Friday, February 5, 2016

Our Graduation Statistics Redux: The Antidote for Rauner's Lies

Are you as tired as I am of intellectually lazy, ignorant, and mendacious Neanderthals (like the Governor of Illinois and his aide) bloviating about a “graduation rate” that fails to include 93 percent of our students? Here is some data we can use to mitigate that bullshit. All this information comes from the IBHE data base.

For our school, the most important piece of information on that site is that Chicago State in every single year between fiscal 1996 and 2014 (every year available on the IBHE site) graduated more Black students than any other four-year institution, public and private NFP (not-for-profit), in the state of Illinois. Think about that. The smallest school in the Illinois system, the school that our critics claim never graduates anyone awards more degrees to Black students than the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, or UIC. More degrees to Black students than DePaul, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Northern Illinois, Eastern Illinois, Western Illinois, Northeastern Illinois, Southern Illinois-Carbondale and –Edwardsville, UI Springfield, Illinois State, and Governors State.

Here is what the money we “throw down the toilet” produces:

• Every single year since 1996, Chicago State led all other four-year institutions in Illinois in awarding degrees to Black students. That includes the 12 public universities in Illinois plus DePaul, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago
• In 2014, Chicago State University’s enrollment represented 2.8 percent of the enrollment in all Illinois public universities
• Between fiscal 1996 and fiscal 2014 , Chicago State awarded 20,318 degrees (Baccalaureate and advanced)
• During the same time period, Black students at Chicago State earned 15,987 degrees, by far the most of any four-year institution in Illinois
• The degrees awarded to Black students represent 19.5 percent of the total degrees earned by Black students between 1996-2014
• In second place for degrees awarded to Black students is Southern Illinois-Carbondale, with 12,210. Third is Urbana-Champaign with 9320

I would be delighted to discuss this with Rauner and his aide or anyone else who wishes to make the claim that Chicago State graduates no one. I challenge our critics to incorporate this information into their critiques of this university. I suppose they believe that the 20,318 graduates of this school simply did not deserve an education.

3 comments:

  1. I'm one of those students. I got a BA from CSU in May,2012 and an MA in Dec, 2015.

    Rauner won't meet with you or have a rep do so. I tried to set up a meeting with a rep for the Gov.

    They claimed a computer glitch kept them from ever receiving my request.

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  2. It's about time we saw the real numbers. THIS is what makes Chicago State great!

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  3. Of course "no one reads the blog" and all we do here is "air our dirty laundry."
    How much did Wayne and his coterie of "bright young things" spend on trying to "brand" the university? All we got were new colors and new logos for the stationery and some new slogans. Why didn't one of the administrative or public relations geniuses come up with this significant information and tout it on those billboards or shove it into the hands of the legislators? Instead, it took one of the "disgruntled, white, male, atheist" faculty to crunch the numbers and shine this light. Kudos Bionaz.

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