3:30pm | After classes opened for the Fall semester just this week with California State University Long Beach drawing favorable rankings in both the U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review, an independent website called GradRate.com has called the university’s graduation rate into question by naming CSULB to its College Hall of Shame list.

The website, created and operated by a Minnesota man named Dave Happe who compiled his findings while researching colleges for his daughter, lists one university from each state which it has determined has the worst graduation rate. CSULB was the school chosen from California, using statistics from the U.S. Department of Education showing a 13% four-year graduation rate and a 54% six-year graduation rate.

Full disclosure: I am actually a member of that 2003 Freshman class and am also part of that 54% rate that earned degrees in six years or less (it took me five).

A press release from CSULB quickly denounced the report and President F. King Alexander called the website “a poorly educated operation” in a statement.

“There is no way the people at GradRate.com could have used the U.S. Department of Education’s statistics and concluded that Cal State Long Beach has the lowest graduation rate of all mid-size and large institutions in California,” Alexander continued.  “There are more than 20 campuses in California that have at least 8,000 (FTE) students or more, and our graduation rate is nowhere near the lowest.”

The school is quite proud of their graduation rate, which was recently praised in a national education report that noted it had increased by more than 20% from 2002 to 2006. The school reached its current 54% graduation rate in 2007 and did so with the same number of students utilizing Pell Grants, which are based on financial need. Statistically, CSULB actually has the fourth-highest graduation rate in a CSU system with more than 20 universities.
 
Happe readily admits that he’s not an expert – in fact, he attended but never graduated from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, which also made the list – and his method for determining the Hall Of Shame list is not scientific. For starters, he looked only to mid- to large-population universities, usually above 8,000 students (the U.S. Department of Education lists CSULB with more than 35,000). Second, Happe focused less on the actual graduation rate and more on how many total students were not graduating from that school. For a school with a massive student population like CSULB, that was enough to earn them a spot on the list despite having what most would deem a favorable graduation rate.

“I’m trying to put some dialogue out there,” Happe said in a phone interview. “I don’t have solutions, I’m not an educator. But the data itself is not disputable. The best question for educators is, what do we do with this?”

Whether the GradRate.com system is perfect or not, it does beg the question, Just what is an acceptable graduation rate? Happe says that in asking around, most people he spoke with estimated that about a 75% rate would be acceptable. Some of the schools on the College Hall of Shame list graduated less than 10% in four years and less than 30% in six years. Southern University in New Hampshire had the lowest six-year rate with 7%, while South Connecticut State graduated just 1% of students in four years.

“A 1% graduation rate I think we would all agree is not appropriate,” Happe told the lbpost.com.

The university sent a letter to GradRate.com which challenged its methodology for determining graduation rates, because of allegedly incorrect transfer statistics (CSULB and CollegeResults.org say 27.4%, the U.S. Department of Education says 4%). CSULB spokesperson Rick Gloady says that there is no standard method of reporting transfer rates and only about half of national universities do so at all. Happe has said he will correct his Hall Of Shame list if CSULB can prove their transfer rate claims.

CSULB also took issue with the fact that GradRate.com applied the graduation rate of one Freshman class to the school’s entire student population.

“[GradRate.com] have ignored all the national and state rankings and randomly selected institutions not because they are the worst as they proclaim, but for some unknown reason that has little to do with the facts in each state,” President Alexander said.

Happe is standing by his list, however.

“Long Beach has more kids paying tuition and walking out the door without a degree than any other school we looked at,” he said in an e-mail.