Folks on FSU's campus have long known that the way to increase graduation rates is to steer students away from the sciences and towards other fields. I have had a number of student switch from sciences to other fields (primarily criminology and social science) because of concerns with maintaining GPAs for graduate school, or because of fear that they may not graduate on time. I have found this very discouraging, especially when a good student who could make it in science leaves, but I can't blame university administrators who get more bang for the buck by bragging about high graduation rates than producing scientists and engineers.
By increasing university emphasis on STEM, it seems to me that the simple reality is that graduation rates among most Florida universities will probably show some decline. I remember seeing one study about ten years ago emphasizing that universities with the highest ratio of STEM students have the lowest overall graduiation rates. Is this something that will need to give if we are serious about encourating more STEM students? Or is there a way to simultaneously increase both STEM graduates and graduation rates?
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