There are many obstacles to more aggressive policy to stimulate higher college success and college completion rates. An important policy is the public’s high approval rating for the current performance of postsecondary education, and its satisfaction with the higher education status quo.

Colleges and universities earned a respectable “B” in a 2001 nationwide random sample, while secondary schools were a full grade or more lower (Immerwahr, 1999, http://www.highereducation.org/). The public’s collective advice is that colleges and universities continue to focus on what they do best. Only 12 percent of the public would raise entrance standards to postsecondary education.

While the public believes that college readiness is inferior to a decade ago, only 11 percent hold postsecondary institutions responsible for students’ failure to persist. Half of a national sample thinks that students are to blame, and another 40 percent think that it is a failure of high schools to prepare students for college level study that causes them to drop out. Very few respondents think the presence or absence of K-16 services such as better counseling or higher education working with public schools is a primary cause of students' college success or college failure.

Moreover, a majority of the public thinks students of color have about the same opportunities as white, non-Latino students. This public opinion poll concluded, “there is no mandate for change – or even a suggestion of what kind of [higher education] change would prove necessary.” More recent polls have similar conclusions. It is unlikely that elected officials will feel much public pressure to bring postsecondary education into greater alignment with K-12. A major public information campaign highlighting the lack of college persistence and college completion in broad-access postsecondary education might help shift opinion towards closing the gap between the sectors.

Labels: College Completion, College Readiness, College Success

Jon S. Twing of Pearson Educational Measurement recently critiqued a prior Blog entry. Twing acknowledged that my January entry ("Alignment Needed to Enhance College Completion") caused him to ruminate regarding a concept that he works on everyday -- the validity of assessment systems.

My entry, according to Twing, argued that K-12 and post-secondary education systems are not integrated. He agreed with that crucial premise, but had much more to say. I respect Twing’s perspective as he has spent much of his career providing support for many large-scale, statewide assessment programs, some of which include end-of-course testing, college readiness components and consideration of school-to-work transitions.

This is the 2nd entry (the 1st entry was "Boomerang ..." dated June 23rd) in which I share Twing’s perspective.

Twing took issue with the state policy possibilities which I mentioned that may help resolve the problem. He argued that I ignored the cause of the problem, namely that policymakers have not defined what is to be accomplished by all of the testing.

Twing argues that policymakers are trying to accomplish the notion of a linked academic system, an intrinsically rational system. An intrinsically rational academic system would be required to survive the scrutiny of a rational human asking if such a linked system was valid. For example, if Algebra II skills are required for success in post-secondary efforts, an intrinsically rational system would suggest secondary school systems would prepare students by teaching them the same Algebra II enabling skills post-secondary requires. Similarly, such an intrinsically rational system would require the primary school system teach the content standards required as pre-requisites by the secondary school system such that students coming to high school would be ready to learn the information they needed to be successful when they got to college. As a result, college readiness would be elevated for many more students.

Twing acknowledged that “several obstacles appear to stand in the way of achieving an intrinsically rational ‘all encompassing’ system”. The lack of a linked system is not simply the lack of the secondary system understanding or preparing students for college success.

First, the post-secondary system may have difficulty agreeing on a single set of educational standards. Twing believes that the independence of college faculty and others in the post-secondary arena might preclude a single set of well articulated standards from being developed. He doubts that universities are inclined to prescribe curriculum for not only introductory courses but also subsequent courses that build on the skills acquired in these beginning courses. Just how likely are universities going to be in persuading all faculties who teach, say, introductory sciences courses, to ensure they cover the same big ideas, let alone the same scope and sequence? Compared to, arguably the sometimes flawed but nonetheless vertically articulated, statewide curriculum the post-secondary corpus of content seems disjointed.

I'll continue sharing Twing's perspective on my prior critique in my next entry.

Labels: College Completion, College Preparation, College Readiness, College Success

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle ran an excellent article (”College seems out of reach to most Latinos”) on the low enrollment rates of high school Latino graduates in California. For example, one in seven Latino grads enroll in a four year college.

The Chronicle presented the usual issues of inadequate counseling and lack of signals about what students must do for college preparation and college success.

Many Latino students must work in high school and this also hurts their enrollment in required four-year college courses. As a consequence, about 80 % of Latino high school grads enroll in two-year colleges where they face long odds for college completion.

All of this has an even more profound impact on California's economy than the four-year issue in the Chronicle article. I spoke on this issue recently, particularly elaborating on the community college issue and Latinos. The full text of my speech can be seen at http://www.stanford.edu/group/bridgeproject/Failure%20to%20Complete%20College1.ppt

Labels: College Completion, College Readiness, College Success

Jon S. Twing of Pearson Educational Measurement recently critiqued a prior Blog entry -- Alignment Needed To Enhance College Completion and College Success. Twing acknowledged that the Blog entrycaused him to ruminate regarding a concept that he works on everyday -- the validity of assessment systems.

