Dropouts: "School is too easy"

Princeton University researchers examining public college graduation rates and looking for ways to increase them have come to a startling conclusion: Many students who don't graduate simply lacked an academic challenge.

From USA Today:

Researchers studying how to improve graduation rates at public colleges and universities have come up with a surprising and counter-intuitive finding: Many students may fail to complete a bachelor's degree not because the work is too hard -- but because they're not challenged enough.

The findings underscore age-old advice: Students should enroll in the most selective college that will admit them. But the problem is not that qualified students are being rejected from academically demanding schools. "They never apply in the first place," Bowen* says. And the research found that those aiming too low were most likely to be minorities, low-income students and those whose parents never finished college.

* President emeritus William Bowen at Princeton, lead author of the study