Right The graduation figures that community colleges must report under the federal Student -to-Know Act of 1990 do not provide useful or realistic portraits of the colleges' effectiveness, several scholars said last week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

"Raw graduation rates are poor measures of community-college performance," said Davis Jenkins, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center, a unit of Teachers College of Columbia University.

This article appeared in the April 17, 2007 edition of the Chronicle.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i33/33a03002.htm

Published Tuesday, Apr. 17, 2007