Is there such a thing as an unacceptably low college graduation rate?

There is seemingly universal agreement in higher education that college completion rates aren't high enough. Yet it's difficult to find anyone pointing fingers at a particular college. Lawmakers lament the low graduation rates of students who receive federal Pell grants, the largest source of federal student aid to low-income students. Yet to criticize a college with a large Pell student population and a miniscule graduation rate is thought to be bad form.

Washington Monthly magazine and the Education Sector analyst group broke the silence in 2010 with a report on collegiate "dropout factories," ranking the colleges with the lowest completion rates and spotlighting a Chicago college with a graduation rate far lower than that of the Chicago Public Schools.

"Show me a city with a high-school dropout factory and I will show you a college in the same city with an even lower graduation rate," said Kevin Carey of Education Sector. "Apparently there's no number so low that it automatically triggers loss of accreditation. There's no number so low that it causes state leaders to consider shutting an institution down."

I spent some time in the fall looking at the bottom of the grad-rate chart in the Washington region. The research spawned a Nov. 26 story on Coppin State University, a historically black campus in Baltimore working hard to turn around its low completion rate.

In this post, I want to spotlight other colleges in the District, Maryland and Virginia with unusually low completion rates. The analysis looks at an average of graduation rates from 2007 to 2009. It's a comparatively generous six-year rate, meaning that the tally gives every student six years to finish a four-year degree. The analysis is limited to schools that reported graduation data to the feds.

(The analysis does not include Kaplan University, a for-profit institution owned by The Washington Post Co., because the federal data I found for comparisons did not include six-year graduation rates for any local Kaplan campus. The data indicate that the Hagerstown, Md., Kaplan campus mostly awards two-year degrees or certificates.)

1. University of Phoenix, Northern Virginia Campus. Graduation rate: 6 percent.

Federal lawmakers have hammered for-profit colleges for low completion rates. Of the colleges contacted for this analysis, Phoenix was the only one with recent experience fielding questions about low graduation rates.

University officials say for-profit colleges don't easily fit the criteria for federal rates. The federal rate looks only at "first-time, full-time freshmen." Students at for-profit colleges tend to be second- , third- or even fourth-time students, and if they are doing anything full-time, it's probably working.

So the Phoenix figure covers only a fraction of the school's students. (Fourteen percent of them, at the Northern Virginia campus.)

Richard Castellano, University of Phoenix spokesman, said the rate above (and the rate below, for a campus in Maryland) "are not even in the ballpark. When you take into account all students at our Maryland and Virginia campuses, the university would not even make this list."

More