Suppose your daughter, a better-than-average high school student but unsure of a course of study that interests her, enrolls in a local state college. After a year, she discovers an interest in the humanities, transfers to a private university and graduates four years later with honors.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, she would be an academic failure. The private university would not get credit for her as a graduate, and she would count against the graduation rate at the state college.

The Department of Education collects data annually from colleges and universities across the country as part of the 1990 Student Right-to-Know Act. The idea is to inform high school graduates and their parents about the graduation success of institutions they may be considering.

Here’s the problem. The department takes a snapshot of all first-time full-time students who enter college in a given fall term and looks again six years later to see who among that cohort graduated. If you leave the first institution for any reason, including transferring to another school, you are a mark against the original institution. And transfers into a college or university are "lost" in the system because the new school isn’t where they first matriculated.

This flawed approach to holding higher education accountable for graduation is maintained even as the Department of Education’s own analyses show that more than 50 percent of all new bachelor degree recipients attend more than one undergraduate institution before obtaining a degree.

The secretary of education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education has been hearing from numerous individuals about ways to increase accountability for colleges and universities. The ideal is a tracking system that follows a student from kindergarten through college graduation — a student-level rather than an institution-level metric. Implementing such an approach is years away and very costly, however. Nonetheless, materials presented to the commission have noted that the current graduation rate "must be modified to the extent possible to provide more detailed information."

To that end, here is an idea that is a significant improvement over the current method and is already in place.

Frustrated with the chronic under-reporting of graduation success for student-athletes inherent in the federal method, the NCAA has created the Graduation Success Rate (GSR) that removes student-athletes from the cohort for an institution if they transfer while still academically eligible to compete and adds those student-athletes who transfer into an institution.

In the first year, we discovered that for the 326 Division I institutions, the GSR covers a cohort of student-athletes that is 35 percent greater than the cohort covered by the federal rate. Nearly 24,000 male and female student-athletes who all were viewed as academic failures by the federal calculations are now included in a graduating class that entered six years earlier.

As a result, the average GSR of student-athletes in Division I increased 14 percentage points from 62 percent to 76 percent. Based on the analysis of our data, the GSR for the general student population — if the simple math of adding transfers into an institution

Myles Brand is president of the NCAA.