out degrees to non-graduates who switched to four-year colleges; they call that a “reverse transfer.”

Put that way, it sounds a lot like the ward heelers who once combed through voter registration rolls to find every last person who could vote on Election Day — and never mind if that person had moved away or was dead.

At a time when four-year college tuition is increasingly out of reach for many families, community colleges are an essential piece of many students’ education plans. College administers should be doing ever more to help those students graduate, legitimately, not rooting around for names of students they can pretend graduated.

The pattern seems to echo what happened at the Chicago Public Schools. During his re-election campaign, Mayor Rahm Emanuel touted CPS’ improving graduation rates. It was only after the election that CPS downgraded four years’ worth of graduation data — though the final numbers were still impressive — admitting that dropouts had been undercounted.

City Colleges stresses that it adheres to federal guidelines on calculating graduation rates. Granting “reverse transfers” has increased the graduation rate only slightly, and as for the posthumous degrees, only three have been granted in five years, and they don’t count in the graduate rates anyway. The real news, they say, is that graduation rates have made a big jump no matter how you calculate it.

Like City Colleges, a handful of states around the country have started allowing students who transferred from community college to a four-year school to receive an associate’s degree by transferring credits back to the community college, all after the fact. Supporters of this idea argue that obtaining an associate’s degree can help students get jobs.

But it is one thing for City Colleges to take seriously a request for a degree from a former student who comes in and says, “Hey, I got extra credits when I moved on to Northern, can I get a diploma?” It is quite another to actually push to find those people and throw degrees at them.

In the 2013-2014 school year, about 500 “reverse transfer” degrees were granted to students who had moved on to other places of higher learning, not that many shy of the 777 full-time students who graduated. Including all students, City Colleges granted 4,322 degrees that year.

In the following two academic years, City Colleges granted 1,410 retroactive degrees.

In another tweak, City Colleges also has instituted “automatic conferral,” in which any student who has met the graduation requirements and signed up for the plan automatically gets a diploma even if he or she has not applied for graduation.

Real progress in graduation rates are to be applauded. And by any measure, City Colleges has made progress. But we hope some of that claimed progress is not just an accounting trick.

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