Low grad rate has high costs

Low community college graduation rates have high costs for students and taxpayers, concludes a new report from the American Enterprise Institute. Cutting the dropout rate in half would generate $30 billion in lifetime income for 160,000 additional graduates and $5.3 billion in taxpayer revenue, the report estimates.

Community colleges can boost graduation rates and save money by streamlining the degree path, using online courses, and borrowing innovations from for-profit schools. Another potential game-changer is the competency-based model, which has helped Florida’s Valencia College achieve a 40 percent graduation rate.

Reforms such as those proposed by Complete College America and others would be inexpensive in comparison to “the tax dollars lost each year through lower income and lower tax collections, as well as the billions of dollars in government appropriations that subsidize the tuition of dropouts,” the AEI concludes.

A second chance for drop-outs

Students who need a second chance — or a third or a fourth — can earn high school and college credits through Durham Technical Community College‘s Gateway to College program, reports the Herald-Sun in North Carolina.

Northern High School, Hillside, Durham Performance Learning Center. None of them worked for Charity Philips.

“I was going through a lot of drama,” the 18-year-old recalled of her years in high school. “I was going through boyfriend drama. I got into fights. I was an idiot.”

She felt, she said, like “I didn’t need school anymore.”

Far behind in credits, she dropped out.  Last fall, Philips enrolled in Gateway.  “ They push you to keep going,” she said. “That’s what I needed.”

Students need one to three years to complete Gateway to College, which is a national program.  Durham Tech’s first graduates are expected this fall.

Auntais Faulkner dropped out of high school at 16.  Three years later, feeling  “more ready for school,” he enrolled at Durham Tech. “Now I know I can do the college thing,” he told the Herald-Sun.

Philips ultimately plans to get a master’s degree in video game design. Faulkner wants to get his bachelor’s in business before getting a master’s in theater.

It’s great that Gateway has lured these drop-outs back to school, but I’d be more optimistic about their futures if they’d set realistic goals.  They both aspire to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees.  The odds of success — video game design requires programming skills, not just the ability to play games — are incredibly low. (My nephew, an excellent student, just sweated his way to a bachelor’s in computer science and video-game design and is teaching himself a new computer language in order to qualify for a starter job at a game company.) 

Students who aim high and miss usually end up with no credential at all. Gateway should urge these very high-risk students to go for an achievable credential, such as a six-month or one-year vocational certificate, before setting off on the long, rocky path to a bachelor’s degree.

The habits of successful students

Students who earn a college degree attend their classes and study at least 20 hours a week,  writes Scott Swail of Educational Policy Institute on College Puzzle. They ask for tutoring help and use the academic support center to learn time management and study skills. During breaks and holidays, they read and work ahead. Finally, they make friends.

Our successful students made friends with other students. They would hang out with them, study with them, and yes, even party with them. They joined clubs, volunteered, and played in intramural sports and academic challenge groups.

Go-it-alone students who skimp on studying and cut classes usually don’t make it to a degree.

Forty percent of low-income four-year college drop-outs leave because of poor academic preparation, concludes a University of Western Ontario study, Learning About Academic Ability and the College Drop-Out Decision (pdf), reported in College Bound.

Many low-income students started their first semester expecting to do well but received low grades, researchers Todd and Ralph Stinebrickner found. It’s not that they didn’t try. They weren’t prepared for the colleges to which they’d been admitted.

College-prep must start earlier to enable low-income students to succeed in college, the authors recommend. That’s especially true for would-be math and science majors. Instead of “encouraging more incoming university students to major in math and science,” they suggest more attention to preparing students for college-level math and science classes.

GED rarely leads to college degree

Earning a GED (General Educational Development) credential can be the first step to college, concludes Crossing the Bridge, a study by the American Council on Education, which administers the exam. However, few make it to any sort of college degree.

Of 2003 GED Test passers with college goals, 43 percent enrolled in postsecondary education within six years, usually at a community college; 71.5 percent of GED passers with college goals enrolled.  Only half returned for the second semester and only 12 percent completed a degree within six years, notes Ed Week’s Curriculum Matters.

GED passers don’t do as well as high school graduates in college or  in the job market, research shows. According to a recent University of Chicago study,  passing the GED doesn’t help drop-outs significantly because they tend to struggle with “noncognitive deficits” such as “lack of persistence, low self-esteem, low self-efficacy, and high propensity for risky behavior.”

Many high schools are putting failing students in quick ‘n easy “credit recovery” programs to boost graduation rates.  I fear more high school graduates with marginal academic skills also will be weak in “soft skills.”

For-profits cut off low-skilled applicants

With many students defaulting on federal loans, two for-profit educators, Corinthian Colleges and Kaplan will deny enrollment to high school drop-outs who pass a basic-skills test known as an “ability to benefit” test, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Kaplan discontinued the tests last year at some institutions citing poor student performance. Corinthian announced it will drop the tests because “ability to benefit” students default on their loans at twice the rate of other students.

