Graduating Dead People. How City Colleges of Chicago inflates graduation rates

Crain's Chicago Business reports:

City Colleges of Chicago has its own version of “The Walking Dead.” Call it the Graduating Dead.

The seven-campus school system is combing records for dropouts, including deceased ones, who may qualify for two-year diplomas, part of an all-out hunt to boost lagging graduation rates and polish a centerpiece of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's education agenda.

In 2013, City Colleges adopted a “posthumous degree” program that made dead alums eligible for a degree or certificate, provided they had fulfilled three-fourths of the requirements. “This policy can be administered retroactively and applies also to students who have died prior to the effective date of this policy,” City Colleges documents say.

The push also relies on “reverse transfer” credits, which allow nongraduates who move to four-year institutions to qualify for City Colleges degrees. According to minutes of a trustees' committee meeting last year, then-Provost Vernese Edghill-Walden said about 500 degrees had been issued under the program in the 2013-14 school year; that's more than 10 percent of the 4,322 degrees awarded by City Colleges that year and close to the number (777) of full-time students who graduated.

Edghill-Walden, now an administrator at Northern Illinois University, says that during her two-year tenure as provost and chief academic officer, just two students who died before graduation got diplomas. She won't discuss efforts to harvest names of former students for posthumous diplomas. “I had major concerns about this,” she says.

City Colleges says it awarded 1,410 retroactive degrees during the last two academic years, more than twice the 626 in the prior four years, and only three posthumous degrees total. In addition, 53 reverse-transfer degrees were issued over the past two years.

Government schooling as a racketeering enterprise ? Mail and wire fraud scheme? Why are people who work at non-profits so self-interested? Is it time to cut funding to government schools because they are so corrupt?