BALTIMORE — Few American colleges would mark a 15 percent graduation rate as a turning point.
But at Coppin State University, 15 percent is two points better than last year’s rate — a first, tentative step out of the graduation gutter.
Coppin State University moves to improve its low graduation rate
School Days 2011-12
Coppin, a historically black institution founded in 1900 at what was then called Baltimore’s Colored High School, has the lowest graduation rate of any traditional public college in Maryland.
In the past 10 years, the quotient has declined from the mid-20s to the mid-teens.
Now, Coppin is two years into an ambitious data-driven plan to rebuild. The institution has an attentive president, Reginald S. Avery, and an energetic vice president of enrollment management, Reginald Ross, who vows to more than double the graduation rate for the students who entered Coppin this fall. Already, rising student retention rates give him cause for hope.
“We often get told we aren’t moving fast enough. And it’s frustrating, because I know how hard I work,” Ross said. “It’s hard to be patient when the numbers are what they are.”
Coppin has the lowest graduation rate in the state system partly because it attracts the least-prepared students. Top black students from Baltimore city schools are lured to the University of Maryland or the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Three-quarters of those who enroll at Coppin require academic remediation.
Still, the school faces increased pressure to repair its fractured diploma pipeline, a priority driven by new state and federal graduation targets.
The University System of Maryland pledged to halve its “graduation gap” by 2015, which means narrowing the 21-point spread between completion rates for underrepresented minorities and other students. President Obama wants the nation to regain the world lead in college attainment by 2020. The United States has slipped to 16th place among developed nations in its share of young adults with college degrees.
Twelve percent of freshmen at the University of the District of Columbia graduate within six years, according to a Washington Post analysis of completion rates for three recent class years. The graduation rate is 32 percent at Norfolk State University, 34 percent at Morgan State in Baltimore and 36 percent at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. All four are historically black institutions.
High schools with low graduation rates are tagged, catalogued and sanctioned as well as threatened with state takeover if they do not improve. By contrast, colleges with low graduation rates have mostly been left to their fates.
Higher education is “the land where everyone’s a winner,” said Amy Wilkins, chief spokeswoman for the Education Trust, a nonprofit group devoted to closing race-based achievement gaps. “The status and reward system that these universities have lived in isn’t based on success.”
Coppin has followed a 10-year-old revitalization plan initiated by Maryland’s state university system. The plan includes five broad recommendations — and 35 specific ones — to improve student success. Raising the graduation rate is not among them, however.
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