Starting in 2014, “the Education Department will hold colleges accountable for defaults of student cohorts for three years after the students graduate or leave college, a year longer than under current law,” reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

About 15 percent of Corinthian’s students in the last academic year used the ability-to-benefit test. The company, which operates more than 100 campuses across North America, estimates it will lose 16,000 potential students and about $120-million in the next fiscal year as a result of this decision, but it will also lose the risk of higher default rates those students would bring. The 15-percent enrollment of ability-to-benefit students was a decrease from 24 percent the previous year, credited to a greater focus on default management at Corinthian, as well as the growth of its online division, which does not enroll such students.

If colleges can’t help ability-to-benefit students succeed, it’s not far to load them up with debt, said Deborah Cochrane, program director at the Institute for College Access and Success.

Last year, a GAO report found “testing officials at a for-profit college helped students cheat on an ability-to-benefit test, the Chronicle reports. The Education Department said it would strengthen monitoring.

People who’ve failed to complete high school or a GED are likely to be weak in persistence as well as reading and math skills. If they’re cut off from for-profit options, they can try adult education or community colleges: Their success rate will be low at lower cost.

NYC tracks grads’ college struggles

New York City is telling high schools how well their graduates are doing at public colleges, including how many need remedial classes and how many drop out after the first semester, reports the New York Times.

Illinois, Denver and Philadelphia also are tracking high school graduates to see how they do in college, reports the Times. Studies show many high school graduates falter in college because they lack basic reading, writing and math skills.

New York, like other cities, has made a considerable effort to improve its high school graduation rate — now 59 percent, up from 47 percent in 2005 — and push more of its students to enroll in college. But many of those students are stumbling in basic math and writing: 46 percent of New York City public school graduates who enrolled in one of the City University of New York two-year or four-year colleges in 2007 needed at least one remedial course, and 40 percent of them dropped out within two years.

At a third of the city’s 250 high schools, at least 70 percent of the graduates who went on to CUNY needed remedial help.

This is nothing new, community college instructors told the Times.

Elizabeth Clark teaches remedial writing at LaGuardia Community College to high school graduates who are unprepared to write a college essay.

“They don’t know how long it should be; they don’t know how to develop an argument,” Ms. Clark said. “They have very little ability to get past rhetoric and critically analyze what is motivating the writer, and you have to push them past simple binaries.”

There are also more basic problems, Ms. Clark said, such as students not knowing that each sentence must begin with a capital letter or using “u” instead of “you.”

. . . Susan L. Forman said that many of the issues have remained the same for the four decades she has taught remedial math at Bronx Community College, including students easily confused by fractions and negative numbers and becoming paralyzed when they are told they cannot use calculators.

What has changed, she said, is that students are often overly confident.

They don’t understand how much they don’t understand, she said.

Minding the minority education gap

Unless the K-12 achievement gap narrows, it’s unlikely that many more blacks and Hispanics will earn four-year college degrees, writes Emily Badger on Miller-McCune.  There is potential for “middle-skill jobs” that require two-year degrees or certificates.

Only 15 percent of Hispanics and blacks, a growing percentage of the workforce, hold a four-year degree, compared to 32 percent of Asians and whites. 

A high school diploma isn’t enough for workers and a four-year degree is unrealistic for many, says Alan Berube, who contributed to a new Brookings Institution report, the “State of Metropolitan America.”

“Rather than think we have to move everybody who doesn’t have a four-year degree over that bar,” he said, “we could work on the availability and opportunity for what people call these middle-skill jobs that demand a certification or an associate’s degree.”

. . . Berube suggests we should also invest more heavily in the higher-education institutions most capable of reaching minority students: not just historically black colleges, but community colleges as well.

Only 10 percent of Hispanic drop-outs go on to earn a GED, half the rate of blacks and one third the rate of whites, reports the Pew Hispanic Center. Hispanics also are less likely to complete high school: 41 percent of Hispanic adults lack a regular high school diploma, compared with 23 percent of blacks and 14 percent of whites.

Those figures include immigrants who may not have attended U.S. schools and don’t understand the need for a GED or how to earn one, Pew’s Richard Fry tells AP.  “The longer foreign-born Latinos without a high school degree are in the United States, the more likely they are to earn a GED.” However, only 21 percent of U.S. born Hispanic drop-outs earn a GED, a rate similar to blacks. 

Four in 10 students with a GED pursue additional education, compared to only 1 in 10 of those without an alternative degree. Students with a GED are also able to apply and enroll in degree-granting colleges and universities.

The high drop-out rate and the low GED completion rate keep a sizeable number of Hispanics on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.