Reprint from the Badger Herald, April 8, 1999
Even a cursory look at the data reveals the impossibility of reaching a key goal of UW System’s recently adopted Plan 2008 — eliminating gaps in retention and graduation rates for racial and ethnic minorities.
The current gaps between minorities and white students are enormous, and they show no signs of narrowing despite three decades of diversity programs. In fact, these gaps far exceed the likely effects of Plan 2008’s new and expanded diversity programs, however impressive and well financed they might be.
By setting a 10-year goal that cannot be reached, the Board of Regents has created an untenable situation for UW faculty and administrators.
Under the Regent mandate, they are now putting the finishing touches on the strategies to achieve the seven goals of Plan 2008. How it will evaluate campus programs to eliminate these wide gaps in minority retention and graduation rates remains unclear.
This means that working up these plans — involving more than six months of work by more than 100 faculty members, administrators, academic staff and students at US-Madison alone — has seemingly been an exercise in futility. Campuses already know the enormity of the existing gaps. They also know that despite substantial efforts over the past quarter century, diversity programs have done little or nothing to narrow these gaps.
Why would UW-System administration and the Board of regents settle on this impossible goal? Through their experience, Board members know that goals are essential in bringing about institutional change. They also know that goals must involve a “stretch” but remain within reach. Despite this knowledge, the retention-graduation goals they established are well beyond anyone’s grasp. Could the Board have been unaware of the magnitude of the challenge posed by this goal? Could it have overestimated the likelihood of reaching this goal?
What information might the Board have examined? Readily available UW System data on retention and graduation rates from 1974 to the present speak powerfully to these questions.
For UW System students who entered as freshmen in the 1993-1996 period, gaps in second-year retention rates between white students and the four groups of students of color are substantial. Whites have an average retention rate of 73 percent. However, the average retention rate for blacks is 57 percent (producing a gap of -16 percentage point), 56 percent for Native Americans (leading to a gap of -17 percentage points), and 67 percent for Hispanics (creating a gap of only -6 percentage points). Meanwhile, the retention rate for Asians actually exceeds by +5 percentage points the retention rate for whites.
For UW System students entering as freshmen in the 1987-90 period, gaps in six-year graduation rates are even more dramatic. White students have an average graduation rate of 44 percent. Average graduation rates for blacks and Native Americans are less than half as large: 21 percent and 19 percent, respectively, yielding a gap of -23 percentage points for blacks and -25 percentage points for Native Americans. For Hispanics, the -16 percentage point gap is smaller because of their somewhat higher graduation rate of 28 percent. As before, a small positive gap exists for Asians. Equally depressing, these gaps in retention and graduation rates show no evidence of narrowing wince 1974, despite repeated commitments to diversity and UW-System budgeted expenditures for diversity over the past decade averaging close to $20 million annually in 1999 dollars.
Based on these statistics, how could the UW-System propose and the Board of Regents adopt a goal of eliminating current gaps in graduation and retention rates by the year 2008?
Were the UW System and the Board of regents so committed to the concept of racial and ethnic diversity that they proceeded, unaware of the magnitude of these gaps and without examining the feasibility of closing them? That appears to be the case.
It is now too late for campus faculty governance groups and administrators to ask the Board of Regents for clarification. Perhaps the Board will see the problem when it reviews campus Plan 2008 submissions. If it does, either the Board will have to revise its retention-graduation goals, or campuses will have to revamp their plans. If something does not give, both minority groups and the public are likely to conclude that the UW System and Board of Regents are more interested in pretending to look good than in doing good. Meanwhile those who suffer are the very minority students Plan 2008 is supposed to help.