To the Editor:

In response to Stephen Burd's "Graduation Rates Called a Poor Measure of Colleges" (The Chronicle, April 2), I would like to stress the importance of including all students when determining success rates. We should not omit certain students from our calculations because of the presumed difficulty of the process.

At Old Dominion University, we admit approximately 2,000 first-year students and 2,000 transfer students each year. We believe in accessibility and excellence. We encourage students with associate degrees from community colleges to enroll. We try to create a smooth transition for them and a seamless education system for the Commonwealth of Virginia. ... Yet half our students do not count in national statistics. This is not the way to encourage cooperation among institutions.

Our provost, Tom Isenhour, developed a very simple yet elegant method of calculating overall graduation rates: Divide the number of bachelor's degrees awarded by the number of full-time undergraduates. In principle, one-fourth of the students should graduate each year. Colleges' success could be determined by the deviation from the norm of 25 percent. That system would allow all students to be counted at the college they are attending, whether they started there or not, and would obviate the need to develop a new national database.

Roseann Runte
President
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, Va.

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To the Editor:

Stephen Burd comments on the report by Clifford Adelman, a senior research analyst at the Education Department, about distortions resulting from using graduation rates as a measure of the performance of a four-year college or university. Both Burd and Adelman raise important points about the inherent limitations of such accountability standards. Yet the critiques offered illuminate only part of the problem and essentially leave out the entire community-college layer of higher education.

The California community-college system alone enrolls more than 1.5 million students. Accurate records on matriculation, transfers from community colleges to universities, and even associate-degree completion are not easily gathered because our students' lives are remarkably complex and the institutions do not always interface well. Within community colleges, a high percentage of students enroll sporadically, due to various personal or employment reasons, even when they aspire to earn degrees eventually. Such students may be more dedicated than the statistics suggest. ...

In urban areas, students may enroll simultaneously or sequentially in more than one community college within a multicampus district, or in colleges across district lines. Which of the colleges should receive credit? ... Some community-college students are concurrently enrolled in four-year universities. Which institutions are to be rewarded for successes? Which are to suffer the consequences of so-called failures?

The challenges in accounting for the large number of community-college students in higher education are formidable. Those designing accountability measures ought to be accountable as well.

Jonathan McLeod
Professor of History
San Diego Mesa College
San Diego