The Education Policy Institute conducted 30 focus groups in Missouri for middle and high school students. Students understand college helps get high paying jobs, but their college knowledge was weak in many ways. The top profession named by students was professional athlete, and parties and money were the top reasons for attending college. The most influential advisors for students were : parents, siblings, and friends. Many of the students lacked confidence about their ability to complete college work.
The EPI report makes some specific useful recommendations at http://www.educationalpolicy.org/.

Labels: college information, college knowledge

Jobs for the Future in Boston has summarized the key findings of a October conference with 500 leaders on transition from secondary school to broad access colleges http://doublethenumbers.org/
* Create multiple pathways that enable all students to graduate high school prepared for college and work
*Incorporate college-level leraning experiences into the high school years.
*Restructure developmental course sequences and upgrade student supports
* Strategic management of institutional spending in expanded capacity and improved student learning.
JFF has a strong focus on out of school youth and very low acheiving students. To see the details on these four strategies, go to the website.

Labels: College Completion, college costs, college sucess

A significant amount of attention is focused on the role of race in the college choice process, although recent reports have begun to focus on the access problem that exists for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, especially with regards to selective colleges. One report found that only about 10% of students at highly selective colleges came from the lowest 40% of the family income distribution. While race receives most of the public’s attention, we need to focus more on the role of income in who attends college.

Compounding the fact that low-income students have largely been ignored in the college admissions process is that they are the ones that benefit most from attending elite universities. These students benefit personally from higher rates of graduation and higher incomes after graduation, and society benefits from decreased dependence on public services and increased diversity in corporate, political, and military leadership.

Furthermore, most elite universities, while claiming to desire low SES students, have not been giving any them preferences during the admissions process. Findings like these on the effect of family income on college attendance have been remarkable, further highlighting the vast inequalities in higher education, especially at highly selective universities.

Labels: College Admissions, College Success, College Success Studies, ready for college, Student Success, Successful College Student

The National Assessment of Education Progress [NAEP] has never linked its grade 12 scores to any external measure. The scores are reported as advanced , proficient, etc. Last week the National Assessment Governing Board[ NAGBE] met to discuss the plans of its technical panel of experts to consider linking Naep to preparedness for college, work, and the military. I chair this technical panel.
The panel concluded the linkage can be done , but there should not be a single score. NAGBE may fund a number of approaches that will yield multiple indicators. This may include judgements by experts and statistical relationships with other measures like SAT, college placement tests, and ACT work-keys. Hopefully, Congress will fund state by state grade 12 NAEP in the near future. Now grade 12 Naep is only a national test.
This initiative could provide better public understanding of what NAEP tests mean in terms of crucial outcomes that people understand better than more abstract concepts like 'proficient". Linkages might be validated by using p-16 data bases like Florida that could link NAEP test scores to actual college success and college completion. NAEP does not report individual scores.

Labels: academic preparation, College Testing

Placement in remedial courses does lower college completion rates, but new approaches are helping more remedial students with college success. Chabot College near Oakland, Ca. uses a learning community that keeps the same students together with the same teacher for three semesters including the first levels of credit courses that transfer to universities. Students who enter remediation ask when they read : What am I looking for? What should I focus on? They help each other and form a close bond with the teacher. Many of these students lack confidence in their own abilities. Chabot also provides a paired course in a subject matter area like history for these same students. This helps students grapple with big questions in a disciplne as well as reading techniques.
To find out more email khern@chabotcollege.edu. She has some evaluation results that show more progress for these students, but still a large majority do not persist in college.

An unkown number of public 4 year institutions have agreed on a voluntary sytem to provide comparative data on: students and families, college student experiences/ perceptions, and student learning outcomes. The new effort is called "College Portrait" and includes some big name systems including Calififornia State University, University of Wisconsin system and University of North Carolina system. These institutions will report to the public on NSSE student surveys as well as an outcome measure like the College Learning Assessment for seniors. But it is unclear how many participants will use the same student learning measure since there are options. Perhaps Secretary Spellings commision had something to do with galvanzing such an open reporting system. In the past, most colleges have kept their assessments of student opinions and outcomes confidential.
This is a very interesting and promising development that hopefully will grow. The University of California system has refused to participate because of the learning assessment test. Moreover, College Portrait will use a six year graduation mesasure which is controversial because many students take longer than six years to complete college.

