Missouri, Kansas colleges boosting efforts to beef up graduation rates - MARÁ ROSE WILLIAMS, The Kansas City Star

In fall 2001, nearly 1.5 million students started college at four-year schools across the country. By 2007, fewer than six in 10 had earned a diploma. The average in Missouri and Kansas was no better. Now schools in those two states are cranking up efforts to help students adjust quickly to campus life, hang in there, get good grades and graduate. Low graduation rates among full-time, undergraduate students at U.S. colleges and universities represent a crisis, according to the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy research group.