You are a state university. You want to increase your graduation rates -- because reputation and funding are tied to them. So what do you do? Your options are many. You can, for example, increase the quality of your educational offerings along with the support structure that comes with them--thus making sure that those you admit stay in school, learn what they came to learn, and don't fall between the cracks. You could, alternatively, tighten up your admissions requirements, so that you are really certain you aren't admitting people who can't do the work. Then you can make sure that your financial aid offerings enable these qualified, motivated kids to stay in school. You could enact any number of combinations of these basic principles.

Or, you could just dumb it all down and graduate everyone with a pulse.

The University of Arkansas--which has a 58% six-year graduation rate--is grappling with these issues at the moment. Here's what they are doing about it:

The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences plans to reduce its core curriculum from 66 hours to the state's minimum 35-hour general education requirement. The goal is to ease the transition for students transferring from the state's two-year colleges and raise the number of college graduates, university officials said.

The core curriculum is a set of general education courses that all students within a given college must take, regardless of their majors, to complete their degrees.

The most significant changes are a reduction of science requirements, elimination of a foreign-language requirement and requiring only college algebra, which is "high school-level stuff at this point," said Fulbright College Dean William Schwab.

The changes will bring the school into compliance with a new state law that forbids imposing on junior college transfer students any requirements for additional freshman- and sophomore-level general education credits, according to the university .... State Sen. Sue Madison, who voted for the new law when legislators approved it last year, said she'd heard a lot of concern about the measure from faculty and students. But she said "it never entered (legislators') minds to dumb down the curriculum."

The somewhat good news is that the faculty are taking steps to make sure that the dumbing down of the general curriculum does not automatically translate into a dumbing down of the entire undergraduate experience. Some departments are adding foreign language requirements to their majors; others are adding extra math requirements. But this is still a scattershot approach -- the humanities students aren't going to encounter the math requirements, and the science-types won't have to study a foreign language.

The University of Arkansas was one of the very few schools to get an "A" for its core curriculum when ACTA rated schools at WhatWillTheyLearn.com. I'm guessing that grade is going to have to be adjusted.