My entry, according to Twing, argued that K-12 and post-secondary education systems are not integrated. He agreed with that crucial premise, but had much more to say. I respect Twing’s perspective as he has spent much of his career providing support for many large-scale, statewide assessment programs, some of which include end-of-course testing, college readiness components and consideration of school-to-work transitions.

He agrees that educational standards (both content standards and performance standards) and the assessments are created in different K-12 and postsecondary “orbits”. He listed ACT®, SAT®, and AP® assessments, the PACT and the PSAT, the PLAN®, Explore®, the SAT Subject Tests™, COMPASS™, and WorkKeys® -- all of which explicitly link what is done in one system (secondary school) with another (college).

Many students lack the skills required to be college-ready because their high school courses and exams are different from the expectations at college. For example, he agreed with my earlier comment that -- “for example, some colleges in California complain that secondary tests do not emphasize trigonometry enough.”

But Twing believes that high school educators are working on ways to improve students’ preparation for college. The stated goal of the American Diploma Project by Achieve and it’s sponsoring of the Algebra II End-of-Course Assessment is an example of explicit attempts to prepare students for the rigors of post-secondary study.

Yet, the high school educators with whom he speaks are often talking about what they can do to improve ACT® and SAT® scores, how they can get students college level credit via dual enrollment, CLEP® or AP®, and how they counsel students to take the rigorous courses they will need for college. There are many examples of such notions being supported in the literature, such as the ACT documents: “Crisis at the Core: Preparing all Students for College and Work” and “Courses Count: Preparing Students for Post-Secondary Success.

Yet, according to Twing, all of this tells us that the rigor of the courses taken in high school is insufficient to prepare students for success in college. The expansion of end-of-course testing seen in several states might well be an attempt by secondary systems to compensate.

I’ll continue with my perspective on Twing’s critique of my prior entry in a subsequent entry.

Labels: academic preparation, College Readiness, ready for college

Now that the senior year of high school has ended, it is an appropriate time to examine its impact upon college preparation and college completion.

The American educational system does little to discourage high school seniors from focusing on matters other than academic work. Rather than using the senior year to complete their secondary education and continue to prepare for postsecondary education, many seniors take less demanding courses and pay less attention to them. Some students use this time for goofing off; others earn money for college or complete nonpaid internships.

For the 70% of students who go on to postsecondary education directly after high school, the primary academic tasks for senior year are, in their view, to graduate on time and to secure admission to college. The first of these tasks may be accomplished by taking the easiest courses that meet the school’s graduation requirements. The second of these tasks usually does not require any effort after the first semester of senior year, since college admissions decisions do not rely on second-semester grades and colleges rarely withdraw an admissions offer to a prospect whose grades drop sharply.

Indeed, the college admissions calendar encourages college-bound students to work hard in their sophomore and junior years—since those grades are reviewed by admissions officers—and provides no incentives for continuing to study hard or take challenging courses in their senior year. It is not unusual for the highest-achieving students to take AP courses in their junior year in order to gain admission to a highly selective college and then drop challenging courses after receiving early admission in the fall of senior year.

The students’ view is, of course, shortsighted. But it is hard for students to see beyond the twin goals of high school graduation and college admission. And in their minds, these goals are not only sufficient but discrete: They do not realize that meeting their high school graduation requirements does not mean that they are prepared for college (ACT, 2000). Nor do they think about using their senior year to prepare for the placement exams that may await them when they enroll in college.

One result is that many students who received good grades in high school spend part of their freshman year in college enrolled in remedial writing, math, and science classes. For example, 56% of the students admitted to the California State University campuses fail a placement test and must take a remedial course; at the more selective University of California campuses, almost a third of freshmen fail the writing exam.

Among those who fail college math placement exams are students who took math courses during their junior year in high school, but took no math their senior year. By the time they arrive on campus, they have forgotten their algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Instead of moving on to college-level work, they must revisit topics they studied in high school. Remediation is a particularly acute problem for low-income students who proceed directly from high school to postsecondary education (ACT, 2000).

The colleges know this—they know how many of their freshmen fail their placement tests, how many are on academic probation, and how many drop out because they are not academically prepared for college-level work. But most colleges, like their applicants, have been more concerned about access to higher education—about admissions—than about academic preparation. For example, most community colleges have an open admissions policy, which fulfills their mandate to provide access.

But community colleges send weak signals to high school students about the knowledge and skills they need to acquire in high school in order to succeed in college. Only when these students arrive for orientation or registration do they discover that they will not be allowed to take for-credit courses until they have passed the college’s English and math placement exams.