Labels: College Completion, College Success

A national effort called the Data Quality Campaign encourages states to develop high quality longitudinal data systems on a p-16 basis. They have ten fundemental elements for a statewide data system and stress student level college readiness test scores, high school transcripts for each student, and the ability to match student records between k-12 and higher education systems. Unfortunately, only Florida has all ten elements. The bigest state, California, does not even have individual student records for any level of p-16. Texas is making big progress and may meet the ten elements in a few years.
We cannot understand and solve poor college completion and college preparation without solid longitudinal data. More urgency needs to be given to the existing gaps. See http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/ to see the problem state by state.

Labels: College Completion, College Preparation, College Success

Washington state began an aggressive program in 1990 to have high school students earn credit at community college while enrolled in high school. This is called " Running Start" dual enrollment, and costs only $7 million dollars a year. It now reaches 17,ooo high school students, and saves on college tuition because students finish college earlier. The program reaches students not normally enrolled in AP. Many students say they are tired of the high school mentality and want to move on earlier. Running Start enrollment is 7% of the Seattle Community Colleges enrollment.
A big unkown issue is whether Running Start and dual enrollment enhances the probability of college sucess and college completion. Teachers College at Columbia is funding a randomized experiment to find this out for the City University of New York. This entire policy area of dual enrollment needs to move from promising to proven approach. Other than cost savings we still do not know much about the benefits of Running Start.

Labels: College Completion, college costs, College Success

College Board has completed an audit of high school courses and did not approve the content and syllabus for 33% of them. Moreover, 2,081 high schools did not even try to get apporved once they read the AP course standards. These high schools will not offer any AP courses. Defencies in textbooks and content inclusion were cited by College Board. For example, some comparative government courses did not include Islamic governments. Audit problems were much more prevelant in low income high schools.
This audit reinforces many studies that found it is what is in a course that matters for strong college preparation, not the label. But changing course quality is a long hard process of working with many high school teachers. The first step, however, is to find out what teachers intend to teach, and if the instructional materials have glaring omissions do something to rectify this. For more details go to http://www.collegeboard.org/

Labels: academic preparation, curriculum alignment

Twenty state university systems are working together to craft plans to cut the minority college graduation gap in half by 2015. These systems such as State University System of Florida educate about 12% of the students in the nations four year colleges. They all have much higher graduation rates for whites and Asians than for other racial and ethnic groups. Some state universities like Towson in Maryland have already met completion goals
It remains to be seen whether this is a real committment or just more goal setting. One of the strategies is to manage college costs, so that colleges can spend more on initiatives to increase college completion. Colleges have been unable to control their costs in the past, in part because their model is to keep labor costs so high compared to lower cost use of technology. But this initiative will require universities to report on their goals in a more transparent way than before. A decade ago the California State University trustees set a goal of eliminating remediation, but it has declined only to 56% from 60% for their students entering from high school. See www.edtrust.org for more details.

Labels: College Completion, college costs

Many studies over several decades demonstrate that high school students and parents overestimate college tuition. In our study Betraying the College Dream http://bridgeproject.stanford.edu/ we found that significant numbers of students estimated more than five times the real cost of tuition. The US Department of Education found overestimates in their studies as well. Yes, tuition is going up, but many middle and low income people think private college tuitions like Harvard apply to state institutions. But California community colleges cost $300 for full time attendance, and the University of California tuition is under $6,000.
In many cases the underestimated college costs by prospective college students are for room , board, textbooks, and student fees. Community colleges can be expensive if you add these in because even if students do not live on campus they still must pay rent and eat. This is another indicator have how poor the information system is for students who attend broad access colleges. They overestimate and underestimate at the same time. Our other site http://mycollegepuzzle.com/ has a method for figuring out real college costs.

Labels: college costs, college information