What do public universities and Bernie Madoff have in common? Maddoff, a former financer and convicted felon, had done considerable damage to the economy with his infamous ponzi scheme. However, many people don’t know that public colleges have also contributed to the financial crisis!

The core mission of the American system of higher education is to turn high schoolers into educated college graduates who are ready to contribute to the working world. However, the reality is that public universities are simply not turning out enough graduates. Economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with low graduation rates as “failure factories”, and despite the harsh language, he may be right.

For instance, only 33 percent of the freshmen who enroll in the University of Massachusetts in Boston graduate within six years. 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico.

Granted, the United States does a good job of enrolling teens in college, but fails when it comes to retaining them. Only half of high school students who enroll in school actually end up with a bachelor’s degree. Could this be a contributing factor to our current economy? Even before the financial crisis started, the facts show that economic growth in this decade has been slower than any decade since the 1940’s.

Who do you think is to blame—colleges or elementary education? The quality of public education in America’s k-12 schools is certainly a problem, but the fact of the matter is that high schools still produce many students who have the talent to complete college, but fail to do so.

Congress and President Obama are in the midst of creating a bill that would help solve the problem of inequality in the American higher education system. The bill would cancel $9 billion in annual government subsidies for the banks that lend money to college students, and use a large portion of that money to increase the amount of financial aid. A smaller portion of that money would be set aside for pilot programs that are aimed towards increasing the number of college graduates. While this is an important first step, it still doesn’t directly address the issue of increasing the amount of college graduates. This bill focuses on enrollment, rather than completion, and does not place any responsibility on the colleges themselves. We can do better.

Many students opt to decline admission to some of the country’s best colleges because they simply can’t afford to foot the tuition bills. The lower-income students who excel in school often end up in colleges that produce more college dropouts. The only real way to improve the country’s graduation rate is to decrease the drop-out rates among the poor and working-class students.

Many students are in no rush to graduate in four years. When graduation is temporarily delayed, it often ends up being permanently denied. Large lecture classes can pack more students in a classroom than upper-level seminars. For that reason, freshmen are cheaper than upperclassmen.

However, there is hope. South Carolina State has a high proportion of low-income students. Such a school would normally have a graduation rate of only 22 percent, but SC State has 45 percent. Penn State has a similar student demographic, but manages to graduate a whopping 84 percent of freshmen. The state of West Virginia has started tying student aid to academic progress, and graduation rates have consequently increased. But there is still an enormous amount of work to be done.

According to the Department of Labor, employees with a bachelor’s degree earned 54 percent more money than those who attended college but didn’t end up finishing. So, why finish college? The numbers say it all.