The graduation rate for students at WTAMU is 42.1 percent, according to the College Scorecard released by the College Affordability and Transparency Center.
According to the Center, the graduation rate displayed is for first time, full time degree or certificate seeking undergraduates who began at the institution. For primarily bachelor’s degree granting institutions, the graduation rate displayed is for students beginning in Fall 2005 and seeking a bachelor’s degree.
For some students, though, the low rate can be attributed to their busy lives, making it difficult for them to keep up with school.
“As a full time student and full time worker I am often facing the question ‘How am I going to take classes to fit my work schedule?’ or ‘I can’t take that class because I have to work,’” Meagan Hill, senior Animal Science and pre-vet major, said. “I must work in order to live here on my own in Texas and pay for school, therefore my class schedule, course load, and anticipated graduation date may suffer. This low number may be due to students having to choose. ‘Live or Learn.’”
The Director of Counseling Services, Orvie Nix, said students who have a hard time with not only academic life, but also their personal life, find it difficult to concentrate on classes and do not necessarily go to counseling services with the mindset of fix it at counseling services or stop going to school.
“When you take into account that our average age of students is in the mid 20’s now, not in the lower 20s, then we get people who have families going or have jobs going,” Nix said. “From our point of view, we try to keep track of ‘Do the students re-enroll?’ but when we track it we say ‘Well we didn’t cause it [if they re-enroll]. Or if they didn’t ‘we didn’t stop it’ [if they don’t re-enroll]. There are so many factors that get involved in that.”
Some students questioned WT’s admission standards as a potential cause for the graduation rate.
“For us I think we could obviously raise the standards for students applying to WT,” Kaleb Collins, senior Mass Communication major, said. “But that’ll drop our enrollment and the money going into the school so that might not be the way to go right now.”
Nix said that the pressure of going to college could sometimes be the drawback for a graduation rate. Rather than going straight to a university, some students should go to two year schools or technical institutes.
“Our country fully believes that an educated citizenry makes for a stronger country,” Nix said. “So we need to make it as possible as we can, for if you can get an education we’re going to see to it that you get that. Well, that has a drawback that there are some people that that is not the way they should go.”
Nix also said that the Student Success Center’s mission is to aid WT students in overcoming obstacles they may have, which ties into WT’s mission of being a college for first generation college students.
“WT has a special mission of ‘we want to deal with first generation students to get this opportunity to go to school,’” Nix said. “So our admission policies allow that, encourage that and this whole wing of Student Support Services is aimed toward ‘we want you to go to school and be successful.’”
Both Nix and Collins believe that one of the most pivotal parts in being successful in college is being able to socialize outside of the realm of academia.
“I think it’s going to have to be a lot of things coming together to make students feel even more like they’re really a part of WT,” Collins said. “[They need to feel] that graduating is really going to improve their lives in the future, and then making students more aware of the tools available to them to help them along the way.”
Of other Division II schools in the area, Abilene Christian University, who is moving to Division I athletically, has a graduation rate of 59 percent. Amarillo College settled at 14 percent while football rival Colorado State University-Pueblo’s graduation rate is 32 percent. Eastern New Mexico University has a graduation rate of 23 percent and Texas A&M locations in Commerce and Kingsville are both at 32 percent.
