At a time when American higher education is under fire for dismal graduation rates that have eroded the nation's leadership in college degree-holders, Slippery Rock University  will graduate a record number of students, and do so more quickly than in years past.

That's because Slippery Rock has built in aggressive new measures to help students succeed — and eliminated many obstacles that make success so elusive almost everywhere else.

It lowered the number of credits required to graduate, which, as at many other schools, had been creeping up and keeping students in school longer. It trained residence-hall staff to watch for signs of academic or personal problems such as absences or poor grades. It clustered students with the same majors in dorms so they can help one another with class work, and hired 90 peer tutors to run a tutoring center in the library.

Altruism alone didn't compel the university to take these steps. It was money — $1.5 million a year, to be exact.