A 16% GRADUATION RATE IS "CONTINUED SUCCESS?"

By Juan Montoya

Try as I might, I am unable to fathom the claim of Texas Southmost College trustee candidates Eduardo "Pee-Wee" Rodriguez, Rosemary Breedlove and Dr. Roberto Lozano that they want to "continue the work that has been undertaken over the last several years."
Nowhere in their advertising or appeals do they make mention of the sorry record that the college-university hybrid (UT-TSC) has had in graduating local students. Instead, they seem content to focus on the administration's efforts to tax our poor residents to death to build grandiose monuments to local personages of dubious educational achievements (e.g., Mary Rose Cardenas).
As Kiko Rendon, Trey Mendez and Robert Lopez have pointed out, the local community college has instead outpriced itself out of the reach of the average student in its service area.
Rendon pointed out that it costs more for a TSC student in a year ($4,782) than it does for a community college in Laredo ($2,106) or Houston (1,701).
Why?
And what do our local students get in return?
The Education Trust, a national nonprofit that works for the high achievement of all students at all levels from pre-K to college, reported that UTB-TSC has posted a dismal record of graduating local students
In its latest comparison of UTB-TSC with other similar four-year institutions applying an algorithm or "recipe" that uses student and institution characteristics to determine similarity, it ranked our school 12th in comparison with 15 other colleges of similar characteristics.
Using data for the six years prior to 2007, it found that UTB-TSC has tallied a dismal graduation rate of 16.2 percent in the six years prior to 2007.
Ranked above it are academically superior institutions such as the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (18.6%), Cameron University in Oklahoma (24.5%), Davenport University in Michigan (24.9%), Louisiana State University at Shreveport (26%), Utah Valley State College (26.1%), Missouri Western State University (29.7%), Cleveland State University (31.2%), Missouri Southern State University (32.5%), University of Akron, Ohio, Main Campus (33.9%), and Washburn University in Kansas (47.1%).
The three institutions that ranked below UTB_TSC are The University of Houston-Downtown (15.5%), CUNY New York City College of Technology (12.5%), CUNY Medgar Evans College (10.3%), and Baker College of Muskegon (Not Available).
These graduation rate date were selected by the Education Trust based on information from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), through a centralized higher education data collection process called the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
IPEDS consists of a series of surveys through which institutions provide data about themselves on a variety of topics. One of those surveys is the Graduation Rate Survey (GRS).
The GRS graduation rates are based on the percentage of first-time, full-time, bachelor’s or equivalent degree-seeking freshmen who earn a bachelor’s or equivalent degree from the institution where they originally enrolled.
Undergraduates who begin as part-time or non bachelor’s degree-seeking students, or who transfer into the institution from elsewhere in higher education, are not included in the GRS cohort. Their success or failure to earn a degree does not influence the GRS graduation rates in any way.
They go even further. These institutions are also allowed to exclude from their calculations any students who fail to earn a degree for the following reasons:
Left school to serve in the armed forces.
Left school to serve with a foreign aid service of the federal government.
Left school to serve on an official church mission.
Died or became permanently disabled.
One telling fact in the data categories included is the "student-related expenditures" where we learn that of the 15 other colleges compared with UTB-TSC, only four spent less on students than UTB-TSC.
In other words, the majority of these schools, including two with lower graduation rates, spent more on students than did UTB-TSC.
It is obviously clear that the priorities used in allotting funding at UTB-TSC must change. Spending the bulk of our expenditures on anything else besides getting our local students to graduate must be questioned.
If the mission of our college is to educate our residents, let’s get serious about it. Future board members must be prepared to boost our efforts to identify sources of funds to pay for our students’ education.
So forget about "continuing the work that has been undertaken over the last several years."
No, Pee-Wee, Rosemary or Dr. Robert, we haven't accomplished much, and a 16 percent graduation rate isn't much of a "foundation" to build on.
Let's clean house and set anew course with Mendez, Rendon and Lopez. Enough is enough. Vote this Saturday. Our students and community college depends on you.