College Drop-out

An NYT report startled me:

Only 33 percent of the freshmen who enter the University of Massachusetts, Boston, graduate within six years. Less than 41 percent graduate from the University of Montana, and 44 percent from the University of New Mexico. The economist Mark Schneider refers to colleges with such dropout rates as “failure factories,” and they are the norm.

This dropout rate is kind of unimaginable in China, or Beijing at least. I can't stop thinking how difficult it would be to graduate from a graduate program, say, a PhD.