Morgan State University in Baltimore has announced improvements in several key academic statistics. This fall there are 1,058 first-year students on campus. This is a major increase of 19 percent from a year ago. The university also has a 3 percent increase in transfer students and an 8 percent rise in the number of graduate students. Enrollments of international students have also increased in recent years.
Morgan State also announced that the school’s retention rate of 76 percent is the highest in 30 years. The university reports that academic coaching and mentoring programs, course redesign, and what is referred to as “disruptive intervention” for students that are struggling academically have contributed to the rise in retention rates.
The graduation rate at Morgan State now stands at 35 percent. This is a low rate but there has been considerable improvement from the 28 percent rate of three years ago.
Kara Turner, associate provost for enrollment management, states that “we have worked very hard to put programs and practices in place to help all our students succeed. We’ve become more proactive in our approach to working with students, ensuring that they take the right courses, utilize the available academic support resources, and remain both academically and financially able to remain at the university.”
This is a classic example of administrative incompetence, dereliction of duty, and certainly a lack of foresight to eagerly report that you have increased your graduation rates to an abysmal 35 percent. Let’s be honest for a moment, that’s nothing to be even mildly bragging about. In my opinion, it literally perpetuates a negative stereotype about HBCUs. For example, do you think the University of Louisville will publicize their overall graduation is a staggering 44 percent? In others words, this administrator should have known how convert and report the percent increase number as compared the percent itself because reads better. You learn this in any basic statistics course and in the proverbial book “How to Use Statistics to Lie”.