The official graduation figures at the University of Texas at El Paso are nothing to write home about. Only 39 percent of those who started in the fall of 2007 as first-time freshmen went on to graduate within six years.
So how did UTEP land in the No. 7 spot on a national rankings list, between Stanford and Harvard?
UTEP ranked high on Washington Monthly's latest list of colleges that act "on behalf of the true public interest" because it takes low-income students—nearly 80 percent of whom are Hispanic—and graduates far more of them than one would expect. The rankings are based on colleges' performance in three categories: social mobility, research, and service. UTEP took the top spot in the social-mobility category, which recognizes colleges where graduation rates are higher than predicted on the basis of incoming students' standardized-test scores and the proportion who receive Pell Grants.
The university's success, say top administrators and some independent observers, comes from rigorously analyzing its own data to identify interventions that can help more students earn degrees. "They're using institutional data to address persistence to completion," says Deborah A. Santiago, chief operating officer and vice president for policy at Excelencia in Education, a national organization that maintains a list of college programs that help Latino students. "They learn what students need and then make changes to achieve success."
For students who started in the fall of 2005—the period covered by the rankings—the six-year graduation rate at UTEP was 37 percent. That rate, while below the 51-percent national rate for Hispanics, is above the 30.1 percent figure for Hispanics at open-access colleges like UTEP.
In analyzing its data, the university found little correlation between incoming students' standardized-test scores and subsequent graduation rates, but a strong correlation between high-school class rank and graduation rates. UTEP students in the third quartile of their high-school class—from the 50th to the 75th percentile—were far less likely to earn UTEP degrees than were students who graduated in the top half of their high-school class.
So the university set out to systematically provide more help to the lower-achieving students by providing summer programs and more academic support during the first semester.
The provost's office has also embraced strategies that bubble up from the faculty. When Charles Ambler, a history professor, returned to the classroom after a decade as an administrator, he noticed that many of the students who failed his U.S.-history course would later drop out of college.
First-year courses like his, which can have as many as 350 students, were once considered gatekeepers, weeding out students who weren't up to snuff. But Mr. Ambler came to believe that the class’s impersonal feel—not students' ability—was the real factor leading to failure.
"It just struck me that what was missing for students was a real connection to the class," he says. "What I needed to do was build that connection."
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-Texas-at-El-Paso-Figures/146733