When we last caught up with KIPP, they were setting the reform world on its collective ear with a report, at once edifying and sobering, on the college completion rates of its alumni. That report, back in the Spring of 2011, showed a surprising 33 percent of the earliest cohorts of KIPP middle-school students had graduated from a four-year college within six years. Surprising how? That depends on how you look at it. If you are born poor and black or brown in the U.S., your chances of graduating college by your mid-twenties is merely 9 percent; KIPP was improving those odds four-fold. On the other hand, the network itself has long insisted its goal was for the students it serves to graduate at rates comparable to the most advantaged American kids, or about 75 percent.
Bolstered by that initial report, KIPP redoubled its efforts, forming partnerships with colleges, re-examining its academic offerings, and launching other initiatives to increase college persistence among its grads. Those efforts are paying off: As of fall 2015, 44 percent of KIPP students have now earned a four-year college degree after finishing eighth grade at a KIPP middle school ten or more years ago.
Remarkably, KIPP now has 10,000 alumni in college. Fresh data from the network sought to surface “financial and career-access obstacles” those students face on campus. The most disturbing data point is how many of them are worried not about grades and books, but food. Sixty percent of those responding to the survey worry about having enough to eat; forty percent have actually missed meals. And no, this is not a matter of merely being too busy to hit the dining hall between classes. The survey asked specifically if ex-KIPPsters on campus have ever “missed meals to have money for books, fees, or other school expenses,” or whether while in college they have “worried whether my food would run out before I got money to buy more.”
KIPP chief executive officer Richard Barth says he knew “on an anecdotal level” that his kids were anxious about missing meals and worried their money would run out. “But the magnitude is still shocking,” he says. While he is careful not to make casual claims, he suggests that “why first generation, low-income children, take longer to graduate, a lot longer to graduate, don’t graduate or ‘stop out’ is found in this data.” Other important findings: More than half of KIPP alumni work at least one job while in college; of those who qualify for work study, 40 percent have not found a work study job; and one in four financially support other family members while in college. “When one or two of these things go against you,” Barth says, “the compounding effect is immense.”
KIPP remains our bellwether charter network, with a rapidly growing, leading-edge dataset that is sure to deeply inform and influence practice at high-performing, college-prep charters for years to come—including in the very near future, when stadium-sized numbers of KIPP alum have spent a number of years in the workforce, and we can start to see life outcomes for the low-SES students they serve. Barth says KIPP remains committed to continuing to monitor those kinds of outcomes and sharing what they find out with the public—for which they deserve our praise and gratitude.
SOURCE: “2016 KIPP Alumni Survey,” KIPP (January 2017).