The fault, of course, does not lie solely with higher education. Part of the problem is that the high schools view their curriculum more as a set of discrete courses than as a coherent program that culminates in the senior year. Seniors continue to accumulate the units needed for graduation with little guidance about the knowledge and skills they will need to succeed in their next endeavor, be it college or a vocation. Despite the cliché about viewing high school graduation as a commencement, the high schools largely treat the completion of senior year as an end in and of itself.

In addition, the senior year has been left out of the accountability movement in the K-12 schools. New York’s state K-12 assessment includes the senior year; other states stop by the 11th grade and most stop at the 10th grade level. The K-12 assessment movement has no strategy for accountability for the senior year.

From this perspective, senior slump appears to be the rational response of high school seniors to an education system in which no one claims the academic content of the senior year as a basis for further education. Neither the K–12 system nor the postsecondary system provide any incentives for high school seniors to work hard. To understand this institutional disinterest in senior year, we must look at the almost total disjuncture between K–12 education and postsecondary education.

Labels: College Completion, College Preparation, College Readiness, College Success

Can any test of high school students predict college success and indicate adequate college preparation?
Probably not -- if the only data used for prediction is a single test like ACT or SAT.

There are inherent problems with any single test as reported by the National Research Council’s Lessons Learned About Testing. Below are some relevant direct quotes from the NRC report:

There is measurement error related to the fact that the questions on a test are only a sample of all the knowledge and skills in the subject being tested – there will always be students who would have scored higher if a particular test version had included a different sample of questions that happened to hit on topics those tested students knew well.

Other examples of factors that contribute to measurement error are students’ lucky guesses, physical condition, state of mind, motivation, and distractions during testing, as well as scoring errors.

Therefore, a test score is not a perfect reflection of student achievement or learning.

Another common problem is the tendency to use what are single, inexact measures to make very important decisions about individuals. Testing professionals advise that when making high-stakes decisions it is important to use multiple indicators of a person’s competency, which enhances the overall validity (or defensibility) of the decisions based on the measurements. It also affords the test-taker different modes of demonstrating performance.

High Stakes (1999) concludes that tests should be used for important decisions about individual students only after implementing changes in teaching and curriculum that ensure that students have been taught the material on which they will be tested.

A major rebuttal to Professor Ericksson’s contention that tests are the best predictor of college success is provided by

Labels: College Preparation, College Success, College Testing

With the exception of the AP program, there are no major efforts to provide curricular coherence and sequencing between the senior year and postsecondary education, and the role of the senior year in high school as a forum for general education is rarely discussed. Nor has anyone proposed a conception of liberal education that relates the academic content of the secondary schools to the first two years of college.

Instead, students face an “eclectic academic muddle in Grades 10–14” (Orrill, 2000) until they select a college major. In Ernest Boyer’s metaphor, postsecondary general education is the “spare room” of the university, “the domain of no one in particular” whose many functions make it useless for any one purpose (Boyer and Levine, 1981). The functional “rooms,” those inhabited by faculty, are the departmental majors.

There are no recent assessments of the status of general education. Adelman (1992) analyzed college students’ transcripts from the National Longitudinal Study, data from the early to mid-1970s, which proved to be a low point in general education requirements. He reported that students took very few courses in the fields comprised by general education. Less than one-third of college credits were from courses that focused on cultural knowledge, including Western and non-Western culture, ethnic, or gender studies. Among bachelor degree recipients, 26% did not earn a single college credit in history, 40% did not study any English or American literature, and 58% had no coursework in foreign languages.

When attention is paid to general education, two contending theories predominate. One holds that the purpose of general education is to prepare students for a specialized major; the other, that the purpose of general education serves as an antidote to specialization, vocationalism, and majors. Clark (1993) hoped that somehow the specialized interests of the faculty could be arranged in interdisciplinary forms that would provide a framework for a coherent general education, but there is little evidence that this is happening.

In sum, the high school curriculum is unmoored from the freshman and sophomore college curriculum and from any continuous vision of liberal education. Policymakers for the secondary and postsecondary schools work in separate orbits that rarely interact, and the policy focus for K–16 has been more concerned with access to postsecondary education than with the academic preparation needed to complete a postsecondary degree or certificate. Access, rather than college preparation, is also the theme of many of the professionals who mediate between the high schools and the colleges: high school counselors, college recruiters, and college admissions and financial aid officers.

The number and influence of mediating groups is, for Stocking (1985, p. 263), an indicator of the “amount of disorder and confusion that has grown through the years in the relationship between the school and the university in America.” In addition to the mediating professionals employed by the high schools and the colleges, “A major role is assumed by the major private testing organizations, whose tests have become powerful tools for allocating students to different types of universities and colleges. And increasingly prominent is the mediating influence of federal government as it has attempted to increase equity in American education and now seeks to emphasize excellence” (ibid.).

Labels: College Preparation, College Readiness