Bearing Bad News / Counselors Must Make Low College Graduation Rates Transparent

Why do so many students matriculate in colleges with such poor graduation rates? A key factor is that many students are unaware of college graduation rate information and how their college choices affect their chances of degree completion. A new paper by Northwestern researchers James Rosenbaum and Jennifer Stephan applies the term “poor completion transparency” to the obfuscating maze between high school and college and then employment. According to Rosenbaum and Stephan, the many confusing degree options in our varied higher education model combine with weak college counseling to create poor completion transparency.

To address the transparency problem, Rosenbaum and Stephan call for better counseling to inform students about the labor market prospects associated with each college option. In this vision, college counseling needs to provide students with blunt, dream-killing facts about future prospects. It’s a bitter pill to swallow.

Number Crunching / Chicago’s K-16 Data System Reveals Low College Graduation Rates for CPS Grads

A new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) titled Barriers to College Attainment: Lessons from Chicago examines the gap between college aspirations and college attainment for low-income, urban high school students, this time in Chicago. The January 2009 report draws on data from the National Student Data Clearinghouse and reveals, among other things, that only 45 percent of Chicago graduates who enrolled in a four-year college during the year following high school graduation attained a four-year college degree within six years. The report echoes the dismal findings of a study in Boston on the college attainment of Boston Public School graduates that I wrote about here. The report calls for the widespread adoption of data systems that track and make transparent high school students’ post-secondary educational choices, concluding, “We simply cannot ask high schools to focus on the college readiness and postsecondary outcomes of their graduates if they do not know what happens to their students after they graduate.”

Up to this point, neither the Boston Public Schools nor Chicago Public Schools has provided much visibility to the new data that’s been uncovered. In a cursory look at high school profiles on the BPS website (example here) and the CPS website (example here), I found no information on the schools’ post-secondary college enrollment and attainment, although the CAP report says, “CPS has made college readiness indicators and college enrollment a central part of their high school accountability scorecard.” The data is dismal and shocking, and I fear that the efforts to sweep it under the rug have been greater than those to put it into the broad light of day where it can be used by principals, teachers, counselors, parents, and policymakers. Greater visibility to the post-secondary education data by CPS and BPS would be a step forward in convincing other school districts to match student data to the National Student Data Clearinghouse.

College Success Factors Re-Explored

Accoridng to the Advisory Committee on the Student Financial Assistance, 0% of college-qualified high school students do not enroll in college immediately after high school. Why? Traditional explanations have focused on the limits of financial aid and how little many low-income high schools students know about the benefits of college-going and the steps of the college admissions process.

For low-income high school students who do enroll in college, few graduate within reasonable amounts of time, as revealed by recent reports from Boston and Chicago. Why? Traditional explanations have focused on financial aid as well as weak pre-college academic preparation that pipelines students into the educational graveyard of remediation.

A September 2008 study by Child Trends brings to light additional explanations for why students fail to access college or succeed once there. The study finds that the college readiness literature has mostly overlooked three key developmental competency areas—physical, psychological, and social—that predispose college success.

"College readiness criteria could be expanded to include healthy behaviors, avoiding risky behaviors, positive mental health, resilience, a strong work ethic and moral character, social competence, and creativity. The addition of these attributes would help youth prepare to optimize their success, healthy development, and experience in both college and the workplace."

The task of raising success-ready youth falls on the shoulders of parents, schools, afterschool programs, community organizations, and religious institutions. “It takes a village,” is the old saying. “It takes a nation in service,” is the new one.