Dropout Factories

by Patrick Appel

Leonhardt recommends The Washington Monthly's new college rankings system. In a related article, Ben Miller and Phuong Ly report on colleges with the worst graduation rates:

These colleges make up 15 percent of the total and disproportionately serve working-class and minority students. They are akin to the 15 percent of high schools Barack Obama and other would-be reformers have dubbed “dropout factories” for having scandalously low graduation rates on average about 50 percent. But the average graduation rate at the 200 “college dropout factories” is 26 percent. America’s worst colleges, in other words, are twice as bad as its worst high schools.