Clifford Adelman, Institute of Education Sciences
January 2004
The ablest analyst left in the depleted professional ranks of the federal Institute of Education Sciences is Clifford Adelman, who for years has been productively mining the data seams accumulated by several consecutive longitudinal studies undertaken by the National Center for Education Statistics. These are among our most valuable sources for understanding the educational (and life) trajectories of young Americans and Adelman is gifted at teasing interesting findings, patterns, and trends from them. The simplest way to view this new study is a tracing of the college patterns of the high school classes of 1972, 1982, and 1992. What Adelman found is often surprising and frequently fascinating. Here are some of the many nuggets, fraught, it seems to me, with implications for the Higher Education Act and key bits of K-12 policy, too:
" Average elapsed time-to-degree for those who earned bachelor's degrees within 8.5 years of high school graduation in the class of 1992 was 4.56 calendar years, compared with 4.45 years for the comparable group in the class of 1982 and 4.34 years for the comparable group in the class of 1972.
" Seventy-seven percent of the high school class of 1992 attended at least one postsecondary institution within 8.5 years of scheduled high school graduation. This access rate compares with 63 percent for the class of 1982 over an 11-year period, and 58 percent for the class of 1972 over a 12-year period.
" When the universe is confined to students in the class of 1992 who earned standard high school diplomas within a year of scheduled graduation, the differences in access rates between white and both African-American and Latino students are statistically insignificant while differences by socioeconomic status remain.
" Eighty-eight percent of the students from the class of 1992 who entered postsecondary education persisted from their first to second year. Among those who did not persist, two-thirds started in community colleges and 70 percent earned less than 10 credits in their first calendar year of attendance.
" Among those who earned bachelor's degrees, nearly 60 percent attended more than one school as undergraduates in the class of 1992, 58 percent in the class of 1982, and 57 percent in the class of 1972. Among those in the class of 1992 who started in a 4-year college and earned a bachelor's degree, one out of five earned the degree from an institution other than the one in which they began their postsecondary careers.
" The proportion of all students earning bachelor's degrees in education fell from 16 percent in the 1970s to 6 percent in the 1980s, then rebounded to 9 percent in the 1990s.
" The most notable change in the distribution of letter grades over the history of the three cohorts is the rise (from 4 percent for the class of 1972 to over 8 percent for the class of 1992) in the proportion of grades that were no-penalty Withdrawals and No-Credit Repeats.
" The proportion of all students who took at least one remedial course dropped from 51 percent in the class of 1982 to 42 percent in the class of 1992. This decline took place principally for students who started in 4-year colleges, where the remediation rate fell from 44 to 26 percent. At the same time, the proportion of students starting in community colleges who required at least one remedial course showed no significant change, remaining in the 61-63 percent range.
These points, and a bunch more, are to be found in the summary online at www.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/prinindicat/index.html, where you will also find a link to the full (PDF) report. And more is coming. When the Education Department gets around to it, you will also be able to access another Adelman report, "The Empirical Curriculum: Changes in Postsecondary Course-Taking, 1972-2000." It includes fascinating data on the undergraduate educations of new K-12 teachers. There we learn that, for all the palaver about why it would be better to major in a "real" subject rather than education, more than half majored in education! And 80 percent graduated from non-selective colleges. Watch for it.
